Using geotagged photos on Flickr to follow the fire

Rounding out the coverage on the San Diego fires, people are also posting photos to Flickr and geotagging the images based on their locations. When you load the Flickr map and zoom in on San Diego, you can filter the geotagged photos by tag (I searched “fire”). The results give hundreds of on-the-ground views, many of which are accompanied by personal insights, testimonials, and the time that each photo was taken. It makes for a really interesting layer of coverage to add to the top-down info provided by the NASA maps and news graphics.

Overview of Flickr geotagged photos labeled “fire” (Click to enlarge)

Details of photos posted by Flickr members.

By the way, my sister and her husband who live in Spring Valley have still not been evacuated, but they have their stuff packed and ready to go. The Jamul fire is closest to their house, but hopefully with the wind shift today they will stay out of danger.

NASA satellite images track San Diego fires

NASA is posting satellite images that illustrate the massive impact of the fires burning in Southern California. They’ve been updating their website with new imagery over the last two days.

These new NASA satellite images of the wildfires show the area between Los Angeles and San Diego, California. Fire activity is denoted with red pixels. Vast plumes of thick smoke can be seen blowing out over the Pacific Ocean.

The first image was captured by NASA’s Terra satellite at 2:25 p.m. EST on October 23, 2007. The second image was acquired by NASA’s Aqua satellite at 5:40 p.m. EST, just over three hours later.

News services like CNN are picking up the satellite photos and adding tags and placemarkers to indicate the locations of each fire.

This sequence of images tracks the daily progress of the fires through satellite-based thermal imagery. These visualizations give a remarkable view of the rapid spread of the fires over the 24-hr period from Oct 22-23.

You can follow the later updates of this map here.

Tracking the San Diego Fire with Google Maps

My sister lives in Spring Valley, San Diego, so I’ve been watching this Google Maps mash-up to track the progress of the Harris fire and the evacuation notices near her area. (Click on the screenshots to enlarge)

By clicking on the links on the left side of the screen, pop-up windows open on the map to give details on each update. The local PBS station is posting updates to the map with Twitter, and as of 8pm tonight 588 people had subscribed to receive the Twitter updates on their mobile devices.

I think it’s amazing how quickly this technology can be adapted into a useful tool for transmitting—and continuously updating—critical visual information. Looks like this mash-up will reach over a million hits soon. So far there have been 944,851 views of the map.

There’s an article with more information about this here.

UPDATE: 1,032,787 views as of Wednesday morning, 7 AM.

CCA Visual & Critical Studies Info Session 10/21

I’ll be presenting my work tomorrow during CCA’s grad information day:

Graduate Information Day
Sunday, October 21, 10 am – 1 pm
San Francisco campus
Prospective students will learn about CCA’s graduate programs in architecture, curatorial practice, design, film, fine arts, visual and critical studies, writing, and the MBA in design strategy. Additional information regarding admissions and financial aid will be presented. Visitors can tour studios, view student work, and meet faculty and current students. Click here for more information or to RSVP for this event.

More info about the VCS program here.

Flickr announces new “Places” feature at Web 2.0 Summit

Flickr just announced that they are updating the way they’ll display geotagged photos on the map. Rather than just showing those pink dots that tell you how many photos have been tagged to a particular location, they’ll actually show the tags on the map like so:

According to Yahoo’s release:

The new Flickr map will display tags that will hover over specific locations, representing interesting and newsworthy things going on there. Clicking on any tag will take you to a photo stream of the popular and current photos related to that topic in that location. This is a great way to browse through news and events on a global basis — a forest fire here, a folk festival there, and fireworks in that other place. It’s like getting a pulse on the world by listening to a million camera shutters snapping pictures in unison.

Stephen Shankland blogged about it on CNET yesterday, and gives some more detail about the “Places” feature that will be launching soon:

The places pages offer a prepackaged view of thousands of locations. Clicking on a link on the maps page can take a user to the nearby place page, sifted to show the tag on which the user clicked. The page itself shows recent and interesting photos taken at the site, featured photographers who have photographed the region often, and popular and recent tags that lead to a new category of photos for that area.

Supposedly Flickr has a catalog of more than 70,000 places ready to go. Can’t wait to see what will be in it.

Enewetak on the Map

Enewetak is located in the Republic of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia, approx 2300 miles southwest of Hawaii. Click on the map to enlarge it.