Maps + Words = Pictures
… or travel around the world in 90 seconds without ever leaving your couch!
About 6 months ago I did some research for an upcoming vacation to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand by reading through old school travel guides and finding myself increasingly more frustrated by the fact that there weren’t enough pictures in these books to give me a good idea of what to expect when I got there. The hotels were listed by location and rated from 1-5 but it left me feeling empty, that I didn’t have enough information to make an educated decision where to go and what hotel to pick.
At the same time I started to REALLY getting into flickr, mainly to share photos with my friends and family who live halfway across the world in Switzerland. I also started looking at other people’s pictures and was blown away by the variety of content that people had posted.
So I took my travel guide, went to flickr and started typing in some hotel names in Hanoi Vietnam and to my surprise, almost all of my searches came back with pictures. But in addition to the pictures, there were comments, like: “I really liked to stay in this hotel and ended up having breakfast at the so and so place next door which I highly recommend”.
A travel guide and Flickr turned out to be the perfect way for me to do a thorough vacation research and once I arrived in Asia I was already familiar with some of the sites and found it easy to explore new places.
Yahoo recently came out with it’s new TagMaps World Explorer, a new way of browsing through maps by zeroing in on words from an overlaying tag cloud. The tag cloud is generated through geo-tagged images from flickr. When hovering over a tag, the right hand side of the webpage reveals related images from flickr. This is exactly the type of online evolution I was hoping for. Yahoo buys flickr, allows people to add valuable content for free or very cheap and uses it for a new tool that’s useful usable and desirable. I love it!