www.nickhodge.com

A Flickr account, Fire­fox, this Grease­mon­key script. Hin­ted at yes­ter­day, in Javas­cript today! Once it is on the cloud, you can live in the clouds.

Now when brows­ing images, Flickr adds a visual nav­ig­a­tion panel to the right. Find­ing pic­tures that are to the North, South, East, West (and intermediates)

My Lon­don pic­tures, being the most accur­ately geot­agged, are now a part of a vir­tual walk-through.

Nick Hodge, Flickr.com, Geot­agged: spent the greater part of today geot­ag­ging my images stored in Flickr. Geot­ag­ging is the addi­tion of spa­cial or geo­graph­ical metadata (that is: lat­it­ude and lon­git­ude) to my uploaded images. The four cam­eras I’ve used do not have GPS, so this geot­ag­ging caper is a manual post-processing effort.

The res­ol­u­tion of the Yahoo! Map Images for Sydney and Lon­don are excel­lent, the maps suck (unless you are in the US!). Even Tokyo’s map was strangely low res­ol­u­tion. At the time of writ­ing, 600,000 images have a geotag accord­ing to Flickr. Microsoft’s Local Live and Google’s Google Maps are way better.

Why invest the time?

Some­where, someday, someone is going to use this data to find out where someone was on a cer­tain day. Or, some smart soft­ware is going to cre­ate an inter­est­ing view of our world.
Time has been a part of the EXIF cam­era data for many years. These two dimen­sions are excel­lent for loc­at­ing on a simple 2D map, but do not give enough “res­ol­u­tion” to be for our Vir­tual Future. Apart from the height, the tar­get, tilt and head­ing would provide more data: Ima­gine a Second Life in a fully imaged, geot­agged, Microsoft PhotoSynth’d world. With the data out there in the cloud, we can live out our life in the vir­tu­al­ized clouds.
A most pleas­ant reason is to revisit your travels. Re-orienting your­self, remem­ber­ing the streets of Lon­don without the 28+ hour flight. Fun. Reliv­ing the past, vir­tu­ally. The future will be more out there and immersive.

Win­dows Vista the last of its kind: Win­dows will go vir­tual, Gart­ner agrees with my assess­ment that the future of Win­dows is com­pon­entised, vir­tu­al­ized and smaller.

Gart­ner expects a sig­ni­fic­ant update to Vista in late 2008 or 2009 that will add vir­tu­al­isa­tion (in the form of a com­pon­ent called a hyper­visor) and a ser­vice partition.

You read it here first, 4 days ago.

Boe­ing has announced they are shut­ting down their Con­nex­ion ser­vice. I won­der if the recent restric­tions on carry on lug­gage, let alone the com­plex­ity of mod­ern travel, has impacted their busi­ness plan.
Put­ting paid to my vis­ion of future Busi­ness Travel.

Some­thing I remem­ber think­ing, if not say­ing, was that the whole NeXT her­it­age of easier soft­ware devel­op­ment tools was going to give Apple a sig­ni­fic­ant com­pet­it­ive advant­age with soft­ware. We are see­ing a pleth­ora of MacOS X based “digital hub” (or digital life­style) mini-applications tied to a web-services style backed (.mac) I am sure all of these, being MacOS X nat­ive, use the Cocoa (ali­asYel­low Box, alias NeXT frame­works) envir­on­ment. The key to the volume of applic­a­tion production.

To see where Adobe is head­ing, I strongly recom­mend view­ing this web­cast from April Sey­bold Boston. There are even more tricks up our sleeves!