Apple Thoughts: Apple's 5th Avenue Store Among Most Photographed Landmarks

"Among the 175 most-photographed landmarks on earth, Apple's Fifth Avenue (NYC) store has risen to fame the quickest, beating out Wrigley Field (Chicago), Buckingham Palace (London) and even the White House (DC). According to researchers from Cornell University who studied over 33.3 million Flickr photographs, the iconic glass cube of the Fifth Avenue store was the fifth most-photographed landmark in New York City, which is the world's most-photographed city"

Interesting study but it is a pretty dry read. But if you are interested, they have published the results of the study as well as the photo mapping they used to complete the study. They used something called "mean-shift clustering" to get the top seven most photographed landmarks on Earth, as well as the top seven in each of the top 25 metropolitan areas. I don't exactly know what "mean-shift clustering" is but they fully explain it in the report they presented at a Web conference in Spain last week. New York city was the most distinctive tag they found, and the top five landmarks worldwide were, in order, Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square, Tate Modern art museum in London, Big Ben and Notre Dame. In case you are curious, the Apple Store on 5th Avenue was number 5 on the list under New York City landmarks. The top 4 were, in order, Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Plaza and Grand Central Station.