We still don't have a real time geotagged photo web in 2011. Even in 2011, where there are many more geo capable cameras and cameraphones than ever, people still wait hours, days, weeks or hours to upload their photos to places like flickr as evidenced by my video of the 276 (as of this writing) photos geotagged in Vancouver on flickr taken on the day the Vancouver Canucks beat San Jose Sharks to make it into the 2011 Stanley Cup finals.
My prediction: after a couple of months, we'll have about 500 photos (up from the 276 currently posted) from this day geotagged in Vancouver and uploaded to flickr.
Video of HTML5 mashup of Vancouver Beats San Jose May 24, 2011 which is currently 271 geotagged flickr photos
Far less then the approximately 2500 geotagged photos taken during the 2010 Olympic Gold Men's Hockey day in 2010 when there were far less geo-capable phones and cameras.
As promised, videos of my San Francisco and Vancouver real-time HTML5 geotagged photo mashups driven by the great flickr and CloudMadeAPIs (each time a geotagged photo to the city is uploaded to flickr, a dot is posted on the map; the dot does a reverse blue fade-in and then alternates between green and red and the map alternates between orange and pink). Next up, add music driven by the neighbourhood (i.e. a different tune for each woeid, which means 26 different tunes for Vancouver).
Vancouver real-time flickr cloudmade html5 mashup:
Try it out yourself! (may take some time for photos to appear since dots are only added when photos are uploaded to flickr geotagged in the city of vancouver):
Try it out yourself (may take some time for photos to appear since dots are only added when photos are uploaded to flickr geotagged in the city of san francisco):
To the three :-) people in the world who care about blinking lights on a CloudMade Map : Evidently CloudMade and the web browsers can't handle large amount of overlays i.e. 1000s of them :-). So the solution is to map.removeOverlay() before map.addOverlay(). If you don't remove the overlay before you addOverlay() then the browser slows down and leaks a large amount of memory.
I'll post a video later of the incredible Das Blinkenlights :-) but you can try it yourself. Just click on one of the following URLs to try it yourself (the map will be all black until somebody uploads some geotagged photos which could be anywhere from 1 second from now until an hour from now):
5 months later and Nokia N8 video still doesn't work on flickr. Interestingly, N8 video works fine on YouTube. I think this is symptomatic of both the decline and irrelevance of both flickr and Nokia that they can't get video working with Nokia's flagship phone.
Oh well ! Onwards! I have 200 N8 videos that I'd like to batch re-encode so that they *do* work on flickr. what's the best way to do this on Mac OS X. FFMpeg?
p.s. Nokia N8 and flickr: I still love you both :-) Luckily I can handle this video issue; I couldn't handle it if there was a similar issue with photos!
On the weekend I created the following black and white barcode for Michael Kalus, which I call "shades of darkness":
all of michael kalus's black and white photos >= 720 px high as of April 20, 2011 tagged "blackwhite" in ascending chronological order and then squished to 2px wide * 720 px high and then concatenated together. The image should be 990 pictures * 2 px wide = 1980 pixels wide but it is only 1974 pixels wide due to either a programming error or the photo missing from flickr (or my script couldn't download it from flickr)
in response to air's comment, here's a video version (select the HD version if your screen is big enough!) of the penmachine barcode which hopefully is more fun and more self-explanatory:
Part 1 of Rant - Recommendations from Yelp, foursquare, etc are useless because there's no way to validate expertise and no identity
social+local+expert data = relevant recommendations aka Yelp, Foursquare, urban spoon, etc are walled garden data silos of doom NOT destiny and they don't really help you find the awesome restaurant or espresso g*d shot you are looking for despite Fred Wilson's experience (an exception that proves the rule)
Part 2 of Rant - Don't trust your review data not to be compromised and not to be deleted when using a service like Yelp, foursquare, etc
You may be elite-2011-taster-273487 on yelp or urban spoon but or other such location based or recommendation based service, but:
you don't own your data e.g. your reviews
you can't export your data
why should anybody believe that it's you or trust your reviews when it's impossible to figure out who you are e.g. who is JudyS_240394 ?
your data will be sold (only Apple seems to have the guts not to sell user data)
what happens when the wonderful service goes out of business or "pivots"?
