The Neighborhood Project (Your Golden

Wednesday, March 26th, 2003

I took a walk through my town (Zushi, Japan) last week, just to look around and take pictures. I saw things that I have never noticed, as I went through town on one errand or another. It occurred to me that we miss most of the beauty of our surroundings by being too busy to look around us. I discovered a ballet school very near my apartment that I had no idea existed. Looking back on my pictures, I realized that the area I am in is much more beautiful than I had realized. I hope that everyone can discover more about the area around them, and share it with the rest of the world.

To facilitate this, I have started the neighborhood project. I would like everyone who can manage it to take an hour, and walk around their neighborhood taking pictures. Send me the photos, and I’ll add them to “The Neighborhood Project”.

Eventually, I hope to put this up as a site where you can zoom in and see local views of places all over the world. Please post your pictures, discover the beauty of your neighborhood, and share it with the world. Of course, if your neighborhood isn’t beautiful, you’ll want to warn everyone about it… smile

By UltraBob at 08:39 AM Link to this post here!
16 comment s


  • on March 26th, 2003 09:03 AM chriskk said:

    That’s an kewl idea! Looking through your photos makes me want to go through the town I recently moved to(Ogikubo) and blog about it. Create an image map with links to the photos and blog entry for that spot .. then create a map showing who’s blogging what area. Then a world map .. zoomable of course. Interlinked neighborhood blogs.

  • on March 26th, 2003 09:26 AM UltraBob said:

    Wow Chris!

    That sounds like a pretty cool idea.  Maybe I can make that a reality, when I get enough photos up to make a map worthwhile.  If you provide me with a blog link for your posts, I can put them up on the captions of the photos.

    You’ve given me a whole bunch of new ideas too, I hope the response on this is big enough, because there is a lot of stuff I’d like to do.

    UltraBob

  • on March 27th, 2003 05:35 AM mie said:

    Hi!!

    I’m in...I think it’s a great idea...to show the nooks and crannies of where we all live instead of the typical touristy images people get of Japan. Plus I absolutely love my neighborhood and with the weather making me want to dance with joy, I’ll begin walking around more. I’ll gather a bunch and will send them on soon.

    : )

  • on March 27th, 2003 12:19 PM kevin said:

    I hope you have a big hard drive grin

    I also wish I remembered where I saw a link a while back about a (very rich) guy in Calafornia. who was flying a helicoptor along the coast and taking hi-res photos of every inch to post on the web. This was mostly to expose companies that were dumping waste and over developing and destroying the coast.  He was going to make a time line type of thing where you could se how any particular spot cahnged in a certain time period.

    I like the idea too, but unlike you I am a very negative person, and the more I look closely at Tokyo and my surroundings, the more I think we are killing ourselves.  Sure there are some interesting nooks and crannies, and lots of sakura for sure, but I have grown caloused and long for an open field where I can breathe and see stars and eat fresh veggies without chemicals… (I almost moved to a great place in Fujino before someone stole the apartment I had my eye on)

    I’ll have some photos for you of my neighborhood (which actually kicks some regular urban neighborhood butt) as soon as I go through my archives grin

  • on March 27th, 2003 12:26 PM kevin said:

    Oh yeah, I also saw this site with a map of NYC bloggers a while back.  A little different in that it doesn’t have the photos. but the map-to-blogger idea is similar.  I may inspire you.

  • on March 27th, 2003 05:54 PM Dav said:

    The sort of virtual space (web) to real space (geolocation) activity is a bit of a zeitgeist at the moment.

    I’ve been working on a system myself, the first portion of which is a java applet that provides a globe which the user can spin around, zoom in on points and cause the web browser to load a URL associated with the point and simultaneously (using browser frames) a mapquest map or satellite photo of the same location. Points are attached to the globe using XML data. See headmap: blogosphere for more details on that. When you get your project running I’d like to try to hook a globe applet up to it.

    I also wrote a system a few years ago that allows you to string a set of photos together into a navigable web tour (See Photour). A similar system could be useful if you get enough photos of a location.

  • on March 28th, 2003 12:29 AM UltraBob said:

    Kevin,

    If this takes off, I will definitely have to install more hard drive space in my server.  To get me started I have a spare 70Gb drive to add, so that should last me for a while.  Backing up is what I’m concerned about.

    I really look forward to getting your submissions, and I will be putting up a page for people to submit soon.  Right now, I am taking the submissions by e-mail, so please let me know ahead of time before you send anything.  I will then make sure that my e-mail box can handle the load.

