Charlie Maffitt

My vote for the current most underrated web trick goes to Flickr's map feature, which uses Yahoo Maps' API to allow you to place all your photos on a map. Maybe it's because a few years in landscape architecture school taught me to think very spatially, but I have always been a little fascinated by maps and one's position in space.

Anyway, adding geotags to photos on Flickr lets you do some neat things, such as viewing a satellite map of where all your photos were taken (see below). As you can see, my recent photographic travel patterns seem to make an arc tracing the Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina down to Georgia and over to the South Carolina Coast.

You can also pick a certain spot in the world, be it your house, the Statue of Liberty, or the Kremlin, and view any photos taken by Flickr members at that place. I found some cool photos taken near my house by other flickr members, such as this photo of a train in the snow (it never snows in Athens):