[Note: This is the fourth of five posts related to Nam-Ho Park’s talk and blog post on Mobile Storytelling. Links to my other posts are at the bottom of the page.]
Nam-ho has a very interesting section in his write-up entitled, “Collective Stories.” Here’s a snip:
Daum Communication, a leading internet services provider in Korea offers a map service with a streetview option, much like Google Maps does in the States. As of Febuary 2011 however, they have added a feature that goes a step beyond: streetview history. You can select from various past dates when the streetview camera captured the image. As one example, you can view the building where Daum is located now, under construction in 2008.
Maybe it’s possible to take this further by using tools like Photosynth to crowdsource forgotten images from people’s photo albums or maybe even add historic archival images, so that when you are viewing a certain place through the streetview tool, you can actually go back in time and take a historical journey through a neighborhood. Historians can narrate stories of a city’s development or you can tell your own story of fond childhood memories. What was once a personal memory can now build up a crowdsourced collective memory.
Marshall Kirkpatrick’s personal experience updating Open Street Map with historical information data comes to mind. The excitement he communicates feeds into my own enthusiasm about all the wonderful things that are possible with maps, mobile technology, and the hive mind of our communities.
How awesome is that?? I think it’s crazy awesome. So many different trends intersect in that experience: community edited content, location, contextual search ala Apture, blogging or at least easy publishing ala the local radio history site and do not forget content archiving thanks to the fabulous Archive.org!
The end result? Meaningful enrichment of my relationship with the place I live, and an opportunity for me to further enrich the relationships others have with this place. [his emphasis]
In our discussion of mobile, let us not forget about the Internet of Things which Kevin Kelly describes so eloquently in this TED Talk. While sensors often come to mind with the Internet of Things, I think Alvis Brigis’ discussion of prosumers’ role, armed with smart phones, in “quantifying the world around us” is interesting. In his post, An app for every tree in Central Park by 2015?, he says:
Over the next 5 years the web will rapidly spread into the world. This will not necessarily require the abundant, cheap sensors typically referenced in conversations about The Internet of Things (which is more about direct object-to-object communication). Instead, it’s more likely that prosumers will enrich rich virtual mirror worlds and then access them via geo-coordinates at home or on the go.
Like Nam-ho, Alvis also addresses crowdsourcing and photosynthing:
Crowd-Sourced Photosynthing: Google, Microsoft and a handful of other companies are in an escalating war to most quickly map the world (no surprise as this is absolutely critical to the future of search). This battle has spread from basic maps, to Street View, and finally to 3d. 3d components are generated by stitching together satellite, aerial, and ground-level photographs. This process is now taking a big leap forward as new rapid photosynthing processes are developed. Photosynthing is currently less effective than building 3d models of buildings and trees from carefully taken photographs, but in the next few years we expect it to overtake standard 3d model generation in efficiency. When that happens, circa 2013/2014, it will be possible to grab public geo-tagged photographs of a given space and to automagically create fine 3d models of everything in that space. With millions of people taking photographs of central park from various angles, it’s reasonable to believe that there will be sufficient data available to crowd-source a high resolution 3d map of all the trees in Central Park in the year 2015.
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Links to entire five-post series:
7th December 2011
