"It can be done!"
"No, it can not be done, you idiot!"
Those were the more friendly responses in the past when photograpers, agency owners or even visitors of advanced IEEE workshops discussed if it would ever be possible to keyword images automatically.
[© 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...).
=:-)
Into the Blogosphere [Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs] is a new
online, edited collection [that] explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities.by the UofMN. The blog has a very interesting section called"Visual Blogs" (Meredith Badger, University of Sydney):
This paper focuses on the use of figurative photography and illustration within the blogging medium. It examines the ways images shape and alter how we view blogs and how blogs shape and alter the way we view the images placed within them. It suggests that ultimately both images and the weblogs that contain them stand to benefit from the relationship.
Heather Champ is mentioned, also Kevin Sites. Meredith Badger concludes:
Visual weblogs present a new aspect of visual literacy grammar, where images must be read in direct relation to the passage of time and as indivisible from the personality of the blogger themselves. Visual blogs show the process; how I got there rather than what I saw once I arrived. It is this aspect of visual blogs that make them a useful tool for pedagogy; they become a tool for examining how images operate online and how they interact with text. Visual weblogs are a starting point for debate and discussion. They emphasise the present tense – this is what I saw today, this is how things look to me from where I stand right now.
Addendum to "Ingenious.org.uk.: New 30,000 images database to "see anything from sex to flyingmachines":
A little bit similar to what the database of Ingenious offers: the National Library of Austria, who presents totally 1,4 million images in its digital image catalogue, now shows 50,000 images from the Austrian Society of Contemporaneous History, the Society for the History of the Workers´ Movement etc. at BildArchiv Austria.
The images can be used for scientific research, editorial and commercial purposes. 12,000 images will added each year. The image database was engineered by the austrian company Gideon.
[Image © Harry Weber/ÖNB Vienna]
"The Power of Metadata" in O'Reilly Book Excerpts:
"Peer-to-Peer Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies"
"We already have Napster for MP3s and work has begun on Docster for documents -- can JPEGster and Palmster be very far off?" (by Rael Dornfest and Dan Brickle)
Do human races exist? Has technology has given us a home life filled with opportunities? Should the state pay to make ugly people beautiful? Who am I? And where am I from? Are we slaves to the concept of the Ideal Home? Should science be censored?
"This site brings together images and viewpoints to create insights into SCIENCE and CULTURE".
Never seen such a interesting educational/science image database like this before.
The british NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCIENCE & INDUSTRY (NMSI) has set up a new database called Ingenious that "weaves unusual and thought-provoking connections between people, innovations and ideas. Drawing on the resources of NMSI, the site contains over 30,000 images which are used to illustrate over 30 different subjects, topics and debates.
You are invited on a voyage of discovery through the content, exploring new perspectives on human ingenuity. The rich resources offer authoritative re-interpretations, which challenge traditional views. You can contribute to these discussions, by offering fresh opinions on the issues that have changed our lives, thereby creating dialogues within communities and with the Museums."
Key contributors to the site are the Science Museum, the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, the National Railway Museum, the Science & Society Picture Library and the Science Museum Library.
Don´t know if Jason Calacanis (see "Blogs, Photo and Copyright: The debate continues [Copyright => Garbage?]") will be delighted or not. His blogs are commercial. Ingenious writes in "Use of Images":
[..]
8. You are permitted to view the images displayed on the Website ("the Images") on-screen and to print one copy of no more than 20 different Images only for your personal and non-commercial use. You are also permitted to save one transient copy of each Image to your local hard disk for your personal use as part of your personal web gallery (in accordance with the instructions and directions set out in the relevant pages of the Website).
9. You are permitted to send the Images as electronic cards ("e-cards") to third parties for your own non-commercial purposes in good faith only and in strict accordance with the instructions and directions set out on the relevant pages of the Website.
[..]
For any non-personal use of the Images you must obtain the prior written permission of the Museum.
This might hurt some commercial providers of images for e-cards.
