StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

The Moblogging Chaos At The Republican National Committee

"A moblogging operation should be taken as seriously, and as with as many resources and people, as a regular news operation ... Moblogging is suitable for breaking news or events with good visual images. It is not good for in-depth stories... ."

[© Image: guess who?]

A nice story ("Lessons learned from the RNC", Learning about mobile weblogging at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism):

Ladies and Gentlemen: it is now possible to leap to the forefront of journalism with technology available on the street. This is moblogging. The future is now.
Sort of.
Whoever thought of this was on to something when he or she decided to hire journalism students to use camera phones and the Internet as a nouveau wire service on the cheap. The idea was to be able to capture the ambiance of a political convention by assembling a mosiac of grainy images of the events via the camera phone. The images would give the viewer a near-real-time sense of the convention, taking advantange of the fast upload capabilities of the phone without the need to download images to a computer to edit or send. We would be a swarm of imagetakers and reporters, filing a photo every ten minutes on average, for the entire convention. Our editing team at the University of South Carolina’s Newsplex would edit our pictures and text, and receive dictation for longer stories, and post them to the moblog.

In practice, this operation worked only somewhat. The problems:

The picture quality is pretty poor...
[...]
We found it difficult to shoot some pictures, then take a time-out to jam out a sentence on the keypad. Typing any text of length on a numerical pad is s-l-o-w. Even with intelligent text... .

Continue to read the list of the little mishaps here.

New Blogs On The Block: New Digital Image

John Schott, creator of the blog Camera|Iraq and Director for Media Studies Concentration and Media Studies (MEDA) at the Carleton College, Minnesota, recently created a new blog called "New Digital Image".
The blog -- Schott is the producer of "American Photography: A Century of Images" -- is dedicated to moblogging in general (actually to teach his class) and brings up some interesting links.

Iraqian Frontline and the Images from Moblogging Soldiers: Final Epilogue

After some weeks of investigating and reporting "Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers, Part I - Part VIII" (read all these stories in the Category "Iraq|War: Photos + Reports" and additionally "Iraq|War|Photography: The Meta Level") John Schott of Camera/Iraq ("Camera/Iraq: New Website Launched") recently wrote in "Soldier Photos":

Camera/Iraq has a continuing interest in soldier photograhy from the Middle East, and we would like to collaborate in the creation of an online exhibition of such work. We were first inspired by excellent early efforts at Phototalk... .
Unfortunately, while scouring soldier photo-blogs or cam-phone collections for that one-in-a-hundred outstanding image, Phototalk encountered pictures lifted from other sources, frequently work by professional photographers. This shouldn't be surprising, really, since the pragmatic goal of a photo-blog is to visualize one's military experience in Iraq rather than to sell photo rights or garner professional notoriety. Content and context trump artistic provenance in soldier photo-blogs.
For a photo editor, however, borrowed pictures creates the possibility of mis-attribution. Contacting soldiers by email has proven difficult because they are otherwise engaged in fighting a war, often gather and present work as a unit rather than exclusively from their own "personal vision," and frequently don't encourage communication by including email addresses or are so flooded with messages that they can not respond. Plus, of course, soldiers are under new scrutiny about what images they are placing online.
Still, the notion of editing an online exhibition is compelling. Please email us if you would like to undertake or contribute to such a project.

This is not entirely the complete story: there is a difference between telling your own war history in your words using (sometimes) other peoples images as an illustration for your text and the (how to say: very euphemistic) categorical statement: "Hey, I took these pix, I created them", which is just a stupid lie. On the other hand, time has shown that at a least one army press officer (with a certain background in photography) had taken private photos with a quality and meaning far beyond the day. It is the old question "who is doing what and how". An undisputed claim: 95 percent of all people reading this blog would present/moblog their own images and never ever other people´s images, except under very special circumstances.

John Schott writes: "The pragmatic goal of a photo-blog is to visualize one's military experience in Iraq". This is absolutely right, but who can visualize your own military experience, your daily life, better than you yourself, in your special situation? No one needs to steal pictures for that.

John Schott writes: "Content and context trump artistic provenance in soldier photo-blogs." With stolen photos? Blogged together with complete book chapters "borrowed" from famous writers? All that without a clarifying explanation?

Where (as a soldier) is your very own experience, your "content and context", if you only cite and quote and/or grab and steal for "visualizing" your "military experience"? Is is still your experience you present (as a moblogging soldier)? Borrowed presentations and visualizations of personal experiences? Do they coexist? What is the next step? Borrowed personal experiences? Where is the real life?

Camera Phone Obsession: First Book on the Culture of Camera Phones

Peter Aitken has published a new (the only in this field) book called "Camera Phone Obsession":

These wildly successful devices can only be described as a cultural phenomenon, and the way people think about their camera phones can only be described as an obsession ... Users are obsessed with the technology features of their phone and love to share their experiences and thoughts with other users - creating another cultural phenomenon, the moblog...The book features numerous hands-on projects as well as tips and techniques to create art. (Link)

Art... . Xeni will be happy.

Questo blog è chiuso per ferie, fino all' 8 Agosto 2004

[© Grace and Katie]

Chiudo, per un circa settimana, questo weblog. Infatti, a mio modesto parere, per scrivere bisogna prima pensare e, i blogs spesso ti tolgono lo spazio per pensare.


