Flickr: Search For Chicken Worldwide

I couldn't help but be curious when I saw the title Flickr Places shows chicken around the world. I was all excited about the possibilities and began to devour the article. But then I realized that the author of the article and I had two completely different concepts of Chicken, and although I was disappointed, I was able to move past the initial let down to get to the meat of this story.

Flickr's new project called Places aims to take advantage of the geo-tags available on 1.38 billion photos stored on Flickr's server. Geographic regions will be getting their own unique url, along with a customized page for that location. These pages will show "iconic photos" (the more interesting pics), most recent shots, and the hot tags for the photos.

Zones will be broken down by Country, then Territory, then City, and you will be able to search at each level. For example, Chicago's url would look something like www.flickr.com/places/USA/Illinois/Chicago. You could search anywhere within each of those steps, USA, Illinois or Chicago.

One of the newer features Flickr has dragged out to show for Places is the ability to search for interesting shots by tag in a region. The picture for this story shows a search for chicken (the disappointing kind) in the US versus China. What's interesting about that is the cultural implications you can take from searching tags. What does chicken mean to the US compared to China (more interestingly, what does chicken mean to San Fransisco compared to Salt Lake City)?

Although no specific date has been given, look for Flickr Places to be released soon.

Flickr Places Shows Chicken Around the World [O'Reilly Radar]
[via: Boing Boing]