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Better late than never…

Locals and Tourists by Eric Fisher

By comparing the geotag of one’s photos with their profile location, Eric Fisher has created visualizations of many of the world’s cities that show density of photographs taken by locals versus tourists (tourists in red, locals in blue and indeterminate in yellow). Seems like an excellent way to discover local hot spots when traveling.

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers’ World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in piaces that tourists don’t visit.

Toronto

San Francisco

Warsaw

Boatanic

This concept was designed for cities with canals, but I could see them being an essential component of the revival of the waterfronts in cities like Toronto.

As Damien O’Sullivan, a designer in Rotterdam, walked the waterways in Amsterdam, he noticed that the typical tourist boats would make fantastic greenhouses—they are ideally suited to gathering heat and light with their large glass windows. If tourists were replaced with vegetables, and if the boat was retrofitted with some farming and energy harvesting equipment, these little ships could make excellent, small-sized, mobile urban farms.

This is the backbone of Boatanic, O’Sullivan’s new proposal for a distributed urban farm set to debut in 2011. Boatanic will offer fresh, year-round seasonal produce, sold directly from the quay and by subscription. Bike delivery services will be available to local restaurants buying wholesale. The system also proposes a return to commerce in inner-city canals, which have become less popular as citizens favor roadway transportation.

We Used to Wait

I love the Arcade Fire. I love this track. I am determined to catch them live at some point this summer.

And it seems strange… How we use to wait for letters to arrive, but stranger still… Is how something so small can keep you alive.

Investment in Human Powered Transportation

Good comes through with another pretty infographic showing how the US Department of Transportation has stepped up their investment in projects for pedestrians and cyclists. I am hoping that a proportional increase in trips taken by foot and bicycle will occur, but the cynic in me says that it will take at least generation of education and cultural transformation and that the increase in trips to date are the same people increasing their frequency.

Underwater Base Jumping

This isn’t real, but I wish it was…

With the launch of their new website, Modernista shows they do (disclaimer: judging by a Google blog search I am pretty slow on this). Rather than displaying their content within a typical agency site format, Modernista took the concept of a social media hub to the extreme, allowing (arguably) the best in breed site for each type of content do the heavy lifting for them with just a simple DHTML overlay allowing the user to navigate between them.

Once I realized the conceit of the site, half the fun became guessing which service they would use for each type of content (spoiler: they made all the obvious choices). Their print work is all displayed through Flickr, categorized through the usage of albums and tags to allow users to navigate the work by client and category. Their television spots are brought to you by YouTube with playlists allowing users to view the videos by client. Similarly, all their interactive work is presented through a link to… you guessed it… del.icio.us, again using tags to categorize their links. Finally, their about and news sections are brought to you by Wikipedia and Google News respectively. One of the best things about this site is that as Modernista is taking you through all these sites, you can hit their escape button and be released into the familiar comforts of whichever social media space you happen to be in. In addition to a great conceit, the site creates a fantastic social media ecology, drastically increasing the reach of Modernista’s content (they could have improved the strength of this effect by cross-linking all their channels to one another rather than just back to their own domain and by using some of the third party Facebook applications to bring their other channels into their Page, but that could be nitpicking on my part).

One critcism I do have of the site is Modernista’s use of “web” spelling in the menu, which may indicate a bit of a shortcoming in understanding of the interactive space on Modernista’s behalf. People only intentionally spell things like that if they are a fledgling start-up and the correctly spelled domain will cost a fortune or if they are a really cool 16 year old on MySpace. Other than that, I really have to applaud Modernista for a fantastic concept with a strong execution.

Update: Wikipedia clearly doesn’t like how Modernista has co-opted their service, but instead of taking the entry down, they have posted a large warning on the top of it. I find this surprising given how protective Wikipedia’s admins are over the neutrality of the site. I would guess they haven’t taken it down because the way Modernista has used the page isn’t occurring within Wikipedia and therefore is not covered in their terms of use.