Flickr Boundaries on Google Maps

Boundaries

This Google Map of Flickr's crowdsourced boundaries is great fun as it allows you to check your notion of area boundaries with Flickr's crowdsourced definition.

Photo sharing website Flickr suggests a selection of place names when users geotag their pictures. These place names are used by Flickr to compute the shape of geographical areas. These area boundaries are then feedback into Flickr to help suggest those place names to users when they geo-tag their photographs.

Tom Taylor has created a Google Map that users can search to view Flickr's area boundaries anywhere in the world. Tom says that "whilst the shapes of places and neighbour results can be inaccurate, in areas of dense Flickr activity such as urban city centres, the results are often excellent."

As Tom points out on his site geographic identifiers are often very fluid. People often have different ideas about the boundary of areas than that held by local and national government, postal agencies and other parties. Using Boundaries you can compare your ideas of an area to those held by 'the cloud'.

Comet Hartley 2 will approach Earth over the next few days; view it in Google Earth

Starting today, the Comet Hartley 2 will be making its closest approach to Earth -- if you consider 19 million kilometers to be "close". Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, it will be visible to the naked eye if you're in a dark location in a moonless sky. Otherwise, binoculars and/or a telescope will be needed.

Of course, another way to view it is with Google Earth! Google has teamed up with the folks at Slooh.com to deliver live images directly into the "Sky" mode of Google Earth.

Go access the images, switch to "Sky" mode in Google earth, and then dig into the "Current Sky Events" layer and choose "Slooh Space Camera", as seen here:

The result with give you something like this:

We discussed Comet Holmes on here a few years ago, but this new layer is certainly the most in-depth we've ever seen for a comet.

Have you had a chance to see the comet yet? Do you plan to in the next few days? Tell us about it in the comments.

Mapping Mood with Twitter & Google Maps

Twittermood

Twittermood is an attempt to show the mood of the USA based on Twitter messages.

Twittermood estimates the mood of all tweets for which the author has provided a location. The mood of each individual tweet is based on the Affective Norms for English Words a set of 1034 words, identified as bearing emotional weight.

The size of each circle on the map is proportional to the number of tweets recorded at that location. The colour of each circle reflects the mood, with yellow showing moods above average and blue below average.

Lastminute.com Mood of the Nation Map

Has 2010 put you in a #goodmood or #badmood? This Twitter and Google Maps mashup from Lastminute.com uses Tweets to give an overview of a frankly rather grumpy UK.

The Mood of the Nation Map bares many similarities to the #UKSnow Map, which isn't very surprising as it is from the same developer, Ben Marsh. You should also check out Ben's #ukhols map, that uses Twitter and Google Maps to show where people in the UK are going on their holidays.

Tweet Sentiments

TweetSentiments.com provides a snapshot view of the world's mood via a heat map from an analysis of Tweets. The site uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies to analyse Tweets from around the world and then presents the results on a Google Map.

As well as a heat map overlay the map also geo-tags individual Tweets.

Old Weather on Google Maps

Old Weather

This website has been developed to help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes.

The transcriptions also help to track the movements of these ships and the stories of the people on board. Old Weather uses Google Maps to show the voyage routes of each vessel in its database.

Old Weather takes the weather observations from the ships' log books and reconstruct fields of pressure, wind speed, weather, cloudiness, precipitation. This data is then used to help make better weather projections and predictions.

ProtectedPlanet.net

ProtectedPlanet.net is a Google Map showing all the worlds national parks, wilderness areas and world heritage sites. On ProtectedPlanet.net you can search in any language to find information about individual protected areas in any part of the world. The application is the new website of the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), a joint initiative between IUCN and UNEP-WCMC.

The world's protected areas are shaded blue on the map. If you click on any of the thumbnail map markers you can then view photographs from Panoramio and Flickr and text descriptions from Wikipedia for your chosen area.

The Google Maps interfaces to ProtectedPlanet.net and Old Weather have been developed with the help of Vizzuality, the team behind the World Database on Marine Protected Areas and the Global Biodiversity Information FacilityGoogle Maps.