I'm indebted to Ewan for his post on Geotagging today - at least, I think I'm indebted: I wasted an unconscionable time today geotagging some of my own flickr photos (example here. I must say I enjoyed returning, courtesy of Googlemaps, to New Zealand and whizzing along the road from Cromwell to Wanaka to place my red blob appropriately. (You'll understand this nonsense when you try it for yourself)
On a more serious note, I'm anxiously waiting for news that my friends Ruth and Ed have arrived back in the States; they were due to fly out from Glasgow this morning. As with all the other disasters - and thank God this so far is a disaster averted - I find I personalise: do I know anyone caught up in this? Is anyone I know affected? I need to remind myself that for every one of my sighs of relief there are many more cries of anguish, and the anguish of the people of Lebanon goes on while we are inconvenienced.
I feel I should respond sensitively to your comments on terrorism and the situation in the Lebanon... but I feel unable to respond sensibly to what is going on. Is it just me that feels overwhelmed and unable to respond aappropriately in words?
ReplyDeleteI therefore feel almost guilty in replying only to the first part of your post on geotagging...
I like being able to fly to locations on Google Earth too. I haven't found a tool that is as straightforward to use as the geotag bookmark Ewan gives, but GETrackr is fairly easy to use. It allows you to capture stuff like angle and direction as well as the location. (See for example my picture of Jordanhill.)
I wrote about this sort of thing recently in Where in the world... Geotagging and Flickrand Geotagging: The overspill. It is great fun isn't it! Ahem! As well as being educationally valuable of course. :-)
David, I read your posts when I was too tied up with ..well, the wedding of the year, actually ...and thought it looked too much for me to play with at the time. The beauty of the bookmark setup is that it's dead easy - though occasionally the system throws a wobbler and puts Perthshire in the USA. Hmm.
ReplyDeleteAnd no, I feel overwhelmed too - maybe that's *why* I tend to personalise my reactions.
I would think most folk feel overwhelmed.
ReplyDeleteI've sympathy with the people of Israel as well as Lebanon, but I'm glad that there are more intelligent and compassionate people out there who might be able to see a way through the morass - or is that wishful thinking? I hope not.
And as another day ends, I still have no word from my American friends, whose phone is still in anwer-machine mode.
ReplyDeleteA welcome to the blogging world to ahm.