Obama Inauguration | Space and Time

Obama election and consequent take over as President of the US are among the top historic moments of the young century and certainly the biggest of 2009 – hope it is only surpass by something even greater, not crises or war, or both -. So, his inauguration was a key point and something to remember for a long long long time.
It made Internet streaming records, mass live viewing on whole world and a lot of excitement – shared also by me, of course..

Along the work and experiments that I’ve been doing with Flickr photos over Google maps, I thought it might be a good idea to try, somehow, to capture that day: Obama Inauguration day!What I’ve came up with was as application that has two fundamental views: Space and Time.

I gather every photo from that entire day, within a 1.6 km (about 1 mile) of the center of the action in WASHINGTON (ok, there is a limit of 2000 photos, but at this time, there aren’t that much photos). That should be the most important action area of this history event. Then, I try to present that information (that is massive) so anyone not present can understand the excitement, happiness and hope that Obama election and inauguration was.

On the first dimension – Space – all photos are cluster on a very simple algorithm and on each cluster, it’s presented the five most interesting photos and a star in the cluster geo position. The star size is equal to the important – this means, the number of photos – of that spot/area.Clicking a cluster will display those top photos on the bottom in a bigger format. To see a photo, just click on them.

On – Time – I also cluster the photos over time with a similar simple algorithm. They are presented in an animation fashion, flashing a light on the place EACH photo was taken with the correct sequence of the time they were taken.This will appear – I hope – like you were really were there on a balloon seeing the photos flash in fast motion.On the bottom, a slide show appear with a time line (so you know the cluster time and duration) and the main/most interesting photos of that small period of time.

But it is always better to see for yourself:

I would appreciate a lot any comments, feedback or your thoughts over this experiment on this historic day: Obama Inauguration!

Hope Obama can transform even just a little part of the hope we gave people to actions and great consequences. He just seems to be very bright and have a great deal of good sense and rational thought, so all points to a the best direction.