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…

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’.

Spencer Platt’s winning photo of 4 girls being driven through the devastation of South Beirut in a red open-topped sports car is beautiful, deep, and surreal. I also love this one which is possibly even more incongruous.

Shame they won’t let you use the images though…