Victoria Highway, Gregory, Australia

I love this. Artist Jon Rafman has mined the depths of Google’s Street View project and found some gems. Street View, of course, is Google’s effort beginning in 2007 to photograph the streets and storefronts of the world as part of its Google Maps direction finding service. Rafman’s project website has 3 pdf volumes comprising his Street View curation. Others have done this before, and at least one crime has been solved using Google Street View, but this is the first effort I’ve seen culling out (or attempting to cull out) interesting photography.

(via waxy.org)

Patch - a local journalism startup funded by Google exec Tim Armstrong

This is an interesting development. Tim Armstrong, Google’s advertising executive, has put his personal investment fund behind a startup called Patch, which aims to create small teams of journalists producing local news in communities all over the US. Right now, the company has 3 Patches deployed, in South Orange, Maplewood, and Millburn, New Jersey. The pictures aren’t great, but it’s great to hear about innovation in journalism. From the about page:

We’re a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.

We want to make your life better by giving you quick access to the information that’s most relevant to you. Patch makes it easy to:

• Keep up with news and events
• Look at photos and videos from around town
• Learn about local businesses
• Participate in discussions
• Submit your own announcements, photos, and reviews

Looking at Patch’s main staff, it’s mostly engineers and advertising people behind the scenes, which makes sense. Leave the journalists to do the reporting…

Hard to say where this will go, and I’m especially curious to see what sort of copyright arrangements will be reached between contributors and Patch.

(via Valleywag)

If you’ve logged into google recently perhaps you noticed a new set of buttons next to the search results, and then were confused like me. Luckily Swissmiss (who came recommended by WTJ) thought her confusion aloud and her commentators had some informative responses: “question for my readers: google results remove+promote”.

You’ve probably read the news on APE or PDNPulse or elsewhere…Life magazine’s vast photography archive is making its way online with the help of Google. I posted about Life’s digital foray before, but that page remains the same. PDN’s behind-the-scenes article suggests that Life has more up it’s sleeve planned for the Life.com domain. Only 20 percent of the archive is online at the moment, and the remaining 8 million or so mostly-unpublished pictures will be made available in the coming months, according to Google’s blog.

The PDN article, too, delves into some the financial questions behind the site. Time Inc., who are the owners of the Life empire, and Getty hope the portal will drive traffic to the soon to be released Life magazine site and also offer print sales to the general public through print-on-demand service Qoop.com. Hard to say how all of the contracts over the years will affect the final form of the collection, and one wonders whether photographers or their estates are receiving proceeds from the venture (if any proceeds are due). Commenters on APhotoEditor.com’s thread about the endeavor have been wondering whether more business-savvy photographers in the 80s and 90s, who likely didn’t sign work for hire agreements, will be in the collection or not. Interestingly, PDN’s article suggests that the Life archive will not go after bloggers’ and other personal use of the photos.

I’ve also seen comments online wondering why the collection wasn’t incorporated into the vast Flickr Commons (home to the Library of Congress’ huge archive, among others’) project or at least use Flickr’s engine for community annotation and tagging. Presumably, a great deal of the Life archive remains under copyright and, as such, wouldn’t fit into the Flickr Commons model.

Wish I had more time to sift through the Life archive, but in the meantime, here’s W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor and Spanish Village essays, a strange photo of a bowling alley and archery range, covered wagons used in World War I, Salvador Dali, a running surfer, and a dual cigarette holder for lovers.