Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Archive for the ‘Google Maps’ Category

I don’t really like playing games of any kind, on or offline, but I love Google Maps so this one caught my attention. Monopoly City Streets is an online, multiplayer version of Monopoly that is played on Google Maps, and it’s a joint project of Google and Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly. Instead of the traditional Monopoly gameboard, you can buy and sell property almost anywhere in the world through Google Maps. The preview site describe it this way: “A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.”

I immediately set up an account and bought Columbus Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived from the age of 10 to 19, and put a house on the spot where my mother’s house was. And then I went and the street where I live now, and several other places where I have lived. I was able to buy almost every street I have lived on (Boulevard East in West New York, New Jersey being the exception) but in all cases I was surprised by how many streets nearby were already owned and covered with a random assortment of buildings, mostly ugly skyscrapers and towers.
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I had a great time this weekend at Podcamp Boston 4. The organizers did a wonderful job — there was enough planning and communication before and during the event to keep things running smoothly, but things were casual enough to be much more flexible and fun than most of the conferences I attend. I also really liked the venue, the Campus Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Beautiful harbor views from the windows, and a good place to get out and walk a bit during the breaks. At least one group met outside yesterday to enjoy the weather and the view.

But the best part of the experience was meeting so many really interesting people. We were a diverse group in many ways, including age, professional background and specific interests within the social media world, and that’s what made it so interesting. (The fact that every was so bright and friendly and funny also helped!)

Links from the Photography Session

I did a session on Photography and Community this morning. It was a discussion rather than a presentation, but here’s a list of links to some of the things I mentioned:

Migrant Mother

• Exploring Contexts: Migrant Mother — From the Library of Congress
• Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother — From Cornell Reading’s Grapes of Wrath blog
• Migrant Grandson — Website of Roger Sprague, the grandson of Florence Owens Thompson, subject of Migrant Mother

Iran Missile Photograph

• Photography as a Weapon — An interesting and insightful examination of the issues from Zoom, Errol Morris’s New York Times blog.
• Iran, You Suck at Photoshop — Boing Boing’s contest to further enhance the missile photograph

Lewis Hine

• Lewis Hine Project — Joe Manning’s research into the identity and stories of the child laborers in the photographs
• Joe Manning — Interview on Todd Wemmer’s Lost and Found Photos podcast

Then and Now Photographs

• Leningrad Siege: Then and Now — Old photographs artfully blended into new ones
• DC Then and Now Photo Contest — DC Public Library
• Looking into the Past — Interesting technique: hold up an old photograph in front of its original location, and take a picture

Diners

• Diners — My diner photographs on Flickr
• Diners — This Flickr group has over 4,000 diner photographs from over 1,000 members
• Worcester Lunch Car Company — Flickr group devoted to diners made by one manufacturer

Photos and Google Maps

• Google Streetview with Thumbnail — Google is now supplementing Streetview with user-contributed photographs
• Panoramio — Google’s photosharing site for photographs of places, used for Google Maps and Google Earth
• Diners of Massachusetts — Sharing photographs on Google Maps

So Bad They’re Good

• Holga — One of several Flickr groups dedicated to the Holga plastic toy camera
• Pinhole Photography — Over 5,000 examples of pinhole photographs, taken without a lens
• Through the Viewfinder — “Through the Viewfinder photography is defined as taking a picture of any subject through the viewfinder of any camera with another camera.”

Flickr Commons

• Flickr Commons — Special part of Flickr for museums and libraries to share historic photographs
• Flickr Commons — A Flickr group to discuss and support the Flickr Commons
• IndiCommons — Blog devoted to the Flickr Commons
• Commenting the Commons — My blog post about participating in the Commons

Creative Commons

• Creative Commons — Flickr’s Creative Commons page
• Creative Commons — Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration.”

TinEye

• TinEye Reverse Search Engine — Show it an image and it will try to find other copies on the web
• TinEye Image Search — My blog post about this, including a Mona Lisa widget

Cool Tools

• Picnik — A free site that makes it easy to edit photographs: simple cropping and resizing, borders, add text and lots of special effect. This is the program behind the edit button on Flickr but you can also use it for photos on your computer or from other social sites. There’s also a premium version with more features.
• Big Huge Labs — Home of “fd’s Flickr Toys” has lots of simple tools for doing interesting things with photos on and off Flickr.

This is my first Google map, and it’s not comprehensive. It only includes diners that I have photographed, but I hope to keep working on it. I love Google Maps, and can’t believe how easy it is to set something like this up. And by setting these up on Google Maps, you also get a link to a KML file for Google Earth, which is a really amazing pieces of software.

View Larger Map

Diners of Massachusetts KML — See this on Google Earth