mySociety launches ScenicOrNot

Score - 9.5: Across Loch Ericht to Sron a Chlaonaidh (by Geoff White on Geograph)

Harry Metcalfe and co have been working for us recently to build a new mini-site, ScenicOrNot.

The goal of ScenicOrNot is to be a gentle-ambling sort of quasi game that’s just compelling enough to keep clicking on, just in case the next picture is the dream valley in which you wish to be buried.

mySociety’s obviously not in the business of building games for their own sake, though. This is another crowdsourcing experiment to solve a specific problem – we need a scenicness map of the UK for a major upcoming mySociety project, and there ain’t one to be had any other way, for love or money.

So if you like mySociety, or just want to ogle the best and worst of this Island, please have a play.

4 Comments

  1. You should have a rss/atom feed. Perhaps more than one …

    – top ten rated pics, purely from ratings in the last $period
    – ditto worst ten rated pics
    – perhaps another with “biggest standard deviation”, labelled as “most contentious” or similar perhaps?

  2. ScenicOrNot is fantastic fun – for a bit – but I can’t help feeling it’s all going into a black hole. We “gamers” need a little bit more feedback in return for populating your map data :). … At least: some stats on progress: how many 1km squares need to be covered; how many you’ve got enough votes on; total number of votes; how many different people have played; number of players over past 7 days / month etc. Could it become bigger than galaxyzoo.org?

  3. Sorry, but this is shite. The quality of the pictures is just very poor, so it is not comparing sites for their ‘scenic quality’, but merely the quality of the photographers. Sorry.

    There is ‘Wisdom of Crowds’, and there is just cheapo crowdsourcing. Perhaps next you will have a ‘hot or not’ for world religions and their various explanations for how we got here ?

    There needs to be a slightly more circumspect quality control over how tapping into ‘cyburbia’ can work, rather than just being swept up along in the ‘techno hype’..