geobloggers

Single Sentence Synopsis: Buildings could offer WiFi photo uploading service, in return for keeping the photos taken of them.

This post is the second part in a trilogy, but also the part that’s been bouncing around in my mind the most. So in Star Wars saga style, I’m writing the middle part first. I’ll get round to parts #1 A World Without Flickr & #3 Peer-to-Peer Photos, a culture tax on your Hard-drive, at some point in the nearish future. For more information see the companion blog post over on my (other) personal blog.

In part one (that hasn’t been written yet) we played out (in theory) the thought experiment of; What would happen if Flickr shut down tomorrow, what happens to all of the photos?

Here’s the next thought experiment of how we could protect against that just a little bit, for a very specific area of photography. This isn’t ground-breaking, or even particularly well thought out btw, I just wanted to get it down :)

a) People, like to take photos of things, those things are often outside and fairly buildingy in nature, indeed in the paper Mapping the World’s Photos (David Crandall, Lars Backstrom, Daniel Huttenlocher and Jon Kleinberg, 3.4MB PDF) out of the 7 top landmarks, 6 are buildingy construction type things … eiffel, trafalgarsquare, tatemodern, bigben, notredame, londoneye and empirestatebuilding. The “trafalgarsquare” acting as the odd one out, being more of a location than a building.

b) Lets imagine that things like Eye-Fi cards exist more and more, sometimes even built into the camera, not forgetting all the cameraphones that also have wireless access. We’ll recall that they also do geotagging with the help of skyhook wireless. And imagine that people all over the world are interacting with architecture and taking photos while doing so, every … single … minute … of the day.

c) The Street as a Platform, which I’m doing a terrible disservice to, but you get the idea. When that person, takes that photo near that building, that building should offer them free WiFi, for them to upload that photo to Flickr (other photosharing services also exist). But in return (with a click-through Terms and Conditions^[1]) it gets to keep a copy of the photo on it’s servers, in the basement. All large buildings should offer that service.

One more thing than that however, whenever a building receives a photo, it exchanges a copy of it with another building within WiFi/internets reach. So the act of a photographer uploading one photo, would put two copies of that photo into two buildings, and a copy of a second photo would jump buildings.

And if you think I’m joking, read Eye Fi Standalone Server – Eye Fi Linux Hacking. It doesn’t necessarily help, but I like to think it adds some validity to my argument :)

a + b + c) Overtime a building will gain a corpus of photos not only of itself but also it’s neighbors.

The building need not do anything else with the photos, its main job it to protect them. Obviously it would be lovely if it did do something with the photos, an ever changing wall of shimmering self images and so on, but yada, yada, copyright, blah, etc.

The city becomes it’s own protective cultural distributed archiving network.

I like to think of this as digital footprints, trails left behind by the many previous travelers through the city. That somehow the building is collecting 1000s of tiny snapshots of people’s memories. They took that photo of that building, because they wanted to remember being there. For someone that angle, position and time was important. For the building it’s a way of recording it’s own history through the eyes of everybody.

I also like to think that this is possible now, to a degree. Not that whole cities need to sign up, but at least one or two buildings or constructions could join in.

To take a stab at a terrible pun …

… what if Cloudgate were built with servers and wireless inside, right from the start, offering to consume the photos taken of it. You take a shot with a wireless enabled camera and it could store a copy for you. It’s building up a library of itself, in all seasons, in all weather. Meanwhile you, have a backup, findable by time and browsing, stored safely in the Cloud!

See, I told you it was a terrible pun! But really, instead of keeping photos stored in the “cloud”, they’re really stored in the urbanized crust.

And that’s pretty much it, see I said it wasn’t groundbreaking, but I also think it really aught to start happening. Anyway, they’ve probably figured out how to do all this and more at Museums and the Web #matw already :)

But what of normal everyday at home snapshots? Well that’ll have to wait for part #3.

Photos used under CC license from .schill, - reuben -, Vlad Lazerian & DC Meatloaf

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^[1] I’ve seen what sometimes has to go into these click-throughs, but basically its all the legal stuff to allow the building to maintain a copy of the photo, without taking away any copyright control from the photographer. Which sounds simple and obvious here, but turned into a legal framework takes up about 3 pages of scary sounds jargon.

Which means, I don’t for a minute expect any of the above to get off the ground, but it’d be nice if it did just for once wouldn’t it.