October 14, 2006

zonetag your photos and blast em to flickr - a project from Yahoo! Research

More on flickr as I recently installed and tested ZoneTag. This cool and free application (from Yahoo!) enables users to automatically have their photos tagged with geographic information (geotag) based on cell ID. I'm still on the fence as to this app is really goint to be that useful, however, I'm sure some savvy programmers will come up with some cool uses of data that has been zonetagged so I'll hold out until then until I comment further. Using the app was very simple and the install and configuration was no problemmo. I noticed that I seem to be the only one using the service from canada so far (try this search for zonetagged photos from Canada - http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/photos/index.php?time=7&city=&zip=&country=Canada&flickrname=&tag=&showmine=1&group=everyone) . Notice that my photo has been automatically tagged with the following:
 Zonetag
 cameraphone
 Canada
 celltagged
 cell:network=
 cell:mcc=302
 cell:mnc=720
 cell:lac=9800
 cell:cellid=53361
How it works is the app depends on the users to add additional information and then the cell ID is updated with the information provided. So, if I add a postal code or city name (Nanaimo) to my tags zonetag will incorporate that information in future uploads. I nice starting point from Yahoo! Research - see http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/. Something I haven't figured out yet though is how I can use the functionality of Shozu with zonetag? Will they compete with each other? Obviously, with so many flickr users depending on shozu to save on data throughput and those nasty charges I would think that  incorporating zonetag while using shozu would be critical. You can see my zonetagged photo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gisuser/268909916/

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