Catching The Rain

Lookout knockhead, this is Chinglish

As a collector of silly signs the BBC piece Beijing stamps out poor English struck a chord and gave me much amusement. The Chinglish photo pool on Flickr is a real ‘must see’. And if you wondered where the tile of this post came from, see this one.

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Science Connections puzzles

Blimey, these are hard!

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Flickr goes one better with photo maps

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

First the laughter:

Flickr has recently launched a fully integrated mapping tool (as opposed to a few other sites which had been doing it via tags and the Flickr API) and it’s flippin’ clever.

As an example go to the Kew Gardens Group map – a map which, not surprisingly, displays all the pictures that have been added to the Kew Gardens group. First thing to do is click the ‘Hybrid’ link top-right so you get the satellite image.

Then zoom in to get more detail, and click on the pink dots to see actual photos.

Also try using the Search Box and the Filters tab at the bottom (e.g. just type ‘alpine’ into the search and press ‘Go’ and you’ll just see pictures of alpines or the Alpine House)

And if you have a Flickr account then login and it just gets better. One of the most amazing things is how they have set up the interface so you can ‘place’ (or geotag) your photos just by dragging and dropping them onto a map. Which probably explains why there are so many pictures that have already been given a location.

Flippin amazing. The only downside is how rubbish some users are at putting things in the right place on the map (there are Kew pictures at Barnes and in Richmond Park!).

Now the crying:

My efforts to create the ‘Where in the world’ map of blog posts and pictures now appear somewhat in vain, and indeed in this world of Blogspot, Flickr, MySpace etc I have serious doubts about whether the effort to create and maintain a blog and photo gallery on your own domain/hosting is really worth the effort. Answers on a postcard….

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London Bloggers

London Bloggers is a seemingly simple site which allows people to list and promote their London-based blogs. Nothing remarkable there, but the real beauty is the way they have structured the site, based on the London tube map. If you’ve seen previous posts on this blog, or browsed through some of the photo galleries, you’ll have a fair idea that I’m based in West London – Hanwell W7 to be more precise. Click on the logo here and you’ll see other blog sites in and around Hanwell, Boston Manor & Northfields stations. Of course you can also choose any other station you like. Sweet.

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londonist.com

One of my favourite sites used to be The Big Smoker, a blog about life in London. A year go it was changed to londonist.com, and though I don’t think it’s as good in some respects now it has gone ‘mainstream’, it’s still a good read.

127They’ve recently run a nice review of the new exhibit in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern (by Rachel Whiteread), which I’ll have to go to. Haven’t been there since the fantastic Weather exhibit (see left) ended a couple of years ago.

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