Bizarre and perilous bridges

Glad to know there are more people out there who have a fascination with old bridges. Here is WebUrbanist's 68 of the world's most bizarre and perilous bridges Some I've seen before, but I'm so impressed with El Camino Del Ray!

El Chorro. Camino Del Rey (link straight to the YouTube video) this bridge is crazy dangerous. Would you be brave enough, or perhaps stupid enough, to cross El Camino Del Ray? Translated, it means The King’s Pathway. It is in total disrepair and is a death trap in Spain. About 700 feet up along the El Chorro gorge, the narrow path is three feet wide in places where it’s not crumbled away. There are hardly any handrails. Can you imagine crossing this, nevertheless filming it as you go? It would either be insane, or insanely fun. But amazed at the number of people on the walk with the photographer, people wearing packs which would add another dimension to balancing.
Have the shouted catch-cry “don’t go too near the edge” reverberating through my head.

Wintery blast

How cold, wet and windy has it been lately?

So bad that my rain gauge blew down.

But still better than in Estonia, as these photos atest!

Lost cities

Ahhh, another WebUrbanist Abandonment, this one is '8 cities that may end up abandoned'.

Guessing this is a sign of the times we're experiencing in the current political and economic down turns.

The gigantic Waiting Room

The first is Detroit - the motor city, the area has suffered decades of industrial loss (between 1970 and 1980, Detroit shed 208,000 jobs). The post has some great photos of that glorious building the Michigan Central Station

Check out the photographer Shane Gorski's set on Flickr, for some atmospheric shots.

The Offices floor

Other cities featured are St. Louis in Missouri, Youngstown in Ohio, Leipzig and Wittenberge in the former East Germany, Ivanovo in the Russian Federation, Kashgar in western China where the authorities are destroying the thousand-year-old old quarter deemed a safety hazard and eyesore.
And finally, the most famous declining city of them all. Venice is indisputably one of the loveliest cities in the world - all the more so because it’s disappearing under the waves.

Long-term parking

In 1977 a design firm created the Ghost Parking Lot Project in a shopping plaza in Hamden, Connecticut, by covering a row of a dozen cars in asphalt. While this Pompeii-like parade may have been a state-of-the-art in 1978, it has since decayed into a crusty eyesore. By 2003 the Ghost Parking Lot had deteriorated to a decrepit state, eroded by the weather and ravaged by the wheels of countless skateboards.

Stick Shed on the Net

I came across Leigh Hammerton's passionate site for the Stick Shed the other day at Mighty Murtoa Stick Shed
He has some great photos there, including one from up on the upper conveyor, and facts & info on the shed, bits I didn't know like -'the roofline is sloped to the same angle a pile of wheat forms naturally'

Wednesday nights in

So, the ABC are replacing The Chaser with the second series of The Librarians (they’re also re-running the first series on ABC2 for those capitalists who have digital tv).
I like their promo “Frances O’Brien is back in the library. Melvil Dewey is turning in his grave…”


Could they have again obtained some anecdotes locally from the wearing lanyards, to using a fit ball?
And there are some new characters including Vince Colosimo as the Head of the Library Association, and Hamish as a news journo.


The advert had a shot of the Mobile Library which is recognisable as Yarra Plenty’s (talk about product placement). Had we known, could have off-loaded our vehicle for the filming - what a way to get a new one!

#69 Feed my Inbox

This is another form of RSS - Really Simple Syndication, instead of using a web-based RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines. With Feed My Inbox you input the feed address/URL and your email address, get an email to confirm, then just wait till your site has some activity and you get an email informing you.
Discovery Exercise: was to set one up, wait for a new feed and discuss the content, how it was arraigned and were there links to follow?
I chose Pixdaus' "Popular Today Pics" and got a list of 29 photos appearing in my Inbox. I really prefer to continue with Bloglines to track the sites I'm already following, as I get enough emails as it is, but I feel that, provided I go off and make a cup of coffee while it is downloading, I get to see the new photos in one list instead of groups of ten, so it suits this application.


This very Mists of Avalon photo was one of those downloaded, decidedly Arthurian.

Beautiful bridges

 So I'm not alone.
There are other people out there in the Net-world who take an interest in photographing bridges.
Here is the link to the Top 20 most popular bridges in the world
(By the way, the Sydney Harbour Bridge makes it at Number 3).

#68 Filtering Flickr

Flickr has become a great resource for finding images on the web, sharing and tagging photos is one of the killer applications of web 2.0. Flickr can also be rather overwhelming when searching for that one right photo amidst some crap which doesn't appear to have any relevance to the tags you're searching on. This is one of the reasons I now prefer PixDaus.

There are two sites that effectively and visually blow your mind when searching: FlickrCC and TagGalaxy are two ways to graphically search flickr.

FlickrCC uses a keyword search to bring up a window of pictures tagged with that search tag. Clicking on each picture gets you the proper attribution link, editing link and different sizes to move directly into your presentations and websites. All of the images are copyright with Creative Commons licensing, which encourages sharing.

flickrCC search for "flowers" - check out the cupcakes!

Tag Galaxy lets you visually search Flickr. I love relationship clouds for drilling down or moving laterally (it's just cool playing at spinning/tilting the globe).

TagGalaxy search

The Discovery exercise requires you to write about your experience with both resources, exploring both sites by searching for the same keywords on each site. I searched for my stock term lighthouses initially but it returned too many photos to really compare the two sites.

Heceta Lighthouse with clouds and fog. Devil's Elbow State Park, Oregon.

Did you find similar or different results? Which method of browsing pictures worked better for you? Did the images you find match your expectations?
I then did a "Horsham" search on both, with some different results, flickrCC seemed to throw up more "irrelevant" hits, think I prefer Galaxy as it tells you how many hits/matches it found, but flickrCC's thumbnails look clearer. I belive both are a step up from searching flickr directly.

The 'other' Horsham in a snowy frost