Broadway and Battery Place Surge

Yesterday saw a sudden surge in the number of people wanting information about Broadway and Battery Place in New York. Suddenly, from the usual trickle, hundreds of people were viewing the page data, mostly wanting to know where it is and how to get there.

360 panorama of Broadway and Battery Place, New York. © Peter Watts

We are intrigued, and can only guess that there may have been a fireworks display or some such held there. If anyone can shed any light on it we'd love to know!

Success of Image Tags

A month ago Panoramic Earth introduced Tags for panoramic images. A month on the success of this has become clear with:

• Several thousand specific 'tag' pages being viewed
• 66% of 'tag' page views coming from search engine results
• High percentage of visitors following links to specific locations

Some of the most viewed tag pages:

england ¦ greater london ¦ australia ¦ beach ¦ cave ¦ hawaii ¦ vatican

This shows the usefulness of image tags in promoting the panoramic images on the site. Tags are added by the photographer as they upload the images and are therefore very specific and targetted - make use of them!

Panoramic Earth Joins Twitter

Panoramic Earth on Twitter: We have recently joined Twitter, come follow us there. Both posts from this blog and new images added to Panoramic Earth will be tweeted.

Tag Cloud on Panoramic Earth

Panoramic Earth has just introduced a Tag Cloud onto the site to help people find images of similar subject matter. The tags are set by the photographer during the uploading process, reflecting the subject content. It is auto-populated with the geographical location data and basic image type.

Feedmil - The New Feed Search Engine

Site promotion is always an important issue. The net never stands still and it can be hard to keep up with new tools. One such tool Panoramic Earth is now using is Feedmil, a feed search engine. Feedmil provides topic-focused feeds for all types of medial like blogs, microblogs, public and social media feeds as well as podcasts. It is set up to help people search feeds of interest efficiently and quickly through simple interfaces backed by innovative technologies.

Submitting a feed is done through a simple form. Feedmil also pro-actively hunts out feeds for itself and then contacts feed producers to submit a description of it.

For Users, the Feedmil interface allows you to specify both the search query and also the popularity range of feeds. Making full potential of the 'Long Tail', users can quickly discover high quality, less popular feeds for subjects of interest. Slider controls adjust the search for topic relevance giving more accurate results while allowing you to explore the feeds you like serendipitously.

Feedmil was founded in 2008 by a web scientist and 3 enthusiastic search engineers. It is currently a privately funded startup, aiming to become 'the best feed search engine in the world'.

Panoramas from High Places

Often the best viewpoints over cities and the like is at the top of monuments. This poses particular challenges as taking a 360° image from a single point on the monument will probably result in a lot of blank wall, and only a partial view of the potential view. Panoramic Earth has a new contributor, Richard Herring, who specializes in taking a series of images that, when put together, give the impression of hanging in mid air, as if the monument or tower from which the images were taken did not exist. He says the following:

'I'm a part-time traveller and occasional photographer, with a particular interest in SE Asia. As I hope my contributed panoramas show, I enjoy the challenge of taking panoramas from high places like towers and monuments, where even if there were space and time to set up a tripod, 180 degrees of the image would be of blank walls and tourists. Under those circumstances, there's no alternative to a steady hand and a good deal of luck (and often a good deal of manual post-processing.) But it's worth the effort, even if the results are sometimes technically flawed, to get a spectacular view that couldn't be achieved any other way.'

These results can be clearly seen in 360 panoramas constructed from series of photos taken from the top of the from the Petřin Tower in Prague, the Monument in London and the Wat Si Saket image from Bankgok (compare with this Golden Mount image taken without moving around the platform and shows the chedi on the top).

For those trying this kind of image it is useful to consider the following:

• Imagine that the point of rotation is the center of the tower.
• Remember to keep the camera as steady as possible
• Shoot in portrait mode and keep the center of the image on the horizon.
• From each photographic point take an image directly ahead of the center of the tower.
• Then take a couple more facing slightly to the right and the left.
• Try to do this at as many points as possible round the tower, but at least at the middle of each side and corner if possible (giving at least 8 points the images are taken from). This provides quite a bit of overlap between the groups which helps when it comes to stitching.
• Use image stitching software, like Hugin (free) or PTGui (paid) to compose the shot.
  

As Richard shows, the results can be very good. Other examples of this kind of picture on Panoramic Earth include:

• A composite of the San Francisco skyline taken from the Coit Tower.
• View over Stanford University from the Hoover Tower in California.
• View of Oxford from St Mary's Church Tower.

Panoramas of London in the Snow

Westminster Bridge, London. 360 panorama (c) Peter Watts - all rights reserved

The 2nd February 2009 saw some of the heaviest snowfalls in London for many years. Much of the city closed down, public transport was severely affected and for a time London's airports closed. As a result, London was much quieter than normal as the landscape was transformed into something magical.

Regents Park, London. 360 panorama (c) Peter Watts - all rights reserved

Some panoramic images from the day were added to Panoramic Earth, mostly taken from Regents Park.

Regents Park, London. 360 panorama (c) Peter Watts - all rights reserved