Cities as Billboards

Posted by Smartspace on January 17th, 2007 - 10:01 am

traces.jpgThe train of thought that I started as I discussed Fabien Girardin's Flickr heatmaps a few posts back, and which led me to thinking about mining consumer line-of sight data to target advertising, seems to be continuing here in a recent New York Times article about how advertisers are now looking to use what they would consider "unsold" space to place their messages. This phenomenon even has a name, urban spam.

But why just post the same ad for everyone to see?   Why not use an individual viewer's line of sight as they travel as a "channel" into which to project ads and messages where blank space exists? Fabien's recent post, illustrated here,  shows the "traces" left by Flickr photographers as they transit  Barcelona. Where his heat maps showed the locations of single images, the traces follow the path the photographer takes through the city, or his visual corridor, if you will.

Original Source: Smartspace

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Smartspace is a new blog about annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes--the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit. This includes discussions, observations and insights on ubiquitous and embedded computing, mapping, location-based services and locative technologies, surveillance and tracking, geotagging, smart homes, intelligent environments, the annotated reality, and virtual worlds, where the increasingly intersect with the physical.