Andrew Sullivan's Readers are Awesome

MY MORNING ROUTINE centers around coffee and the internet.  After pouring a warm cup of coffee I love spending a bit of time catching up on what I missed during the night: checking email, browsing news headlines, looking and sports scores, and hitting a few of my favorite political websites.  I tend to have a certain order in which I complete this Tour de Web (as we all often do) and somewhere near the top of the list is Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, a popular blog that generates millions of hits per month and won the Weblog Award for Best Blog in 2008.

One cool feature on Sullivan's blog is a weekly contest called the The View From Your Window where he posts a reader-submitted photo (always a view from a window and always posted on Saturdays) and invites readers to try to guess the location of the object in the photo.  It has become a very popular posts each week and readers will often spend hours trying to find the exact location of the photo.  Most weeks, it is stunning (dare I say scary) to see how many readers can not only find the location of the photo, but pinpoint exactly where it was taken from.  Results are posted on Tuesday afternoons and the person who's guess is the closest gets a free The View From Your Window book (yes, the contest has not become a beautiful coffee-table book).


Well, last Saturday afternoon I was in Nice and I got an email from Sullivan (or somebody at the Dish) saying they were going to use a photo I had submitted a few days earlier for the contest.  The photo was from...well, I won't tell you where I took it until you have a chance to see it and try to guess for yourself.  The results are now up and can be seen here.  Below is the photo I submitted in case you want to give it a shot before you see what Sullivan's readers guessed.  If you follow this blog at all you'll remember that I posted it during our trip.  I took it down when I was told it was going to be used for the contest, but apparently that didn't matter much because several readers found the location by putting the photo in a google search and this blog came up (even though the photo had been deleted).  You'll see from the results that this week's contest was a pretty easy one -- readers found several clues in the photo and had little trouble finding the location.  But that has to be partly because Daily Dish readers are so unbelievable awesome.

Anyway, here's the photo.  [Oh, make sure you watch the video submitted by the guy who eventually won the contest.  It shows how he "found" the location of the picture.   Very cool!']