Machine Tags
People involved with me in the Second Life projects that take advantage of the cagd eportfolio tool that I’ve written, will most likely be familiar with sending snapshots to the site via the postcard --> post@sleeds.org email address. It’s a cunning piece of code that I hacked together, that parses the (somewhat less these days) garbled email postcards that LL send out, filters out the gumpf, leaving you with the image itself, plus some metadata about it — like the coordinates of where it was taken.
(I must publish that code some day — it’s not very complicated and might help a lot of people out)
Anyway, the function didn’t originate as a tool for cagd — initially it was a experimental tool for Flickr. It was shortly after Flickr introduced geotagging — and the ability to see your photos on a map with other people’s dotted around them — and I thought it would be fun if we could see our Second Life snapshots on a map as wel.
The tool that came out of that — sl2flickr (spot the url-change there) — was one of my usual ‘hacky-experiments’. The code works, and the authetication/sign-up part is still there if you want to give it a try. But the map has long since broken, because Linden Lab changed the Map API.
Recently though (although this has nothing to do with the map API really), we had a discussion in the Second Life Flickr Group about using machine tags with a sensible namespace. Now, I must confess, I’m not entirely clued-up about what machine tags are specifically — apart from being tags which are useful to programmes, but not to (and therefore easily hidden from) humans. But what we ended up after a short debate, was a system for geotagging Second Life snapshots. For example, a snapshot taken at the Welcome Area at Ahern could be tagged:
secondlife:region="ahern"
secondlife:x=128
secondlife:y=128
secondlife:z=0
At the time, a few other services (like BlogHUD, I seem to recall — worth checking up on that) agreed that they would start using the same system, but for ages I’ve been wishing that both Snapzilla and SLBuzz.com (that a lot of people, like Torley, use to upload their snapshots from in-world) would do likewise.
Yesterday, through a rather weird little serendipitous email exchange that Thau had with some people from Orange, the two of us found ourselves onstage at Orange Island, talking about the Second Life Flickr Group, alongside Cristiano Midnight (of sluniverse.com) and the Koinup guys — and I couldn’t possibly let an opportunity like that slip without harranging Cris into taking a look through our discussions about tags.
…which he did, and left a post announcing that Snapzilla’s photos will now use the same geotagging namespace. Which is awesome really, because it means that we’ll have significantly more geotagged photos to play with in the future, and that once I get off my backside and re-learn the map API (or convince someone else to), we can have a map just like Yahoo’s and Google’s, peppered with photographs from all over the grid.
An amusing footnote:
I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but what with there being several names for Snapzilla (well, two — that and ’slunivers.com’), I’d always thought that slbuzz.com was just another url that pointed at it. But, of course, I’ve just discovered that it’s an entirely seperate (and therefore, competing) website. Haha. Ooops.
So when Torley was talking about using SLBuzz.com, I thought she meant Snapzilla. And when she suggested I talked to Mark (the slbuzz owner), I thought she meant Cristiano.
Fortunately though, I didn’t make that mistake out loud. haha.
Tags: code, flickr, machine tags, tags
