A Networked World

A Graphical Shift in the Net

I spotted a post the other day, and now can't find it again, that suggested that video is the new text, that the next generation uses video as a native form of communication. If you can find the link I'd love to refind it.

Given the highly variable, but frequently excellent conceptual quality of the stuff on YouTube, I'd half go with that, I suspect that some of us older dropins are being snowed by the volume of material without grokking that if 60% of a given population has access to the tools, there will be an awful lot more stuff produced than if only 3% have access to them.

And there will be a lot more very compelling material produced. But whatever the reality, it feels like there is a major shift going on in graphical use of the net right now. YouTube aside, there is stuff going on in still photography that is at least as interesting and, in a couple of cases something like genuine 2.0 thinking.

First stop is this outstanding stuff;

H.D.R. is one of many digital darkroom techniques catching the fancy of amateur photographers. With the rising popularity of digital single-lens reflex cameras and more powerful personal computers has come a growing interest in visual experiments.

At the same time, software makers like Adobe are increasingly automating many of those processes, including H.D.R. While they may not always be straightforward, tricky digital techniques no longer require months of experience or hours of study.

Although H.D.R. photos are often compared to paintings, they are an attempt by software makers to allow photography to more accurately mimic human vision.

My Canon Powershot already does a pretty good job of stitching together a panorama out of overlapping shots, so there is no earthly reason why I shouldn't expect the next version to be programmable to shoot 3 or 4 photos, 1,000th of a second apart along a continuum of shutter speeds to get exactly this effect if I want. But that's just the photography, what's happening to the photos is much more interesting. This from Euan. A small world just got smaller

So having read a post by Bernie Goldbach about searching Flickr for your upcoming holiday destinations I do a search for pictures tagged with Gassin (the tiny village in the South Of France we are about to visit) and find that a load of them were taken by my mate Lee Bryant!

Brilliantly simple; and Flickr already lets me leave a message for the photographer to ask for more information about the place; like where to stay, what to do there, where to eat, drink, make merry usw. No doubt someone will organise that a bit more but this alone is a good start. But the real web 2.0 stuff fires up with this post from Ton. 3D photo exploration with Photosynth

Yesterday Björn Kolbeek pointed me to Photosynth of Microsoft Live Labs. It is a technology that stitches photo's from different sources together to create 3D representations of actual locations. You would be able to fly through a 3D world, entering through a photo on any website and flying out to another website through any of the other photo's that constitute the 3D rendering.

It was presented at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference, which is being held this week in Boston, USA. Techcrunch also has an article.

The cool part of this app is not that the idea to create a 3D representation of something is new or unique. We've had panoramic virtual tours for quite some time already. What is unique though is that it builds on the multitude of contributions of Internet users all over the world. Imagine it not only using all photo sites like Flickr, 23, and the like, but also each and every photo that is used on any site somewhere.

This kind of visual representation would also be another great and important building block in combining the geographic landscape with the information landscape that is the Internet. In the video on the Photosynth website one of the suggestions of use, next to virtual tourism or checking out venues beforehand, is to be able to find out the exact location of a building you photographed but don't remember where. Simply by 'diving into' your own photo published on Flickr, you would find yourself 'inside' the panorama stitched together from everybody's photo's of that spot. Step through the looking glass, if you dare.

cool, reverse lookup via correlated images.

And how about this for size, if this technology had been available at Daly Plaza, it could have pulled together all the photos from every witness and reconstructed the event in 3D that law enforcement people could have flown through, looking for more evidence that might have been only partially visible in multiple photos, but reconstructable from their stitching together in 3D.

And this story of lies and corruption would have been even more rapidly and tellingly deconstructed than it was because it would not have depended on anyone remembering, having been crawled by a search engine, it would have been merged into it 3D matrix and all we would have to have done was fly back into it to find out where it was.

I think we might be passing through one of those Internet gateways into yet another plateau of capabilities that would have made my father, who was a bit of a technology fan, have to pick up his jaw from the floor yet again.

And we? We'll moan about how its not good, fast, cheap or simple enough, and keep pushing.

Euan Open's Pandora's Radio

I vaguely recall coming across Pandora a long time ago, and not making much of it, but Euan has managed to get himself hooked on it and, as an old radio guy, I can see why. (OK, so I've pumped a fair bit of time into it myself this morning)

The premise is a good one and based on the Trivial Pursuit model for business generation;' we have all this damned information, what the hell are we going to do with it?"

So the system takes either a song or an artist that I like and uses its algorithms to figure out what else I might like from artists producing similar work. And its pretty well on track. It did a great job of finding some Rita Coolidge overlaps and made a fair fist of Scott Walker/ Engels. Actually, I'm impressed that it even knew about Plastic Palace People.

The Media Talks in Code

Dave Weinberger has an interesting post on the status of a story on the front page of the Boston Globe, featuring a disabled vet back from Iraq and declaring the place a quagmire. Dave takes issue with the Globe front-paging the story;   

Why this soldier? Why front page? Because Sgt. Fountaine is now against the war? And if he had come through his experience thinking that his sacrifice was worth it, would that have consigned the story to an inner page? What do we learn from Sgt. Fountaine's change of heart? Does it point to a trend? If not, if it's so purely particular and individual, then why is it the headline?   

We need individual stories. We need overviews. But in choosing to put this particular story on the front page with a headline and lead focusing on Sgt. Fountaine's change of heart, the Globe uses his story inappropriately. IMO.

I Blame BagNewsNotes

Since I started tracking the Bag my whole attitude to imagery has lost its innocence. Jon sent me a link to a new site that offers to help me live to 100 so I check it out since I've always wanted to get a telegram from The Queen.

