When I first discovered google search some time ago, one of the first queries I issued was “David Valcárcel Romeu”, that is, me.
Regardless of the reasons why one would want to know the degree of one’s internet presence, such as ego or curiosity, the idea has come to be quite a common practice, and several terms have even appeared to identify this trend.
New possibilities of querying the world wide web appear at almost the same frequency in which new ways to share information become available, and with the advance of the Semantic Web, it is incredibly easy to explore the web in different ways.
While thinking about this idea, I wondered if it would be possible to “self flickr” myself.
For example, thanks to the flickr API, it is possible to query the flickr photo base in innovative ways, such as integrating flickr content with a semantic web version of wikipedia.
As the moment of this writing, flickr has over 80 million geotagged photos.
I myself have a collection of photo’s that have been geotagged.
Could it be possible to find myself in someone else’s photo, somewhere in the background, inadvertently becoming part of the picture?
Timestamp and geolocation information is extracted from each photo, and used as search criteria for the flickr API call.
For the moment, I have not managed to find myself in somebody else’s photo, although results are surprising: some photos were taken at almost the same time and at almost the same place.
In theory, the possibility of finding myself should increase day by day, as users continue to embrace photo geotagging technologies.
Thinking ahead, it should be possible to include other photo sharing sites that offer querying APIs, and thinking even more ahead at a larger scale, one could even consider running queries continuously, and analyzing results with face detection applications for examples…
The question that remains is if all this is just some sort of egolized form of amusement à la Where’s Wally?, or if this and similar ideas is something to bring up next time you run in to some idea-searching VC’s…
