http://noticin.gs/

A friend and his friend invented a game when they were young. I never played the game but I remember it involving a tennis ball (or a number of tennis balls), an oversized rag doll, and a series of spaces. I think you had to somehow manoeuvre  one or all of the balls to the doll.

There was a strict set of rules defining how the game should be played. Well, actually, the set of rules wasn’t very strict at all. Whenever a player did something that wasn’t in the rules, a new rule would be defined, named and added to the rulebook. Over the years the game evolved, becoming more and more complicated as the rulebook became larger.  By the time I discovered the game, only my friend and his friend knew the rules well enough to be able to play, but that didn’t really matter.

Which is to say that inventing games is good. And noticings is a good, simple  game, concocted by Tom Armitage and Tom Taylor.

All you have to do is take pictures of things you’ve noticed, geo-tag them and upload them to flickr tagged ‘noticings’. And that’s it. You get points for each noticing and bonus points  for noticing something near another player’s noticing. You now also get bonus points for being the first noticing in a particular neighbourhood. The game is evolving as the Toms get a feel for how the players are using it.

And of course it’s extra nice when your noticing gets noticed…

Well, I remembered, and it’s lovely. Look:

Lawns, terraces, shrubs… What is it? Can anyone go up there?

Through his dedication to the cause and (I’m guessing) quick-typing wizardry, Dan has shown that it’s possible to disseminate real-world events online in all but real-time. The way he talks around the talks gets across a great feeling of the events  that compliments the youtube footage and flickr group really well.

One of the first things I ever saw on the internet that utterly entranced me was a webcam from a yellow cab in New York. There I was, sat in my Brixton bedroom late in the evening, watching the sun set between blocks as the cab-driver zig-zagged across the upper west side (possibly) . With my piddly dial-up connection the screen would refresh every 10 seconds or so, but I watched completely captivated for ages (and this was on a pay-per-minute tariff!)

I remembered this, because I’ve just had the same feeling watching flickrvision, a map of the world which shows flickr photos as their uploaded.

As Rob Manuel on the B3ta newsletter says, ‘this is exactly what it must be like to be God’.

By creating a visualisation of internal flights across the US over 24 hours, Aaron Koblin has generated a map of connections. I love the way that the map reveals itself as day breaks across different timezones. A map that kind of shows both space and time.

Found via Collision Detection

…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda

It turns out I wasn’t alone in thinking that, but there you go.

And now drag and droppable geotagging just feels like it takes us that bit closer to the all-encompassing map of the Empire, but one that’s the size of your computer screen. It’s a tantalising vision. We can map the world through digital layers of detail upon detail, a virtual walkthrough from the pre-existing satellite imagery of rooftops, to pictures of building façades, down to views through windows and into rooms, relentlessly manufactured and painstakingly re-created. The map of Science, of the College of Cartographers.

This is fine in itself, but the map I’m looking forward to is the one created by us, the ‘Beast or beggar’ who inherited that of the Cartographers’ vision: a map of the minutiae of life piled up like bric-a-brac in a secondhand store, grabbed moments that combine into visual poetry. Flickr groups can colonise areas like marauding tribes, virtual Ballardian gangs reclaiming their environments. As images stack up upon images, we’ll be able to peel back the layers by tag and by group to reveal new geographical portraits of our surroundings.

This is all a bit sketchy, random, and romantic. I’ll have to come back to this.

But in the meantime, I’m geotagging those images.