First Friday: by day, by night

A bit belated, I figured I should post a small project I finished last week for my Digital Media Entrepreneurship class — a geotagged map of the monthly First Fridays art walk in downtown Phoenix.


View First Fridays: by day, by night in a larger map

The rationale behind this assignment was to have us experiment with the new potentials of tagging, the act of labeling or categorizing content online. Dan Gillmor, one of the two professors for my course, believes online tagging could revolutionize the Internet. It has disrupted the traditional taxonomy of content organization — he calls the new system a "folksonomy" in reference to its origin through crowds of people from the bottom-up — opening up new possibilities for arranging and finding content. Geotagging represents just one unconventional form of tagging information.

First Friday has become a main-stay of journalism projects for Cronkite School students — it's a really easy subject to cover and provides fairly engaging content — so I had to come up with a slightly different angle. While going through my photo library, I found a bunch of daytime images from the downtown area that I shot when I first bought my newest camera (a Canon Rebel XSi). So, using Google Maps, I paired shots from the day with shots of the art walk to illustrate how spaces change every first Friday of the month.