(Hint for the person/CEO/BizDeveloper etc. who is constantly looking for "DigitalVision 2003 revenues", ""Image source" 2003 revenues" or "Index stock imagery 2003 revenues" and other good stuff-- Google hits are a tricky thing, especially with your really nice -- and static -- IP! So, no one has to work for Pixlogic, the company ("Visual Search") with Venture Capital from the CIA, just to know who you are...).
=:-)

A Small World: Photobloggers Are Stealing Images...From other Photobloggers

Photoblogs.org has a story of photobloggers/moblogers who are stealing the images of others photobloggers/moblogers AND claim that these images are their own work:

copyright violations
Does anyone have any idea what to do about other sites ripping off your work? I got an email a few minutes ago telling me that sithlords.hu (recently registered at photoblogs.org under the member name of everyesno) has used one of my images for their July 7th entry. My image can be seen here.
I've emailed them and told them they're in violation of my copyright but any other suggestions as to how to deal with the pilfering scumbag(s) would be gratefully received. (Link)

Iraqian Frontline: Images from Moblogging Soldiers VIII

[© Still Unknown; does anyone know?]

The TiredAnDirty Soldier@Yafro is back -- the previous entries were explaining that he had been wounded -- and shows again a very intense image we consider to be a stolen one (resolution, size, composition etc.). He has shown this image earlier here together with a different text. The previous photo has been removed (this had been the initial link here, now pointing to nowhere), together with the text, but a backup copy is available.
So now we got the same picture with two different background stories being very dramatic: the first text said

they dont seem to learn that even when they have the element of surprise it still wont turn out in their favor

and the text to the previous (the one that disappeared) image said

we had 5 soldiers killed on wensday this is not a picture of it i am not going to post a picture of it untill i have edited it they were rideing in a m-113 that is the track vechial in the picture that is right in front of the camera the insurgents used 400 pounds of c-4 and when it went off it blew that armored m 113 into nothing 5 were killed instantly and one was criticley wounded the blast crater was 10 feet deep and 20 ft wide the good thing is that the guys who were killed never knew that they had been hit it was so quick i hope it is like that for me" (Link, 10th image)

So he stated to have been an eye witness to the scenery the images are showing, someone driving in the tanks. Now it reads:

today was a bad/good day 4 hrs ago we were engaged today in a manner we havent seen in a long time it was well organized and exicutied we were returning from a trip to a out poast when we were attacked it was one of those ones you could see coming but it was too late a child tip us off by covering his ears when we drove by but by then it was too late the it was the biggest explosion i have seen my entire time here from an i.e.d. but usualy after the detonate it they run but this time they had pre positioned men to surround us and surround us they did we were engaged from all sides by small arms and r.p.g's i dont know how to describe what gose on in the mists of it we had rounds hitting the ground all around they make a popping sound when they hit i am not going to go into details becouse i dont know what is cleared to divulge but the last i hear we had killed 21 and wounded 41 and i dont know how this happened but we had no wounded and no killed but by all rights we should have had we been any other army ambushed and surrounded i think they would have gotten alot of us so for all of you that have been praying for us thank you these are your prayer min. at work if anyone sees anything on the news about it let me know what they said later ill share more (Link)

Someone is taking the same image (pardon, but very likely to be stolen from the web) which obviously has a special meaning for him and tells two different stories. There are three months between the usages of this photo. The previous entries on his site shows that he indeed had been injured (he said that another soldier took those pix: "another soldier that was on the convoy took these"). Can we trust his words, his stories now ("this photo wasn taken today i dont think anyone got the chance to take pictures" he explains later in a comment to the second usage of the photo)?
Reviewing his site again and again (especially the previous images which have been removed but had been stored here) it seems that he doesn´t have taken a picture himself -- all images are coming from various sources. Someone starts a photoblog/moblog and not one single image is not, how to say, borrowed? All this because only strong images from excellent photojournalists are outstanding enough to express your own feelings in such a situation?

Photoblogging US Soldiers at Buzznet?

Hello Marc from Buzznet [a photoblog community, Marc is a co-founder], thx for recommending. If you casually got a list with some photoblogging US soldier from Iraq (something comparable to the Yafro list (1; 2), let us know. Best!

DailySnap: New Series of Interviews with Photo-/Mobloggers

The "DailySnap", a photoblog from the 20-year-old Jessyel Ty Gonzalez at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has announced that it will interview at least one photoblogger every week in a feature they call "The Snap Presents..." :

These interviews will dwell deeper into the minds behind the most popular, beautiful and inspirational photoblogs on the web. Along with the interview, the selected photoblogger also displays his three favorite photographs he/she has taken. It's updated EVERY MONDAY.
This week, our first interviewees are Sam Javanrouh from Daily Dose of Imagery (WVS), Justin Ouellette from Chromogenic, and David Nightingale from Chromasia.

The interview procedure is standardized (18 determined questions via email). Link to the Interview Site at DailySnap.com.

[Thx to Photoblogs.org]

Photoblogging becomes international

...writes Metafilter and points to Photoblogs.org.
But:

How about photoblogs that aren't necessarily listed on photoblogs.org? Due to its former, highly unfair and arbitrary voting system, I can't get my own blog listed at the site.

Start

Each time you start from scratch.