Lifehacker.com writes about Yahoo’s Purple Pedals campaign, part of their “Start Wearing Purple” campaign. I haven’t dug into it enough to see what’s the point of the larger campaign (but I’m considering mothballing all my own purple clothes for the duration — just to be sure there’s no suggestion that I’d “start wearing purple” at some corporation’s behest).
What it is: Purple bikes around the world with Nokia 95 GPS-enabled cameraphones and software that takes a picture every 60 seconds and uploads it to the bike’s Flickr account. Lifehacker’s explanation is much more straightforward than Yahoo’s videos.
All the Flickr images from the different bikes seem to be tagged “ybike.” Seems to be the only way to find the collection of bikes. Oddly, the images are dated but the only place to find the time is in the camera’s exif data.
Flickr HQ
The ones I looked at from Flickr HQ’s bike (which I found by randomly looking at images tagged ybike) had been viewed little or not at all. But then the most recent photos seem to be from the bike just sitting in an empty office. Mroth, where are you? Wander in front of the bike and wave, will you?
Maybe the timer needs to be linked to a sensor so it only snaps when the bike is in motion?
UPDATE 9/18: Oh, rats, they went and deleted all the empty office pics. Not in keeping with the image of the Flickr staff as working night and day to improve the Flickr experience for their users?
2 responses so far ↓
Matthew Rothenberg // September 16, 2008 at 6:10 pm |
I crashed the bike, so I’m staying far away from it for now.
Although here’s a typical photo of the bike being used in our office:
http://flickr.com/photos/judemat/2830326647/
Matthew Rothenberg // September 17, 2008 at 9:17 am |
Forgot to mention, but in theory it does only take photos while in motion, but it seems to be too sensitive currently since everytime the bike gets lightly bumped into by someone, it will start a cycle and take a dozen photos or so.