Data-Mine Other People's Flickr Photos to Generate Your Travel Itinerary
From the Flickr-verse to Detailed Itineraries You can find just about anything on photo-sharing site Flickr, from page after page of adorable felines to 381,468 photos of the Eiffel Tower (at last count). With so much digital and geographic data up for grabs, algorithms can do some really interesting things with all of Flickr's crowdsourced information. Take this new Yahoo program for example: It mines the millions of tourist photos on Flickr to create detailed, customized travel itineraries based on the photographic experiences of travelers that came before you. Say you have three days to spend in New York City, the most photographed city in the world. The Yahoo software starts by separating tourist photos taken in New York from photos posted by city-dwellers, using geolocation data to ensure a user's string of NYC photos covered a short span of time before moving on elsewhere. It then uses...