Yahoo Labs WorldExplorer mashup

The O’Reilly Radar have discussed the new World Explorer mash-up created by the folks at Yahoo’s Berkely research lab. It takes publicly geotagged photos from flickr and combines them with Yahoo Maps to create a mash-up from which you can view photos associated with a particular surrounding. It has some algorithm to display tags relevant to a particular area. What’s more, there is also a night option which will only show tagged photos taken at night to give you a different perspective.

You can embed the maps into web pages, blogs etc. via a nifty little flash app generator called Badger. Unfortunately, WordPress.com doesn’t seem to be happy with the embedded object HTML so I guess we will have to wait for them to do a similar thing as they’ve done for YouTube and Google videos, hint, hint

The underlying technology from Yahoo is called TagMaps, and it supports APIs to allow you to create your own tag maps from data you provide via a REST interface.  I’ve been playing with Google Maps and its APIs quite a bit over the last few months, but I’m getting more and more impressed with the functionality of the Yahoo stuff and am keen to have a play.