Flickr Geo-Tagging With a Legal Twist?
Yesterday, Yahoo & Flickr announced geo-tagging which combines Yahoo maps with photo overlays. Users can easily drag their photos using an overlay tool to position them on a Yahoo map, and voila! Want to know what Vancouver looks like? — check out the photos. Very cool.
So what does this have to do with law, technology, research, or any combination of the above? Well, one of the things I try to do when new web-technologies come out, is to re-think them with either a legal or library perspective. For example, rather than geo-maps, I’d like to take the floor maps to our firm, and tag them with the user profiles from our Intranet. People move? no problem, drag-and-drop them to their new office using the overlay tool.
Or, how about a more granular map of the Library, with the ability to drill down to the shelf level? The answer to ‘where would I find…?’ could be more specific than ever before. And each shelf map location link could be tied back into the Library catalogue.
I don’t always remember to do it, but the old adage of ‘thinking outside of the box’ really does help (me, anyway…). Anyone else? I’m sure there are plenty of twists that this group can come up with.
I was thinking along the same lines, Steven. We need to be able to create our own maps or somehow use a real map as a surrogate for a library or a law office — not terribly helpful. A related thought, if we’re thinking about the actual Flickr functinality and not an imagined extension, is that text can be treated as an image and thus located with this system.
Well we always said that what young lawyers needed were pathfinders to novel research areas. We’re just moving on from metaphor-land. Check out: http://lawscout.uakron.edu/