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Vacation Photos That Inform Instead of Bore
A News.com story discusses the increasing trend towards adding metadata to casually created content. Their discussion centers around vacation photos taken with increasingly sophisticated cameras, and uploaded to ever more feature-rich websites. These photos, taken on a whim by snap-happy tourists, become invaluable for people wanting to follow in their footsteps. "It's the odd juxtapositions of randomly plotted photos that may be the most surprising--and useful--to travelers with more obscure interests. For example, fans of graffiti can search the word, 'graffiti,' and 'New York City' at Flickr.com/map, and pull up photos of freshly painted tags, all plotted with pushpins on a clickable Yahoo map. A search for 'Dumbo Brooklyn graffiti,' for example, finds some 99 photos, including the infamous 'Neck Face' tag, spray-painted on a brick warehouse at Jay and Front Streets in Brooklyn. Try finding that in a guidebook."
What would be nice is if a high-end camera had a basic Palm-like OS where the user could use the preview screen as a touch screen with a virtual keyboard. That way when you're taking pictures metadata could be added on the fly. While I'm dreaming built-in wifi would be nice :)
Did you catch the part about them 'embedding' the "Fake" ad? If you did, well, bully for you, if you didn't, well, I'm onto your game. :)
I used to know a guy who had a six foot high concrete wall around two sides of his property, he had a busy street right in front of his house. One morning he came out and found nearly the entire wall had been spray painted with an anti-war mural. It was technically an act of vandalism and selfish disregard for private property but he said he actually liked it more than a solid white wall and thought it was pretty cool artwork. He wanted to keep it but the city eventually forced him to have it removed after a lot of people complained about a few parts they considered "obscene".
I understand where you're coming from man.. and in places where the council can force you to clean it up, at your cost, it's definitely wrong, but the thing is, when you build a wall facing a public place, it's not completely your wall anymore. It's a public wall. Personally, I think that if the public is free to do what they want with your wall (say, if the council wants to paint it) then you shouldn't be forced to repaint it at your expense if a minority of the public does what the majority don't like with it. Then there's the guys who jump fences and paint on houses and shit. That's just juvenile.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Here are my personal observations from spending 1 month in China back in 1997.
The thing I remember most from my trip to China is the bodycount. I've never seen so many corpses lying around on the streets anywhere as I did on an early morning busride from Qufu to Jinan. I saw the remains of over 30 (we stopped counting at 30.. there were more) fatal vehicle accidents which ranged from cars and trucks hitting each other, pedestrians, bicyclists, immovable objects, and a donkey in one case. It was explained to me that the drivers in that particular area (province?) feel they conserve gas by driving without their headlights on at night (which I observed). I also noted in this area there generally weren't street lights.
A train ride from Qufu to Xi'an was also noteworthy in that our train apparently struck someone. The train came to a stop with the body right outside the train car behind mine. I watched in amazement as about 6 Chinese officials (I'm calling them officials because they appeared to be wearing uniforms) got off the train and stood around the body kicking/prodding it. They eventually (after about 5 minutes) dragged it onto the middle of the set of train tracks alongside ours, got back on our train and we continued on our (less-merry) way.
A taxi ride to get to a train station in Tsingdao resulted in police action against our taxi driver. While enroute, our taxi driver was waved to the side of the road by what appeared to be a police or military officer. The officer-type walked over to our cab and started arguing with the taxi driver. The driver pointed back at us. The cop-type person reached up and pulled the taxi sign off our driver's roof and started walking away. Our driver got out and went walking after the officer, at which point the officer turned around, drew his firearm (some kind of short-stock ak47 looking machinegun thing) and pointed it at the driver. My friend and I exited the cab and went running for the train station which was in view down the street.
I admit that most of these impressions I was left with were formed through a haze of not being remotely able to speak/parse/understand the Chinese language, but I'm certainly of the impression that actions speak louder than words. I have a slew of pictures and other impressions, but these are definitely the strongest. Its been 10 years since then and I remember the whole of the trip as if it were yesterday. While you would be hard-pressed to convince me to return, I am glad I went.
I don't have the bandwidth to look at the video, but this program offers some different ways of browsing photos(as opposed to the ACDSee alikes):
a d.shtml
http://www.windsorinterfaces.com/photomesa-downlo
(Windows+.Net)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The only way that metadata can become useful is if there is little commercial interest and the normal urge for mere annoyance is purposefully squelched.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The "LiveLabs Preview" - i.e. actual application to try out - is actually here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
Strangely enough, works only in a Windows browser...
Of course based on actual research into "Photo-tourism" by Noah Snavely et al. (note his supervisor is Richard Szeliski, explaining the M$ connection:-)
Got to hand it to them, this only backs up what some people have said for a while about taking Computer Vision research and throwing a proper development teams at it (c.f. Boujou). Result: one cool product.
I agree with people that have complained/worried that ideas like this will just be taken over with advertising, or worse yet, 38 pictures of the same 2 people standing at a street corner with different looks on their faces.
k works shows interesting photos of the area, videos, links to Project Gutenberg books, and so on.
p in=SART-264 to http://wholemap.com/map/area.php?area=TorontoROM&p in=DDOI-1
I've been geotagging Photoblogger posts for a while now (starting with my own...) and have found the results really interesting after a while. A popular area here in Toronto is the Don Valley Brickworks - http://wholemap.com/map/area.php?area=TorontoBric
And by adding in the time element you can see the construction of the new addition to our museum, not in boring drive-by photos from the top of a Beetle, but though images like http://wholemap.com/map/area.php?area=TorontoROM&