[© Illustration/Image: Ingenious/NMSI]
Cameron Marlowe from Electronic Publishing Group at the MIT Media Laboratory -- his current project is the popular Blogdex -- has published his paper "Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community" (pdf-download) for the International Communication Association Conference.
Blogdex mainly tracks the diffusion of links/ideas through the population of webloggers to objectively describe the information epidemics that occur regularly within informal social networks (Link).
His paper instead brings the coherencies and background stories of two different metrics for measuring authority within weblogs (Blogroll and Permalink) into the light of day.
Marlowe assumes that the Blogroll is a proxy to popularity and the Permalink a proxy to influence. The paper (9 pages) is definetely worth reading:
Abstract: The weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation in personal publishing has also come to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributed but completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest. A byproduct of this ongoing communication is the set of hyperlinks made between weblogs in the exchange of dialog, a form of social acknowledgement on the part of authors. This paper seeks to understand the social implications of linking in the community, drawing from the hyperlink citations collected by the Blogdex project over the past 3 years. Social network analysis is employed to describe the resulting social structure, and two measures of authority are explored: popularity, as measured by webloggers’ public affiliations and influence measured by citation of each others writing. These metrics are evaluated with respect to each other and with the authority conferred by references in the popular press.
Conclusion: The initial excitement over the weblog power law made many webloggers uncomfortable. How can a person get excited about a medium where attention is garnered by the number of weeks one has participated? Looking only at popularity by blogroll rank, it does appear that the “rich get richer,” but another assessment of authority, permalinks, might be an equally good proxy to authority and a better measure of influence. Barabási has noted that the growth of scale free networks is not only determined by the age of nodes, but also by the node strength, an undefined property related to a node’s ability to acquire links. Permalink rank might be an accurate way of measuring node strength, and a better proxy to authority and influence at a given point in time.
It is a major advantage of scientific work in this field that -- blogging is still young -- the bibliography is somehow short. Btw: Marlowe runs a moblog with real strange =:-) pix.
"Nokia sucks: I had to send this from my Sony Ericsson because it ROCKS"
[© Cameron Marlowe].
Megan Bigelow, a photojournalist based in Boston, MA, has recently posted a message to the subscribers of Editorialphoto:
hello all-
I am writing a research paper on the state of the photojournalism industry. Some key
points I will be exploring:
-the poor pay rates and the lack of a pay increase and/or adjustment for inflation in about 20 years
-the impact of digital technology upon the photojournalism industry and how this
relates to low pay rates and the life span of an image and its marketability, and how industry and technology have contributed to the photojournalism industry in a similar manner to the decline of other industries like steel and car production
-rights grabs and the infamous work-for-hire contracts
If anyone has any recommended reading, websites, personal anecdotes, thoughts or any input at all on this topic, I would appreciate your help and/or input.
If you feel that you can help her: check out her website for her emailaddress which - spambots - we do not want to post here.
[© Photo: Megan Bigelow]
You´re still sticking to moblogging? That was yesterday. Gone. Now we got Roblogging:
pt + "roblog": "Welcome to the world's first and only "roblog". currently, 2 sony aibo robot dogs, an er1 / tablet pc based robot post, and a roomba-tablet pc robot automatically to this site throughout the day, and once and awhile a human - phillip m. torrone - does as well. as always, the best way to predict the future is to invent it." He is mad about his automatic “moblog” picture posting machine.
How would Howard Rheingold call it? Steve Mann? These guys?
Mobveillance, equiveillance theory, coteveillance, coveillance... yesterday´s stuff.
As we see it: it´s related to surveillance, but it´s not a surveillance by third parties, it´s a personal induced surveillance with permission. It´s related to sousveillance, but it´s not watching third parties´ surveillance, it´s watching the people doing sousveillance; it´s some kind of retro activated sousveillance for enhanced surveillance. We call it Roveillance™. We have a new expression! Roveillance is the new medium of your choice for ClappingVeillance.
Phillip has also inventend the iShower: "so, in an effort to maximize my time, i was thinking that if i could waterproof a web cam, send the video and audio to my computer in the batroom and then get the audio back to the shower radio, i might have a good shower video conference system. so in stage one i am testing it out, the web cam is sealed up, and the audio is going okay. when i have time, i'll get the rest going. perhaps you want to tele-shower (shower with someone else across the globe). i'll need to work out the display component, but it's not a big deal. check out the first test."