It's only in preview at the moment but what really caught my eye was the image it uses to promote its approach to life and the pursuit of happiness.

Let's see. Late middle aged white guy with a wife (if you really want to get mythical, The Madonna whose element is the sea to which she is nearest and in traditional blue) on one arm and the virginal but soon to be mistress looking adoringly at HIM while the others are all paying attention to anything but other people.

The White Guy is the centre of attention, not least of which because he gets to carry, and presumably provide, the wine. Wait, the champagne. You know, full of foamy bubbles and about to pop its cork. You can do your own stuff around that.

Meanwhile, the virgin "includes" the black guy who is apprently suprised by this intimacy because his body curves away from contact. And he gets to carry the glasses. He is the servant.

Social weather forecast, not much change predicted.

Powered by Quman

Network: (vi) To Create Meaningful Connections

If you missed the aerogel I perpetrated on scaling, you might want to start there but this is the bit that hangs off the end, after UNLESS IT NETWORKS.

Because net content is weightless, networking maintains the momentum of what I create as other people take up the load of ensuring distribution; naturally because it supports some of their contentions, prejudices or obsessions, but the network guarantees that I will get better distribution of what I produce than I could alone. In that way networking is a gift economy, you lend me some of your credibility and donate access to your network for our mutual benefit and I donate my production to your uses. For example, Gary at Teledyn republishes this blog as a feed and I'm all in favour

But what matters here is the fact that networking tools let me link bits of information so that others can navigate among those bits to see what I'm using to get where I am in that field of knowledge. Some of the bits are "mine" in the sense that I have constructed the artefact (document, image, table, graph, audio track etc) and some of them are constructed by other people. On a network, especially the much discussed Web 2.0, it doesn't matter. The reciever can use the same tools to create similar and equally connected fields of information that include, dip into or extend what I have done.

Fundamentally networking is a kind of Velcro at the edges of bits that encourage them to stick to other bits guided by people. It is certainly a loosening of the idea of ownership that leads to a mindset and a practice that eventually comes into conflict with ideas of copyright and exclusion.

Metadata With Teeth

or Forts are prisons with the key on the inside.

Ton Zylstra picked up on the Connecting the Dots piece from yesterday and gets it in spades. Go and read Washingtonian Information Strategies Kneejerking, damn, I wish i had written that. Especially this bit.

The examples above have this aura of clumsiness, because those involved don't seem to notice that their actions are the information now, not the information they are acting upon. The changes to Wikipedia don't result in the desired changes to pages, but instead create a pattern of strange changes from Washingtonian IP addresses in the history of each page. Those on the lookout for patterns, not singular info pieces, trigger on this, and as a result just start looking more intensely at that you wished to take out of the equation.

He also touches on our responses to failing strategies and how they get that way. Of which more anon.

And I just love "Forts are prisons with the key on the inside".

Zaccly

Kind of Cool

I was nosing about after the story on whether or not Apple is going to get into the phone business and ended up at Techblog looking at the pics of the iPhone Concept. As I read down the page I saw a link from the word Phone and casually moused over it.

Up pops a little text box with some stuff about the link underneath. Turns out its an Adlink from Kontera that uses what they call a unique underline (it has a solid line with a dotted line underneath.

Now I've been using the latest version of Qumana which has a built in revenue model using contextual adverts. Haven't got to that stage yet because we are having a problem with some flicker on my laptop screen and I'm happy to get the posting away.

But it occurs to me that the popup text is not a bad way to present the advert. The link (which to my mind needs to be more distinct and unique) tells you there is something there and you can find out immediately by mousing over while the ad otherwise doesn't intrude into the reading space if you don't want it to.

Something like that could easily run off keywords in the text automatically.

It could also be useful for popping up useful related information. For example, Typepad is using something similar for managing comments. All I have to do is click the link to get some information about what is in the comment and links to edit, delete or unpublish the comment in question.

If the Qumana link above had been a "contextual" keyword, what popped up might not have been an advert, but links to the last 5 postings that I had mentioned Qumana in. I'm sure there are other uses as well.

I have a feeling that little text boxes are going to be popping up all over the place. The only problem I can see with embedding supplementary data like that is that we still need to manage the metadata.

The Things We Say

Tell the world more about us than we care for it to know.

Media coverage of Hurrican Katrina has meant that the internal, and sometimes the external editor has been turned off. The piece on WWLTV with Mayor Ray Nagin is a fine performance by a public official in extreme crisis.

The performance of AP and Yahoo in their coverage leaves rather more to be desired.

RSS - Transports of Delight

This is what I like so much about this technology. The other day I followed an email link to Digital Divide Network where I set up an account and nosed through the options. One of which was to have my own free blog.

Now I post stuff about development so there's a case for doing that, but who wants to repost everything twice just to have a presence somewhere else? Not this lazy so and so.

If Udell Is a Cell, What's the Organism?

Jon Udell has a nice summary of the meta-realities of the bloosphere in Blog Biology.

Increasingly I think about this stuff in biological terms. I'm a cell; the blog is my cell membrane; the items I post here extrude that membrane out into the intercellular environment, forming a complex surface area with which other cells interact. The other day, a piece of Brenda's extruded surface touched a piece of mine. I know that because my surface is instrumented with a variety of sensors: my referral log, del.icio.us, Feedster, PubSub, Technorati. So when this pseudopod of Brenda's touched this pseodopod of mine, I noticed.

In this case, two sensors reported contact: my referral log, and Technorati.

So far so good, but then he takes the next step as well