Week 3, Thing #6: Flickr Mash-ups and Third Party Sites

Lincoln Sightings Across the Nation

Not really. These are Lincoln sites, not sightings. But I thought the headline was catchy. I chose six locations pertinent to Lincoln's life and career-- again from a website -- and uploaded them to Flickr. This was successful. Then I had to transfer them to Mappr.

Mappr almost killed me. I misunderstood the whole tag issue at first. When they say generic, they really mean generic. "Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C." was not accepted. "Building, Washington, District of Columbia" was accepted. Once I renamed all my tags and sent them back to Mappr, the next stage of placing them on the map went quickly enough. The map has to be "zoomed" in to a size big enough to recognize the states, or again, you will be told "Wait, don't you want to make this map larger?" or something like that, I forget the exact prompt. I got beeped often in this process, but once the map came together, it really was fantastic. I can hardly believe a program like this exists. To see my map, try this link. http://www.flickr.com/photos/8939400@N04/map/ It was still working for me as of yesterday and I hope it is still live. Anyway, enjoy Mappr as much as I did. This whole exercise was a great adventure. Also, look for my technology article, forthcoming.

P.S. What I really love about Mappr is how unfailingly polite it is. No curt, one-word commands here. An entire page is devoted to telling you what you did wrong. The prompts go something like this: "Mappr thinks there is a low possibility that this picture was really taken in Washington, D.C. Is there something missing from your tag? Mappr could be wrong, but we can't find this location." Imagine, an interactive program implying it might be wrong. Well you know darn well Mappr isn't wrong. So that leaves you. If you want to feel right about the world today, check in to Mappr and make a few mistakes. Some engineer went to a lot of trouble programming manners into this thing, so you might as well enjoy it.