Worldwide Mouse Release Program

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Little Storping-in-the-Swuff => Mouse Update

Simon over at Little Storping-in-the-Swuff has recently been grappling with a mouse invasion.

It looks like the problem has been solved, but his latest update on the progress has given me a terrific idea.

To explain that idea, I’m going to have to take a trip around the subject for a while. Please bear with me for a few minutes.

For some time now, people have been using photo sharing sites like flickr. Flickr allows you to “tag” your photos with user defined… um… tags, that allow you to classify your photos. For example, I tag all my Taiwan photos with a “Taiwan” tag, and often tag them further with the name of the city, whether or not it has my “family”, “animals”, “costco” or “pizza” in it.

This allows people to search flickr by those tags and find related photos of interest to them. (My guess is “nude”, “naked”, “breasts” and “female” will be the most searched for tags on flickr, but I might be being cynical.)

Arising from that was the phenomena of “geotagging”. Posters would include a tag of “Geotag” on their flickr photos, and a tag of the GPS coordinates.

This week, flickr took that quaint hobby one step further by officially introducing a geotag mechanism imbedded in their database.

You can now take your flickr photos and, using a built-in interface to Yahoo! maps (nothing’s perfect), drag the photos onto the location you took them and they are entered into flick’s geotag database. Others can now go to a map of an area they are interested in, and browse photos taken at or near that spot.

Flickr introduced this facility earlier in the week, and within 24 hours had 1.2 million geotagged photos.

The interface needs a lot of work, but it can be fun browsing an area you know and looking at other peoples’ pictures.

When mice are captured humanely – that is, captured and released, rather than captured and drowned, you’re supposed to take them more than 2 miles away or they’ll just come back. (OK, I don’t actually buy that mice act as homing pigeons, by why risk it?)

So, this brings me back to my idea.

Simon’s recent capture update was accompanied by links to Google maps indicating the rough area the mice were released in.

I propose the following:

  • People releasing mice should take a picture of the mouse at the point of release.
  • Post said photo to flickr
  • Enter the photo into the geotag database
  • include the following tags “Mouse” “Mouse Release Program”

The practical upstart of this is that if you happen to be looking for a mouse to adopt, you can check your area and find if any previously domestic mice have been released in your area. With a little luck you can find them and give them a good home.

I can see a couple possible unintended consequences to this idea, though.

For example, what if you found a mouse in your home and were able to identify that it had been released by someone else in your area. Could you take legal action against them?

Or, perhaps you don’t like mice, could you use the database to locate released mice and kill them? Perhaps even posting pictures of the kills in the geotagged database?

I can envision all sorts of new games that can be devised using geotagged flickr.

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6 thoughts on “Worldwide Mouse Release Program”

  1. I love this idea. Far more sophisticated than a simply setting up “mousecrossing.com”.

    However, I’m a bit alarmed at the thought that this might create a “boomerang” effect: Person A captures and tags a mouse, then releases it at some distance from their house. Said mouse then finds a new food source at its new location, the owner of which (Person B) looks up flickr, determines the mouse’s origin (or at least its previous location) and returns the mouse to the locale of Person A. That’s assuming that Person B doesn’t become so enraged at Person A that they do something far more dispicable instead.

    I should emphasise that all the mices originating from my flat are being deposited in rural locations with no (visible) nearby houses.

    I can see the geotagged-mouse hunting thing being more popular perhaps as an alternative to banned/soon-to-be-banned activities like fox hunting or street wars?

    Anyway, geotagging is a brilliant idea (agree it’s a shame about Yahoo, but maybe some Google/Picassa thing will follow?)

  2. I love this idea. Far more sophisticated than a simply setting up “mousecrossing.com”.

    However, I’m a bit alarmed at the thought that this might create a “boomerang” effect: Person A captures and tags a mouse, then releases it at some distance from their house. Said mouse then finds a new food source at its new location, the owner of which (Person B) looks up flickr, determines the mouse’s origin (or at least its previous location) and returns the mouse to the locale of Person A. That’s assuming that Person B doesn’t become so enraged at Person A that they do something far more dispicable instead.

    I should emphasise that all the mices originating from my flat are being deposited in rural locations with no (visible) nearby houses.

    I can see the geotagged-mouse hunting thing being more popular perhaps as an alternative to banned/soon-to-be-banned activities like fox hunting or street wars?

    Anyway, geotagging is a brilliant idea (agree it’s a shame about Yahoo, but maybe some Google/Picassa thing will follow?)

  3. I’ve got thousands of photos on flickr, I’d HATE to try to move those over to Picassa. Hopefully, flickr will just keep improving. It has only been available about a week… I can hardly be surprised by a few shortcomings at this early stage of the game.

    Speaking of games, that actually gives me another idea. How about just hunting? Kind of like African photo safaris.

    You go out somewhere with your camera, telephoto lens and GPS and hunt down wild animals, then post the picture into the geotagged database. That could be more fun than geocaching.

  4. Pingback: Little Storping-in-the-Swuff » Mouse Update 2

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