Quote:
Originally Posted by Okayyou
Had some thoughts recently, wanted to see what others think.
I feel the My City Photos section is vastly underutilized. The sheer volume of city photos and locales represented is not matched by many other places on the web. Additionally, the photography presented here is often of a higher quality than what can be found through random web searches. SSP photo threads do an excellent job showcasing places of interest. For example, when I travel somewhere or want to see what a place is like, the best way to do so is look at photo threads from that area. Doing a Google image search for Portland produces skyline or city results. These are ok, but if I want to see neighborhoods and don’t know much about the city, it is hard to know specifics to search for. This is where the photo threads here really shine. They often showcase particular neighborhoods, or display the native perspectives of cities. The problem I’ve found is that the search function and visibility of threads is limited and underpowered.
So this is my idea. Develop a map with each thread geotagged to its specific area. If I wanted to see neighborhoods of Portland, I could zoom the map to Portland and see all the Portland threads in the area. Each thread could be represented by a dot on the map. Maybe the dot could be sized by a thread’s view number so the more popular threads are more visible. The dots could be shaded by age, white are brand new, dark go back to the earliest threads. Filters could be used to see threads just by certain members, or maybe by keyword, thread age, etc. Tagging is pretty common place now; it would be nice to be able to tag threads with keywords. Maybe the keywords could pop up when user hover their mouse over the dot.
A global map with all these photo threads would be a huge asset to travelers that want to see places before they visit. Google earth has a feature like this but you literally have to click every photo which is a crapshoot of whether the image will be good, or even tagged correctly. As I mentioned before, unless you know what to search for, it is really hard to get an idea of ‘Place’ from the scattered images.
I think this format might provide greater exposure for the site. I suppose if anyone had issue with this format, they could opt out of geotagging. I imagine the coding wouldn’t be too difficult; most of the effort would be in retroactively tagging each thread. But if users just tagged their own old threads much of the effort could be crowd sourced.
I don't know if this is the best place to post this. Who runs the SSP photo section? How constrained is the site by BBC code? Just some thoughts...
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That's a great idea. One simple way to achieve most of the things you've suggested is to have a link to Google Maps, with an SSP map that has pins for different threads.
You can change the collaboration settings so that anyone can edit the map, and then people can post links to their own threads, or people can post links to threads by other forumers.
Posting a link is pretty easy - just:
- click edit on the map,
- click on the pin icon to generate a placemark
- drag and drop the placemark onto the relevant place on the map
- the map automatically generates a call out box for the pin. In the space provided, give the pin a name (eg name of forumer and city covered by the thread),
- click on 'rich text' in the pin's callout box,
- post some link text in the callout box
- highlight the link text in the callout box
- click on the link icon and post the thread URL into the box
- add any other comments you like into the call out box
- bob's your uncle
There could be a sticky with a link to the map in the photography section, plus people could link to it in their signatures. I'm sure it would also be possible to embed the map itself into a post as well.
Here is an example, with links to a couple of threads:
https://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?msid=203406978152641034248.0004cae63ab9990b98931&msa=0&ll=54.775346,-41.660156&spn=84.794655,158.027344