Yesterday we launched our new city pages.

We’ve had city pages as collections of information and tips for Dopplr users for over a year, and now we’re made those pages public to the internet: the first stage in creating what we’re calling a “Social Atlas” internally.

A few weeks ago we mailed everyone who had contributed a tip to Dopplr and asked if they would prefer to keep what they had posted private to only Dopplr members, and we’re happy to say no-one chose to – so the collective intelligence of Dopplr is available to everyone on the web to help them travel smarter.

Of course, this works both ways, and we hope of course that more people find Dopplr this way and choose to participate to make our social atlas more comprehensive.

Here’s an example of our new public tips pages: tips tagged “breakfast” in San Francisco:

From which I can find a hidden gem like the one Yoz suggests:

So that’s the useful stuff, but perhaps the most noticeable, eyecatching thing about the new pages is the inclusion of Creative-Commons-licenced photography of the world’s cities powered by Flickr.

We’ve curated a small collection of CC-attribution-sharealike licenced photos from Flickr Places, and then superimposed a graph of Dopplr traveller activity, added some interesting factoids like where most people travel to and from that city and hey presto!

We’re pleased as punch with them, and especially happy to be able to support the Creative Commons in a small way. Many thanks to our friends there and at Flickr for their assistance in putting this together.

It was fascinating to work through thousands of amazing images to select them for the city pages. We created a small tool internally to help speed up this task, which we’ll write a separate more technical post about later.

We’re far from having an image for everywhere on Earth, but we’ll be adding more every week.

One other interesting side-effect of creating the public city pages was that we had to make public pages for the whole geographical hierarchy of our ’social atlas’.

So, we now have ‘place’ pages for countries and all of the USA’s states.

And, I find these pages fascinating! I’ve not been able to stop clicking around them in the same way that I could pore over an atlas when I was a child. You keep turning up things like this:

And my favourite:

I think Funafuti might be my new favourite place…

What’s yours? Go explore!