Despite the fact that cameras are ubiquitous, we're still doing a terrible job capturing the photographic/video history of the world around us: While there's probably over a million photos of every single animal at the zoo (sidenote: zoos should have a professional photographer that goes around each day taking a photo of every animal. Each of the tens of thousands of visitors can stick their memory card into a kiosk, downloading all of the day's pictures, saving themselves the trouble of trying to get "personal" photos of animals doing nothing, clouded by scratched and spit on lexan), I doubt the street in front of the zoo is archived in any reasonable form at all.

Construction happens, disaster happens, time happens, and the world changes. Soon you're wishing you could demonstrate how that area that used to be farmland is now a cityscape, or how different the corner looked before the hurricane, and so on, all while wondering why you have a photo journal packed full of shoddy pictures of every zoo animal.

We're closer to this dream now that GPS-driven geocoding is starting to appear in a small number of products, coupled with utilities and web applications allow you to manually Geocode photos (the former is enormously more useful than the latter. People just aren't good at manual processes when their buy-in is marginal, especially highly precise applications like longitude/latitude). This is useful in that sites like Flickr are now allowing you to search and view pictures by geographic location, so there might come a future point when every street corner is covered. I wrote about my wish for this a year ago.

Now we need to do the same thing with video.

While the individual frames of video are lower in quality and resolution than a good quality digital camera, it does have the benefit of many, many frames, making it much more likely that a subject of interest will be caught.

It would be interesting to have a site where users can contribute "street videos" - A video tour down blocks and streets, categorized by time taken, direction, speed, and of course street (preferably segmented out by blocks). You could make a "trip" by combining the videos of many people. As years pass you'd be able to contrast videos years or decades apart.

There are plenty of practical uses as well: Most days I drive through a complex interchange (sometimes called "the junction") here in the GTA. It's a poorly laid out set of split-offs requiring last second lane changes for people who aren't accustomed to it, and every day (every couple of seconds, actually) some touristy sort slows to 20km/h while they try to come to grips with all of the signs, causing traffic chaos for thousands. It'd be nice if they could do a "trial run" through the interchanges video video clips.

I don't have the time or the inclination to make such a site, so there you go: A free idea! Then again, don't people claim that ideas have no value ayways?