Shredded couch armrests, severed chipmunk tails … Sometimes our cats leave us a few clues about their daily activities, but most of their seekrit feline goings-on remain a mystery. Until now. German workshop tinkerer and cat fancier Juergen Perthold whipped up the CatCam — a tiny $20 digital keychain camera rigged to take a shot every 2.5 minutes — and attached it to the collar of his kitty, Mr. Lee. The result? A slightly surreal glimpse into the kitty’s trek through woods, fields, tunnels and garages.

Check out the rest of Mr. Lee’s day, as well as the exploits of a handful of other feline Ansel Adamses. Want to build your own CatCam? Perthold shows you how! (And for only $31, you can order a CatCam kit from Juergen himself.)

From a similar vein comes “Stranger Photos Have Happened.” For this experiment, Jay Carlson (the founder of online ‘zine The Plug) left a disposable camera tied to a bench, accompanied by this note:

Good afternoon,
I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up.
Love, Jay / The Plug

And lo, the passers-by obliged, begetting much cheesy mugging unto the camera — enough to fill up the whole roll.

See the rest here: http://theplug.net/28/strangerphotos.htm [via Make]

^{[image courtesy christopherdale]}

Fee fi fo fum, I smell a bloody good photographer. Flickr user christopherdale snapped this eerie shot of “The Awakening,” a 100-foot sculpture of a panicked giant struggling to to free himself from the sod of Washington, DC (or thereabouts). His long-exposure technique gives the whole scene an otherworldly feel. Here’s a nice detail of the giant’s gaping yap, complete with gnashy choppers.

^{[image courtesy christopherdale]}

Every morning, I peruse the Universal Hub photo stream, and this entry stopped me dead in my tracks. It depicts a Central Square alleyway — a sight I’ve seen many times, but never in such a beautiful light. Amazing work, sushiesque!

^{[image courtesy sushiesque]}

At this point, everyone knows what a powerful tool Google can be if you’re looking to dig up information on other people. Well, recently, I stumbled across a couple websites that allow you to use Google to spy on pretty much the entire world, all at once. But not in the way you’d expect.

I’m referring to two flashy mashups of Google Maps and Flickr: Flickrvision and Earth Album.

Earth Album harvests Flickr’s most interesting photos, then displays the results for a given country when you click on the map.

Flickrvision is something a little more startling: It shows you a satellite’s-eye view of photos being uploaded in real time, sending that little digital globe spinning with every new submission. (For an extra dose of voyeurism, you can also check out Twittervision — although in this case, I think a picture really is worth a thousand words.)

Happy gawking!

Other nifty map-related sites:
breathingearth.net | Watch the population rise and fall in real time! See the carbon emissions of countries around the world! This is how the planet “breathes.”
opentopia.com/sunlightmaprect.html | Shows what parts of the earth are currently goth-friendly, and which parts are subjected to the sun’s burny rays (or, if you live in Seattle, coated in a light gray drizzlemist).
google.com/sky | No longer do you have to download Google Earth to mess around with the digital heavens — you can do it right in your browser!

Now, I know I’m barely scratching the surface of this topic here (and intentionally so, since I could easily spend the rest of my life researching this). Got your own favorite map sites? We’d love to hear about them!