TagMaps is a really cool little toy from Yahoo’s research labs that I just stumbled across. It’s using heavy concentrations of tags on Flickr and overlaying them on a map, allowing you to zoom around the map and see how people have tagged their city. Here’s the official verbiage:
TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize text (well, tags) geographically on a map. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.
The World Explorer engine analyzes the information tied to the photos (such as location and tags) to find the main “attractions” in each location and in every zoom level and compute their “importance”. We use the tags, on the map, in varying font sizes, to represent these attractions.
Here’s a sample of the World Explorer, centered on Seattle…
(via Flickr Central)