Here’s an amaz­ing way to get the lay of the land in Lon­don. Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jef­frey Mar­tin has stitched togeth­er 7,886 high-res images, cre­at­ing an 80 gigapix­el (or 80 bil­lion pix­el) panoram­ic pho­to­graph of Eng­land’s great cap­i­tal. The pho­to is also inter­ac­tive, which means you can play aer­i­al tourist. When you enter the site, click on “Show Land­marks” (low­er left cor­ner), make a selec­tion, and then start fly­ing around the city.

These pho­tos were tak­en from a 36 floor build­ing, using a DSLR cam­era and a 400mm lens. And it now stands as the world’s largest 360 pho­to.

via newslite

I can’t vouch for the claims being made in this “fun facts” song. (Nor do I know what’s up with the Jesus imagery.) But the video has some enter­tain­ment val­ue, if not some good triv­ia. So enjoy…

A quick note for our read­ers: This week, we soft launched a new mobile web site for Open Cul­ture – one designed to give our read­ers the abil­i­ty to access Open Cul­ture con­tent with far greater ease on their smart­phones. If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone (or any phone with an advanced web brows­er), you should be able to read our posts, watch videos, and lis­ten to audio much more clean­ly, no mat­ter where you are. Sim­ply pick up your phone, vis­it any page on openculture.com, and you will see what I mean.

This mobile site is still in “beta.” So if you expe­ri­ence any prob­lems, or have any feed­back, please send it our way. We want your input. And, if you don’t pre­fer the mobile site, you can always turn it off. Just scroll to the bot­tom of the mobile page and click “Switch to Stan­dard View.”

Final­ly, as you can imag­ine, this project required some time and expense. If you can com­fort­ably afford it, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion via Pay­Pal to sup­port this ini­tia­tive and oth­ers like it. And if you can’t swing it, that’s a‑okay. Maybe just tell a friend about the site (or about our Free iPhone app) and oth­er­wise enjoy the ride.

Thanks for any feed­back you might have, and hope you enjoy the mobile ver­sion of Open Cul­ture.

A note­wor­thy men­tion: The World is Full of Inter­est­ing Things packs togeth­er 106 works from the “cre­ative inter­net” into one Google slideshow. It’s a visu­al grab bag of images, videos, mashups, apps and oth­er items that have cap­tured the col­lec­tive online imag­i­na­tion. The diverse col­lec­tion is more eas­i­ly expe­ri­enced than explained. So start flip­ping through and see what we mean here.

via @KarenTempler and Kot­tke

Bucks, The New York Times blog ded­i­cat­ed to help­ing con­sumers make the most of their mon­ey, took things a step fur­ther today. They went beyond telling you how to save mon­ey. They told you how to get 10 things for free. Free tech sup­port, pass­port pho­tos, work­outs, med­i­cine, and also free ebooks, free online cours­es from great uni­ver­si­ties, for­eign lan­guage lessons, and movies. And they kind­ly includ­ed two of our col­lec­tions on the list. So if you’re look­ing to save a buck, here you go…

Two weeks in South­west­ern France. All footage was shot by Jon Bryant sim­ply using a Canon 7D. You can also watch the video direct­ly on Vimeo here.

Via @brainpicker.