Andy Cush highlights a fascinating project called Geolocation:
Photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman use Twitter as a location scout for their haunting, beautiful images. The two artists scan the social network for tweets with location information embedded but no picture, head to those locations to shoot, then caption each photograph with the tweet’s original text. If the photographs weren’t so good, the concept might come off as gimmicky. But in the hands of Larson and Shindelman, it is anything but–their images, always free of people, capture the loneliness and dread that underscores much of our online communication.
Jakob Schiller zooms out:
Last fall, Twitter reported that the service now handles half a billion messages a day. Facebook has more than a billion active users each month and in August, Instagram reported that it had 7.3 million daily active mobile users (surpassing Twitter). Instead of being overwhelmed, Larson and Shindelman see this vast expanse as a gold mine of sorts. For them it’s an under-tapped sociological resource that they’ve been mining for years to see what it can tell us about ourselves and our habits.
The Dish 