I decided to try out a couple of 3rd party apps for the iPhone that have to do with taking photos. The ability to glean the location of the phone and the fact that it has a built in camera makes it the perfect candidate for easy geotagged photos. I previewed a few apps. One of them was iFlickr, which provides the user with the ability of shooting the photo up to the user’s Flickr account as soon as it is taken. This was the only one I could find with this feature, but I was still pretty excited. I was a little disappointed to find out that no Exif data was actually saved (so no date or time info, no camera data, etc.), but I thought it would still be great. Well, it was pretty interesting, although the photo I first took in my apartment was about 5 blocks off, moreso a discrepancy that you would get using the iPhone Maps application.
Then a strange thing happened. I took a photo at work using iFlickr, and I discovered a mysterious place in cyberspace that to my knowledge was never disclosed by William Gibson. This place is a field outside of rural Lebanon, Kansas, known by some on Google as the Cowboy Stencil Capital of the Universe. In the 2000 census, this small rural town had a population of 300. It is also apparently known as a community suffering from rural flight as documented in a 2006 New York Times article. However, to date, 836 photos have been geotagged to a field about a mile and a half to the northwest of the town center, 3 or more photos probably for each of the remaining citizens of Lebanon. Ostensibly, this is some bug in the iFlickr code where the app gets confused and default to this quaint locale, or, perhaps it is a little joke by the creator of the app. I would like to think that there is some more profound reason, and that this could be a William Gibson plot unfolding before our eyes. Regardless, this is an interesting spacial meta-tagging glitch – when you view my photo on the map, it looks as though tall buildings have sprouted from a field…