I spotted this kid dancing for the Bing Streetside car, which he evidently recognized as it drove past on 20th Avenue in Astoria. It’s not the wackiest photo of its kind but kind of amusing.
Streetside Goofs
Streetside has come a long way since I last looked at it, in some ways beating Google’s Streetview for recency and coverage. What Google has that Streetside most likely does not is access to its archives, which include grainy, sometimes ghostly images of streetscapes from as early as 2007. Streetside also differs from Google’s Streetview in its relatively cavalier handling of people’s faces. That is to say that Streetview more aggressively blurs out faces while Streetside, as seen in this capture, leaves its human content pretty much recognizable. In this case maybe the choice was deliberate considering the kid’s exhibitionist nature. Maybe the drivers noticed his behaviour and made a note of where it happened, specifically disabling face blur at that spot.
I’ve been poking around both Streetside and Streetview this week, having fun cleaning up the data at NYCPAYPHONES.COM, a New York City Payphone Locator. It’s a new site which draws on data from New York City’s dataset of Public Pay Telephone Locations. I do not know for certain but I may have played a small part in getting that data released back in 2012. I submitted a request for its publication soon after Sandy and the city responded quite promptly. The events of Sandy and the brief return of payphones to mainstream attention which resulted from downed cell phone signals might have made someone at DoITT reëvaluate the importance of having working public telephones during natural disasters. Knowing where public telephones are located is not an everyday concern for very many people but it seems like a reasonable bit of information to have in your go bag. An earlier identical request from me some months earlier was wholly ignored but I guess Sandy changed that.