A late adoptor generously explains: "Sometimes this variation of enhanced liquid reinverted sousveillance has been referred to as Showerveillance or Wetveillance in the literature. Armani Shower Gel Fragrance might sponsor this and Apple has added iShower to the product line." [The link is in your head]
As an Update to the ongoing Sousveillance ("inverted Surveillance") discussion (1; 2; 3) after the IWIS 2004 (International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance, 2004 April 12th) Howard Rheingold comes up with another article: "Inverse Surveillance" -- What We Should Do With All Those Phonecams".
What does Wikipedia tell us about Sousveillance? It says "Even today's personal sousveillance technologies like cameraphones and weblogs tend to build a sense of community, on contrast to surveillance that some have said is corrosive to community."
As we stated on April 24: "Naturally there are other opinions out there, esp. because of the self-perfoming of Mr. Mann. The term "Sousveillance" is on the Wikipedia list for deletion." This isn´t true anymore, meanwhile this entry - 10 days later - has been changed, it has been completely new written. All critical aspects have been removed.
Anyway, we are disappointed. Although all other sources are clapping their hands: what Howard Rheingold is writing in his article is absolutely nothing new. It´s just a repetition of what was published on the wallpaper of IWIS2004. Nothing more. That´s it.
Ridiculous. Steven Mann formerly - in his early years - was sometimes wrongfully treated like a charlatan, but now (in fact he did so the first time in late 2002) that Grandpa Howard Rheingold has said "You are granted to enter my church and religion" the fans and disciples are clapping their hands and cry HURRA - not because of Mann, not because of Rheingold, but because of what Rheingold is reporting about Mann. Kinda metaclapping (they would call it "ClappingVeillance" - we are watching if you´re clapping or not). We don´t blame Rheingold for this.
If you watch the past and discussion list, you´ ll find even more new phrases, terms and expressions: mobveillance by Mr. Moblogg himself, equiveillance theory, coteveillance or coveillance ("Sometimes this variation of sousveillance ("personal sousveillance") has been referred to as coteveillance or coveillance in the literature") and so on and on. Now all the late adoptors appear with "I totally agree with your points and think they are very valuable" advising us to buy their new book and to follow their new "prototype ideas".
It´s becoming an endless discussion. It´s like two pals sitting together. One says, "Let´s invent a new expression, a new term, a new phrase. I´ll invent it. Later I´ll add some content, impact and meaning to it, somehow hazy, blurred, fuzzy. You are the one to write about it. At that point it can´t be ignored anymore. Then, at a certain point, we will have a movement, an agitation. People will start to believe what we say and what you report. It´s a cycle of self referring one to each other. We will have meetings and conferences. You continue to report. Then the cash comes in. In the end inventing an expression is money. The cash cycle starts. We´ve done."
This reminds us of what Schopenhauer said about Hegel and Kant more in general: "Experiences without terms are blind, terms without experiences are empty and blank ("Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind, Begriffe ohne Anschauungen leer ").
Make up your mind yourself, these are some other links: 1; 2, Techdirt Wireless where Mike Masnick adds simple at the end: "The content has already been published. " [The Connected Camera Fights Back: "Every time someone trashes the idea of camera phones because the camera quality sucks, we try to point out that the amazing thing about a camera phone isn't in how it compares to a regular camera, but the fact that camera is connected . Howard Rheingold makes the point especially clear in his latest column for TheFeature, pointing out that one way to fight back against the ubiquitous surveillance cameras all around is to do some "inverse surveillance" with camera phones back at official misdeeds . He makes the point that in the past, when an abuse of power was happening by the police or other authorities, one of the first things they would try to do is to confiscate and/or destroy cameras that witnessed the event. However, if the camera is connected and streaming the images onto the internet in real-time, it doesn't do much good to confiscate the camera. The content has already been published."]; 3; 4; 5.
