Microsoft’s Location-Tagged Photo Database
November 25th, 2003Yikes! How did I miss Microsoft’s release of the World-Wide Media eXchange? Microsoft calls it “a centralized index of digital photos, where photos are tagged by the geographic location where they were shot.” Developers affiliated with the Locative Media Lab and the Place Lab initiative have been discussing and working on very similar ideas for years, hoping to build out open and broad foundations for such systems before these capabilities can be locked down by narrow megacorporate interests.
As Jo Walsh put it, “interfaces and standards from meshed hyperconglomerates like Nokia and Microsoft present us with a square pinhole through which to attempt to view a potential wild and vivid world.”
It’s time to get cracking. Thanks to Scott Lederer for the wake-up call.
Don’t they realize that most people who take pictures and would be interested in putting them on the web use Macs? There’s no Mac client in sight. I hate Microsoft.
What applications like this need is a way to interface with the location services they use for things like 911 calls. Now all I need is a JavaME phone and a provider that doesn’t charge through the nose for data transfer…
For those that want to see geographically organized photos (w/o GPS info) go to http://www.trekearth.com.
By the by (and yes, I’m late to the party), I imagine you’re familiar with Jabberwocky at http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/