Part 3 of Rant - Solutions - for now: copy to your site, future: open formats are the only long term way to get out of the silo
It's unfortunate that in 2011 that the best way to build up a consistent reputable, verifiable, track record for reviews or anything else that's structured beyond mere text is still to to have your own site e.g. a blog .
The best pragmatic compromise is to somehow copy the data you post in walled garden data silos of doom back to a site you control on your domain (unfortunately most walled garden sites don't allow you to get your data out without compromise; exceptions that prove the rule: flickr and instagr.am)
Or flip it around: Make your site the master and copy the data out to walled gardens like twitter, yelp, facebook etc is probably a better short term pragmatic solution. Not surprisingly the usual suspects :-) like Dave Winer and Tantek are pioneering this (check out Tantek's falcon system).
And in the long term, a "beyond unstructured blog of text" open API or data format for things like reviews which we have been discussing since 2004 (e.g. microformats) will actually happen. I remain optimistic about that :-) !
tl;dr: Surprised by the paucity of real-time geotagged photos on flickr. People seem to upload in batches many hours after the fact. Still looking for a cool real-time geotagged picture feed so I can do some Blinkenlights info visualizations in a web browser near you!
Real Time Average Colour of Geotagged photos of 18 cities after a few minutes
Real Time Average Colour Geotagged photos of 18 cities after a few hours
Since 2007, I have over 50000 21000 (29000 non geotagged) geotagged photos uploaded on flickr from cameras most in real-time or near real time (a few minutes to a few hours after they were taken). I expected in 2010 that there would be many real-time geo tagged obsessive :-) photo uploaders like me. Enough to power a cool Blinkenlights info visualization.
Well I was wrong :-) Based on the info viz (geoTaggedAvg18.html ; github source - tested Firefox 4, Chrome, iPhone 4, Android 2.1 - each dot is the average colour of a geotagged photo uploaded to 1 of 18 cities, there are 24 dots per row and then it wraps around after over 24) that I did in Javascript and HTML5 even in geo-tagging mad cities like New York and San Francisco and Vancouver, people don't upload geotagged photos in real-time to flickr (and I doubt elsewhere but love to be proven wrong, if anybody has a real-time updated photo stream with lat/long and an API that has more photos than flickr, please let me know:roland AT rolandtanglao.com twitter:@rtanglao). They do it after the fact and they don't do many.
Probably because:
people are concerned about loss of privacy
uploading with GPS coordinates is too hard
GPSes are unreliable but getting more reliable every day
most people upload to social media ghettos like Facebook and Twitpic where most of their metadata including latitude and longitude is lost and/or not available via API instead of "full photos as social object with full-meta-data-preservation-and-APIs-to-get-the-meta-data" services like flickr
Each red, yellow or orange dot represents 1 geotagged cameraphone photo from folks on Flickr taken between 00:00 Feb 28 2010 PST to 11:59PM Feb 28 2010 PST. Over 2000 photos! generated by: dl.dropbox.com/u/361757/CCC/mens-gold-medal-hockey-game28...
(Works on Firefox 4, Safari 5, Chrome, Safari iOS 4 but not Firefox 3., github source)
Observations:
Granville and Robson truly were the epicentre of action that day!
No photos uploaded from Granville Island
No photos uploaded from The Drive - East Van was almost totally unaffected by the Olympics which corresponds with my experience. East of Gastown there was no Olympic visitors and not nearly as much buzz.
Does Pixelpipe on the N900 support flickr uploads that are visible only to your contacts who are "family" on flickr like ShoZu does? It doesn't appear to. My observations (check out my previous post on Pixelpipe with the N900):
PixelPipe doesn't appear to support flickr's privacy level of "family". It does support totally private and totaly public which map to the equivalent in flickr but that's not what I want.
Luckily the built-in N900 Share Online does support family on flickr. So that's what I am using.
My theory: PixelPipe on Symbian and other operating systems supports Flickr's "family. Just didn't bother to implement it on N900
With the number of people who use the N900 being low, I can see why such a decision would have been made. So no harsh feelings Pixelpipe :-)
Dave Winer has been writing for many years about a social camera. I have been writing for years about how ShoZu + Nokia Cameraphones are killer apps and built-in ShoZu would be a killer app (e.g. Nokia should buy ShoZu).
My current thinking is:
Canon or Nikon's sensors and lens + Nokia phone with "comes with world wide connectivity and built-in easy to use app for uploading photos and HD video to all popular social sites e.g. flickr, facebook, picasa" + sideload to your Computer and OVI files (i.e. Eye-fi done right, not as an aftermarket kludge - don't get me wrong, unlike Dave I love my Eye-Fi card; it's done well but at the end of the day it's a hack!) for backup in real time using ShoZu-like technology to do it in the background and auto-resume if connectivity lost =
an awesome social camera that would sell well
The current Nokia solution is Share Online which is:
a) hard to use
b) hard to configure
c) doesn't work in the background and auto-resume like ShoZu
d) requires folks to figure out the whole "3G/WiFi don't automatically switch to 3G when I am roaming" dance
As Dave points out if Nokia doesn't do it (and Nokia is the only company with all the pieces including camera hardware and software, ShoZu-like tech, etc) and the biz dev clout to do something like a "Comes with bandwidth" partnership like Amazon did for the Kindle), somebody else will do it e.g. Apple or Google or some social camera upstart.
I have been blogging for 10 years, started Dec 1999 (dreadnet.editthispage.com which sadly died a few years back due to my own negligence) so some 2010 social media long term predictions and gratuitous advice which again is worth what you paid for it
Social Media 2010 predictions and gratuitous advice:
Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Tumblr and other walled gardens are over in the long term; an open solution will replace them in 5 years or less.
Don't be afraid to use and experiment with the walled gardens but recognize that your stuff can be deleted at any time and unless you have backed it up to an open format like HTML, it won't last forever (most likely scenarios: service goes out of business or your account is deleted for an arbitrary reason). I wouldn't shed a tear if all my tweets were deleted, YMMV. If you have fun with the walled gardens, get your domain and start a blog, videoblog,podcast, etc., you won't regret having an online presence you own and control
If you care about your closed garden stuff, back it up to an open format. If you aren't geeky enough to figure this out, ask a geek, there's lots of them, just don't ask me :-)
Have a "hook" and nurture and grow it. Not good enough in 2010 to be a jack of all trades social media whatevah :-) You actually need to *know* something. Most people do (they just don't realize it!) so that's not a problem.
Don't know why I have to write this in 2010 department: Don't trust reviews or content on Urban Spoon, Yelp (i like the idea of yelp & other aggregators but in practise most of the reviews are shall we say not helpful), Gowalla, Facebook etc unless you know the person in real life or have read their stuff over a period of time. Most restaurant reviews like most content on the Internet are wildly biased but that's a good thing because objectivity in food reviews is ridiculous.
Get your most valued content out of the walled gardens and your email (email rocks but it's not a place for long term knowledge storage and retrieval) and back it up. The best way to back up is to put the content in an open format like HTML on your own domain and backup all the stuff on your domain. Again, ask a geek. And really most people's stuff that is truly valuable is not a lot, myself included :-) e.g. I bet my best emails, best photos, videos and blog posts for the last 5 years could fit on 1 DVD!
So, I don't really have the time but since I love Mozilla, here's one of my Mossecamp ideas for Friday (if you like it, see you on Friday assuming it's accepted!):
In a nutshell:
10 people will signup up to have Roland tape 1-12 second videos of them live (i.e. no editing) on "One way the internet has changed their life."
Roland will post them to flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution License to the Mozilla Net Effects Flickr Group
The people in the session will watch them and vote on the "best" one (majority rules, my "best" definition: bonus points for fun, other languages, cool things but of course your definition is up to you!)
Winner gets a prize. Prize will be a free 1:30 second video taped by Roland on his Nokia N82 on Friday at Moosecamp and edited on iMovie by Roland and submitted to flickr and possibly some Mozilla swag from Zak
Let's say you had 1796 photos in a directory from flickr and wanted to animate them in Shoes which is built on Ruby, how would you do it?
Here's how I did it (forgive my bad code, it was just a fun 1st project and of course you could do this in QuickTime Pro with no programming but that wouldn't be as much "fun" :-) !):
Hey Vancouverites! Got an N95, N82 or other Nokia cameraphone and a data plan (or a Wifi phone)? If so, I'll show you how to install ShoZu and configure it to send photos to any email address, flickr, facebook, twitter, Now Public, any arbitrary email address, etc. (ShoZu supports an incredible number of photo and video services in fact over 90% of the popular ones!). All I ask is we do this over coffee in downtown or Gastown before work or at lunch and that you buy me a $2.25 macchiato :-) in return. Text me at 604 729 7924 if interested! iPhone ShoZu users, the offer applies to you too but I doubt you need any help :-) !
Some little known cool ShoZu features:
Did you know you can use ShoZu to send to multiple flickr accounts (e.g. one for work and one for family)?
Did you know ShoZu supports videos? Who needs 12seconds.tv when you can send 20 second videos from your Nokia to flickr (or anywhere else! e.g. facebook)?
And here we are: My Campaign! I want to raise awareness of ShoZu amongst the Mobile Industry Review audience and beyond. My hope is that you, dear reader, will take it upon yourself to educate at least five normobs about ShoZu. Further, I hope you will help them get the app installed on their handset and setup to send to Facebook or Flickr or the like.
It’s my firm belief that ShoZu is a ‘gateway application’ — like a gateway drug — that converts a normob to a mobile data user (a ‘promob’).
ONCE you’ve tasted and started using ShoZu, you ‘get’ mobile data. You can start to look at other applications and uses. You might like to check out Jaiku. Or try and get your head around Twitter.
But the key is photos. Photos OFF your handset, on to the internet. That’s the magic that converts the normob.
Too often, nobody cares. We’re all busy. Normobs just get on with their lives. Take 10 seconds out to explain the concept though — and you spread a little joy with your technical experience.
Finally! I've had an Eye-Fi card (bought in the USA for me by my brother in law) for over a year and use it with our point and shoot to upload kid photo to our private kid photo flickr account. Highly recommended!
Mountain View, CA Nov. 18, 2008 – Today, Eye-Fi, Inc. (www.eye.fi), makers of the world’s first wireless memory cards for digital cameras, announced that its Eye-Fi Share and Eye-Fi Home cards are now available in Canada. The cards are available exclusively at Black’s Photography online and retail locations across Canada, and from www.eye.fi.
I love Kinzin's aka "These are my Kids"'s new (well not so new my blog post is late!) "Print Pack" feature. This feature allows you to ship 10 prints for $US 2.50 plus shipping anywhere in the world!
I use it to send 10 photos per month to my family in Belgium and Ontario and also to us. Great idea (which I and probably others suggested to them!)
Digital photos are great but having hard copies is also great. And finally through the Print Pack Feature I have an easy way to do it from flickr (or from your local drive or facebook but I don't store my photos on local drives or facebook).
Feature Request: do the same thing for videos i.e. how about a DVD from my flickr videos shipped once a month for say $5 / month plus shipping?
Feedback on These are my kids:
Could we please have it as an independent website? There's no value for me having it as a facebook app (but I can see why it is a facebook app; the community is there, still I'd rather use it using my kinzin login rather than my facebook login)
The default privacy settings are to make everything visible in your Facebook feed. I'd prefer the default to be that everything is NOT visible but I concede I am over zealous about the privacy of our child.
Adding a photo to my print pack is not intuitive. You can't add all 10 at once, why not? Also I would prefer to have to be able to add photos via a tag e.g. kinzinprintjuly08 to my print pack.
I am fascinated by JavaScript and its rise in Drupal and the web in general and I am looking for a system to do some visual hacking with my 30000 or so public photos on flickr.
how to run LK without using any other software other than apache on localhost: http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080301/000042.html - "the gestalt I am working toward is that each time you make a change, it becomes a new web page that you or anyone else can share and experiment with ."
