Dataset of the Day: Another Look at Flickr Data

Flickr recently published the areal shapes of place names based on geotagged photos. Tom Taylor quickly developed a visualization for any particular place name.
The shapes are irresistible. We added a few locations into Geocommons. The data includes counts of the number of photos taken for any particular place name. For a better idea of what this looks like, take a look at San Francisco flickr data on OpenStreetMap:

At almost any scale, photos are tagged exponentially more to some locations, often those next to water or places with grand vistas of iconic landmarks. I wondered whether this was tourists, so I overlayed Emily’s data on hotels in paris:

One can see that the photos here still snake their way along the water, and they also pop up by Père Lachaise Cemetery and on top of Montmartre. Click on the image to browse the same map with Velib stations included.
Finally, I wondered whether it was just geeks like myself who geo-tagged their photos, so I loaded the crunchbase and flickr data into a global map:

Hooray for crowd-sourced data. There are a lot of interesting possibilities for the flickr data: information about the tags (e.g. “disgust”, “architecture”) within each polygon, layering on topo maps, or layering on landmarks.