Posts Tagged ‘crowdsourcing’
ScenicOrNot: want to play with the data? 26th Jun 09
mySociety have added a data dump to ScenicOrNot, the site we built for them a couple of months ago. It’s got the photos and all the votes for each of the 181,300 places that have received 3 or more votes since the site launched.
If you’re one of the many people who had something to say about the voting system that ScenicOrNot uses, we hope you might have some fun playing with the raw data! If you do make something, let us know how you get on…
ScenicOrNot’s Secret Project… 1st Jun 09
Isn’t secret anymore!
MySociety have just taken the wraps off Mapumental, which is a terribly clever mapping application to help you figure out where you want to live if you have a commute (and probable more besides that). We and MySociety teamed up to build ScenicOrNot, which has produced the dataset that Mapumental consults when you move the scenicness slider.
They’ve produced a video to show the site, currently in private beta, in action:
Mapumental is really quite impressive — a significant technical accomplishment as well as very useful — so significant kudos are due to mySociety. Nicely done!
ScenicOrNot’s on BBC News 27th Apr 09
Just a quickie post — ScenicOrNot, a project we recently completed for MySociety, has been featured in BBC News Online’s Technology section.
Predictably, there’s been a big jump in player numbers. We just zoomed past 3000 players, 260,000 votes and over 50,000 places rated. Thanks Auntie!
ScenicOrNot: finding Great Britain’s pretty places 16th Apr 09
Last week, we finished a new project. MySociety commissioned us to produce ScenicOrNot. They want to create a “database of scenicness”: something that identifies pretty places and their locations. They came to us with the idea for the site, and we put it together for them over a couple of weeks.
The idea behind ScenicOrNot is simple: it’s a game, very much akin to HotOrNot, which asks users to give photographs of places a score out of 10. There’s a photo on the site for nearly every 1km grid square of the UK, so eventually, we’ll have a dataset that we can use to give every bit of Great Britain an average score for prettiness. MySociety have a very cool plan for it, and they’ll release the data as soon as it’s useful so that other people can get cracking with their cool ideas, too.
The site is fun, easy and hopefully a little bit addictive: just the right prerequisites for a site that’s croudsourcing a new dataset. If we’ve done it right, rating pictures shouldn’t feel remotely like hard work, and by the progress we’ve seen so far — 109,000 votes cast and 10% of the country rated in just under a week — it’s not going too badly.
Please do check out the site and, as always, tell us what you think about it.