Pictures of Rita

Hurricane Rita hurled clouds across much of the central US today as it weakened into a tropical storm, then a depression. Where I was in northeastern Oklahoma (marked on the Google Earth image at right with a pin placemark) the cloud cover provided a spectacular, fiery sunset (see bottom picture). Click on either picture to enlarge or leave comments in my Flickr photostream (subscribe via RSS or Atom).

Additional pictures and video of Rita continued pouring in from around the Web:

• Flickr photos tagged with “hurricanerita”
• Yahoo coverage including Y! editors’ favorite photos from Flickr and a Hurricane Rita slideshow
• Accuweather video reports from the field
• Google News “Hurricane Rita” search
• Wikimedia Commons resources
• Weather.com provides some additional information and video

This has started me thinking about better ways to represent geolocation where a photo is taken or video is recorded both in the metadata of the picture or movie file and also on the Web and in 3D applications such as Google Earth. I’m going to delve into the possibilities of geoblogging future photos via Flickr.

And that reminds me, somebody really needs to start selling a high end consumer camera with integrated GPS so that pictures can be automatically “location stamped” just as they are already date stamped. Another blog entry for another time, I suppose.