Date Archives December 2012

Instagramming More than a Flyover

I’m working with some folks now who are contemplating from afar a move to Charlottesville. Years ago, I would go out and take pictures of their As part of their process, they’re doing “flyovers” in Google and Bing to get a better sense of the area (as many buyers are wont to do). But … these respective Street Views don’t offer the flavor of an area … But Instagram does.

Check out “The Beat, a new project from the Rutgers Social Media Information Lab” … better yet, see if you can get a sense of Charlottesville from The Beat.

As the commenter at The Atlantic says, if the geolocation of the Instagram photos gets more accurate, this would be truly, truly useful.

Update 6 December 2012: This post is already outdated, as I suspect that Instagram will be less useful now that Instagram (Facebook) have decided to “prevent its images from showing properly on Twitter’s website and clients” – as I said on G+, The silo-ing of social media is distressing. and leads me to invest less and less in these channels. I so wish Flickr hadn’t failed on mobile so miserably.

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Charlottesville (City) Investing Less in Infrastructure

Graham Moomaw reports at the Daily Progress:

As the city of Charlottesville bumps up against its debt limit, the amount of money officials are allocating for infrastructure needs has dropped sharply.
According to a draft of next year’s capital budget, officials plan to allocate just $1 million for new projects out of a total of $5 million in new requests from city departments.

I remember something about a surplus in Charlottesville.

Maybe they haven’t heard that America’s infrastructure is crumbling and failing.

Maybe Charlottesville could partner with Albemarle, the University of Virginia and other regional partners and Blue Ridge Internetworks and put in fiber. Everywhere. (it’s working in Kansas City)

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