    Thanks a lot for writing,

    UltraBob

  • on March 28th, 2003 12:54 AM UltraBob said:

    Dav,

    You are a crazy genius!  I had noticed the blogsphere thing on your page before, but didn’t know you were actually working on making it.  I would really like to have a link between the two projects, that would be extremely cool.  I would really like for people to be able to scroll around the globe and find pictures of neighborhoods they are interested in, find pictures of a random neighborhood, or search by postal code.  Please let me know by e-mail, what information I need to gather with the photos to make it work with your system.  My address (in paranoid anti-spam format) is ultrabob AT REMOVEME.t4ac.com.

    I look forward to discussing with you how we could make this happen.

    UltraBob

  • on March 28th, 2003 02:28 AM Dav said:

    Hi UltraBob,

    All you currently need is the lat/long to associate with any URI. The XML file the globe applet needs simply requires four things 1) latitude 2) longitude 3) url 4) descriptive name. It could be as simple as indicating the general lat/long for each neighborhood and then we can link that point on the globe to your main photo page for the neighborhood.

    Of course sometime in the future digital cameras will include GPS information with each photo, at that point any geo-coded system will be much more detailed (and systems like the one you’re thinking of will be rather commonplace I would think).

    So, for your project, just ask people to try to determine the lat/lon for their neighborhood when they submit their photos. I would point them to http://www.geourl.org/resources.html for information on how to find their lat/lon. Specific to Japan there is http://www.mapfan.com/. That’s what I used to find Mie’s neighborhood when I added her to geourl.org. That was a fun adventure, since it’s almost wholly in kana and I don’t read kana; it helps to do the “View Only This Frame” option on your web browser as you’re using the maps to zero in on a location, that way you can see the lat/lon in the URL, such as this one: http://www.mapfan.com/map.cgi?ZM=2&SbmtPB=MAP↦=E139.28.51.1N35.39.56.6&Func=INDEX&&.
    Note however that those coordinates in that URL are in arc format not decimal, in other words it is degrees/minutes/seconds, so you need to translate that to decimal format (easy to do, use this tool: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/bickel/DDDMMSS-decimal.html) Oh yeah incidentally you’d probably want to submit each one of your neighborhood URL’s to geourl.org also.

  • on March 28th, 2003 02:31 AM Dav said:

    Oh by the way, I’d really suggest taking the time to set up a web form to handle submissions rather than plain email. A little work up front will save you a lot of work down the road. Since you already have the ability to run perl based cgi’s on your server (I’m typing into one now, heh) then it shouldn’t be too difficult…

  • on April 1st, 2003 06:12 PM Dav said:

    Hey check this out:
    seamless city.

  • on April 2nd, 2003 01:04 PM UltraBob said:

    Dav,

    Cool site, thanks for the link.  I am working on the form for photo submissions that you suggested I make now, and hope to have it up within the week.  Perl’s not really my strength so I’m doing it in PHP.

    I run my own server so I can run whatever I want on it as long as I can figure out how to do it, which I’m sure is a lot more of a limit for me than it is for you.

    I’ll let you know when I’ve got it up, and maybe you’ll have suggestions for how to make it better.

    Also, I hope that you have some photos you can contribute too.  You’re in S.F. as well right?  I love that town, if I went back to the states, that is high on the list of places I’d want to live.  Of course in the seemingly McCarthyist tone of America I don’t feel very inclined to move back there now.

    thanks again,

    UltraBob

  • on April 12th, 2003 08:11 AM chriskk said:

    The Seamless City project looks like fun. How about something similar except take shots from where you live or a certain start point and then goto the closest station.

  • on April 16th, 2003 07:38 PM vincentvds said:

    Hi UltraBob,

    About my neighborhood some photos here:
    [url=http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/woon3.html]http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/woon3.html[/url]
    [url=http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/woon4.html]http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/woon4.html[/url]
    [url=http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/woon5.html]http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/woon5.html[/url]
    and
    [url=http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/wie.html]http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/wie.html[/url]
    [url=http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/wie2.html]http://www.belgium.co.jp/vincentvds/wie2.html[/url]

    I live in Noge-cho, near Sakuragicho-eki in Yokohama. Noge is an old neighborhood with omiya’s, bars… Was a poor area. The contrast between this Noge and modern Waterfront Area Minato Mirai 21 is enormous. Nice old neighborhood, but I like also to escape once in a while to the nearby shopping malls and the seaside parks at MM21.

  • on April 20th, 2003 07:32 PM iM said:

    Zushi Rocks! I have been to Hayama twice. Each time I was amazed at the communication between neighbors. People actually spoke to each other! One guy remembered me from the visit I had made two years previous. One housewife would shout hello to me as I walked past her kitchen window. Absolutely wonderful place. Tokyo proper sucks.

    I need to move.

  • on November 4th, 2003 10:43 AM knight said:

    hi this pade is total crap nothing good and i was lookind for duo decimal system.