13,500 people sing “Hey Jude” at Trafalgar Square


If you thought 100 random people singing the Sound of Music in Antwerp was a bit wacky, picture 13,500 people singing Hey Jude in the heart of London.

This was another stunt by T-Mobile in the UK who previously got 17,000 people to show up at Liverpool street station. None of the people there actually knew why they were there – it was all thanks to the “power” of social networks that everyone managed to show up at the right place, and the right time. And I don’t know about you, but I’m really digging the feel good atmosphere the whole event seems to have created there.

Geotagging cameras create accidental maps

One could easily spend hours browsing images on social photo-sharing sites like Flickr. From time to time I find myself on the site’s “interestingness” page, endlessly hitting the reload button and marvelling at all the beautiful photography. But one unintended consequence of all these photos has nothing to do with what they look like – it’s all the information like tags, camera type and location that’s created along with the images.

All that information has even allowed researchers to create virtual maps of the world’s most-photographed landmarks and places. According to the New Scientist, investigators at Cornell University have been analyzing the geotagged information automatically recorded by many new cameras when they take a picture. All the information has led to some interesting insight into what visitors find most interesting.

The top spots? New York tops the list as the world’s most photographed city. London however has the most photographed landmarks – sites like Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, the London Eye and the Tate Modern art gallery all top the landmark list. Coming in at fifth place? New York’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store.

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Picture London without the people

If you’ve ever had a chance to visit London, you know what a hive of activity the city can be. Huge red double decker buses rumble past your field of view, pedestrians stroll through Trafalgar Square and the pontificators mass at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park.

Perhaps it’s a surprise then to see photos of these places, completely devoid of any human being. That’s exactly what Flickr user IanVisits has done in his recent photo project titled “Abandoned London.” Ian had the opportunity recently to capture images of London at its most desolate. On Christmas morning, as many Londoners remained curled up in bed or at home opening their holiday presents, Ian was riding his bike through the empty streets, capturing these eerie street scenes, frozen in time.

The normally bustling stairs in front of the National Gallery sit vacant, strangely forlorn. The pulsing neon of Picadilly Circus is dark, the advertisements yelling their goods to nothing but empty air. Hungerford Bridge anxiously awaits the stirrings of foot traffic.

Despite the absence of any Londoners, each image in Ian’s Abandoned London set seems to create its own sense of personality. It raises an interesting question – is a city defined by its people? Or is it an entity of its own, breathing, sleeping and existing as if it was alive? In any case, if you’re looking for a unique view of London you’ve probably never seen, make sure to check out his gallery.

Many thanks to Ian Mansfield for letting us use his photos!

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Text messages on London’s Trafalgar Square go up in smoke

Are you bored with just plain text messaging?

In London, it seems that plenty are. Recently an experimental architecture and design firm called Minimaforms unveiled a new communication model inspired by smoke signals, according to the blog PSFK.

It’s called Memory Cloud, and it is dubbing itself a “media art project.” How it works is that you send an SMS to a certain number, which then somehow translates your message into artificially created smoke.

PSFK quotes the artists behind Memory Cloud explaining the project, which strikes the same kind of vague chord that most types of participatory art seems to these days.

“Memory Cloud creates a dynamic hybrid space that will project personal statements as part of an evolving text, animating the built environment through conversation. The method of textual inscription works with light as virtual ink that perceptually writes and erases through a cinematic interplay with the external environment. Memory Cloud aims to motivate social interaction through the construction of an environment that is given form through a collective act of writing space.”

So, if you want your messages read by strangers walking through Trafalgar Square, this could be for you one day.

You can see some of the messages that Memory Cloud captured during its Oct. 8-10 unveiling at Minimaforms’ Web site.