Imagine a web site that holds photographs of every street number in London. Each picture would be uploaded by the general public using camphones. The system would hold a history of photos. It would be searchable by postcode or street name and street number in the style of Streetmap.co.uk. Attached to each photo would be a Wiki style page where people could leave comments and reviews. When you're going somewhere new, you could get a map from streetmap and visit this site to see what #23 actually looks like. If you were using a Wifi or GPRS connected PDA, you could look at the reviews and pictures while deciding whether to go in.

This is a lazyweb request where I'm not going to build it but I think it ought to exist. There's obviously lots of wrinkles to work out and a business plan to build behind it. The UI would need lots of work to make it fast and easy to use. There'd need to be quite a lot of storage and bandwidth available. The big trick would be to make it self-correcting rather than involve moderators and editors.

And I can't see any reason why it shouldn't be exended to cover the whole UK based on postcode and street number.

Does anyone want to try and build a proof of concept? Does it already exist and I just haven't heard of it?

This is a repost of an old weblog of mine that brought up The Open Guide to London The difference now is that there are a *lot* more cameraphones around. [from: JB Ecademy]


[ << NotCon04 - Call for papers ] [ Some questions about VoIP >> ]
[ 12-Apr-04 1:40pm ]