Yahoo! engineers hack up a storm 

I like to travel. Road trips, business trips, vacations; if it involves a plane, a train, a boat an automobile or even a blimp, sign me up. Along the way I like to take lots of pictures and blog them, via Flickr, both on my own travelogue and here on the network blog.

So I was pretty jazzed when news came across the ether that those ultra-clever Flickr engineers had mashed-in Yahoo! maps to create a whole new kind of photo-journal. (If you publish a blog you’re probably already using Flickr to give it a little extra visual punch and attract users. If you don’t already have a Flickr account, go here and set one up. It only takes a minute.)

Mapping pics with Flickr is pretty easy. Point your browser to your Flickr account, click the “Organize” tab and then the “Map” tab. You can choose a road-type map, a satellite image or (my favorite), a satellite/map hybrid. Use the location search in the upper right to find places.

Then drag and drop your photos to whatever location you want. You can get as granular as Yahoo! Maps and satellite images will allow. You can associate multiple images to a single location and can change the location of an image by dragging it to a different point on the interface.

Once you have associated an image to a location, that location will appear in the image’s properties, and your users will be able to click on a map link to see precisely where the image was captured.

And for you geo-hackers out there…
In addition, Flickr has also come out with extension to the Flickr API that will enable the adding and retrieving of geo-information, as well as setting privacy permissions and searching by location. “Everything you need,” as Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield says, “to roll your own.”

And that’s not all. Upcoming.org is also in on the act. Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s ZoneTag smart mobile upload client now has a new feature that allows a photo taken near an Upcoming.org event to be automatically tagged with the event and displayed on the Upcoming.org event page.

For more info, including an informative multimedia tutorial, check out this post and this post on the Flickr Blog.
 

These are jazzy, subtle ways that can help you enhance your users’ experience, share information and drive traffic. Well done, Flickr, Yahoo! Maps and Upcoming.org folks!

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor