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.

Finding myself online

Can you find me on this page? (Roosevelt Row's First Friday website.)

(Hint: Check for the profile of a handsome young man interviewing a vendor in the page banner.)It's strange to find yourself on the Web. This is far from the first time I've stumbled upon my likeness or my work, completely unaware of their existence on the tubes and circuits of others.
As a journalist for the AZ Republic and State Press, I've discovered many aggregating blogs that will copy, paste entire stories from their original source. The ones I've seen always credit me and the publication, but it's still strange to find yourself being quoted on a site you know nothing about.

The quickest way I've found to find people using your work is to set up a Google Alert. Google will search the Web for a phrase you enter — in this case, my name — and send you e-mail alerts when it encounters them. My unique name helps narrow things down and avoid getting too many junk reports. Of course, this doesn't work for photos. The Roosevelt Row catch was simply good luck.