I've been thinking of how there are more and more picture / mapping services like how flickr ties into Yahoo maps and how this will (shortly) lead into your camera (cell phone??) being GPS enabled and encoding where you took the picture along with the other meta information - when. That will be pretty cool in itself as it allows you to easily upload pictures to a service and see everything laid out on a map.
The cool part will be when someone takes the meta information and co-relates it to the tags that people have added - what. You'll be able to mine a site like flickr to figure out that all the pictures at this location are likely to be the Eiffel Tower. By linking when and where, you will no longer have to rely on people tagging things the same to associate images of the same event.
Everyone's photos will add to the collective and with photo tourism, 3d models and walk through's will be possible of just about any location. Now they'll have data to make a holodeck. That's step 2. ;-)
It'll be cool as long as the companies are thinking "Privacy Privacy Privacy" all the time. Regular people don't realise how these "mashups" can result in people knowing a lot about their personal lives.
ReplyDeletePart of it is educating the public, the other part is protecting the public from the downsides of the cool technology.