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Nebraska: Where it Happened

I was looking at this Flickr photo by a Twitter colleague of mine named Michael Peterson. He’s often posting photos of locations that played a significant role in Nebraska’s history. Official historical markers, ghost towns, the remnants of churches, hospitals, barns and places all around us that are about to disappear all together.

It got me thinking about 4th grade Nebraska History units, and people around the state who are proud of their heritage, and people who are passionate about photography, and the ever growing number of geo-taggers and the amazing web based tools that we have at our disposal in 2010. How can we focus all of these things into a single, incredibly informative and highly entertaining package?

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a website that had elements of the following all combined in one spot:

  • A database that correlated Nebraska photos with geo-data
  • A beautiful (minimalistic) web interface that allowed you to view the photos by map view, or list view by county or region
  • A web interface that allows people to contribute (moderated) 1st person narratives or content
  • A mobile interface that allowed you to easily view the contents and/or contribute new data while in the field (+ iPhone/Android apps)

A person would not have to start completely from scratch, many ingredients/resources/models are already out there.

So anyway – I had this idea, and I do not presume that it is a unique one, but I know that I don’t have the requisite skills or the time necessary to pull it all off in the way it exists in my head. I’m throwing it out to the wind in the hopes that some folks out there might be able to pull off the creation of a site like this if a lot of people pitched in. Crowd-sourcing and all that.
And if nothing ever comes of it, I have a great list of resource links for the 4th grade teachers in Nebraska to use in their Nebraska History units.

Posted in My Thoughts.