Flickr Mashup

Now that I've learned what a "mashup" actually is, I can review one. When searching for Libraries with mashups containing Flickr, I had some difficulty because I wasn't quite sure how to search for them. Regardless, I tried and I found a few promising results and selected one to try and look at. I don't know if this particular mashup has already been done, as I still can't access the course on WebCT, but at this point I have to post something.



The State Library of New South Wales Flickr and Google Street view "Then and Now" Mashup.

Hagon, Paul (2008). Flickr and Google street view mashup: State Library of New South Wales. Viewed 27 Oct 2010. <>

Having never before reviewed a flickr mashup, I find myself at a loss to really say what is and isn't good about them. In the case of this particular mashup, it has great potential as a tool for historic learning and it is such a pity that this project seems to have been neglected. I am put in mind of a series of "then and now" pictures published by the Mercury of locations around Hobart some years ago and I remember being amazed at what had changed and what had stayed the same. This mashup does the same thing, but uses Street view for it's "now" shots so that as Street view is updated, the mashup remains recent.

An issue that I had with this mashup, which might also explain why it seems so neglected is that it doesn't appear to be managed by the State Library of NSW, but was created by Paul Hagon, who is a Web Designer for the National Library of Australia. This is not bad in itself, but it means that the mashup relies on other users to tag locations and that it doesn't have very much advertising. I looked on the State Library of NSW website and I couldn't find any link to this mashup.

Using the mashup is simple if you've ever used Google Maps or Street view before. On one side of your screen is a map of NSW, on the other side is the street view window; tags on the map can be clicked and show up the street view in one window and provide a small picture taken at the same location at some point in the distant past.

As I mentioned before, the number of pictures in this mashup appears to be quite small and I would have liked to have seen more photos of buildings and events being geotagged. The pictures themselves display with a brief explanation of the event or location, which I found to be interesting and better than simply displaying photos with no context.

- piff