Just fooling around...

Well, I haven't worked on my blog in ages, but since I've been busy playing around with some new technology (namely, Google Earth), I've decided to see what kind of cool new stuff I can figure out. Google Earth hosts pictures posted by users of Panoramio, a photo-hosting site much like Flickr. I've opened an account there hoping that some of my photos will be viewable by Google Earth users. I think it takes a few weeks after you post before anyone can see them, so I've uploaded this Panoramio map that should show the locations of the pictures I've loaded to their site. I'm going to keep Flickr as my primary photo-sharing online album, but I'm thinking of using Panoramio as a sort of "best of" site, where I'll try to load a few pictures from places around the U.S. and around the world that I've been to that I feel are representative of the time I spent there. Since the map above shows the whole world, you have to zoom in on one location to see all the different pictures from that place. Florence, Italy, for example, has about six pictures currently loaded for it, but you won't see where they are unless you zoom in pretty close. I've done my best to get the locations where the pictures were taken as accurate as possible, but if you feel any are misplaced, please let me know.

I have also added geo-tags to most, if not all, of my flickr photos on that site. This is no small task, considering the 2,000+ pictures I have on there (I had a long winter vacation), which you can also explore using my flickr account by going to this site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/straderpayton/map/ but the problem with flickr is that it uses Yahoo maps, which are frequently are available at a lower resolution or with less information than google maps (which Panoramio uses). This is especially true for Japan. Google's maps of Japan are very detailed and have extremely high resolution satellite images for major metropolitan areas (unfortunately not so for smaller towns like Isesaki).

Anyway, please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.