The ultimate photoblogging toolset: Nokia + Flickr + ZoneTags

The combination of a decent camera phone, ZoneTags and Flickr hits a sweet spot that I can't stop telling my friends and family about.  Unfortunately, few of them are using Flickr yet, but that should change very soon.

I have the Nokia 6630 which takes nice images at 1.3 megapixels.  And I've equipped it with the recently launched ZoneTags from Yahoo! Research.  ZoneTags automatically flags a location on every photo I take.  More importantly, it automatically uploads my photos directly to my Flickr account immediately after I take a picture with my phone.

This will not only open up a world of photobloggers and a massive stream of new RSS feeds, but it will enable some fantastic mapping possibilities.  Satellite imagery will always be fascinating, but how cool is it that we're now applying historical visualizations of events in time and space from human perspectives?

This reminds me that I need to re-watch the movie 'Smoke'.  Harvey Keitel takes the same photo in the same location of the same smoke shop every day to show us the depth of the things right in front of us:

"People say you have to travel to see the world.  Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle."

The simple application of this technology combo, though, is the ability to give my friends and family a stream of visual content from my life that is otherwise just too hard to manage still.  Downloading stuff off my camera isn't really that much of a hassle, but it definitely becomes a chore.  My wife has stopped doing it herself and just lets the camera sit full of images for weeks at a time or until I download them.

Flickr hardcores have known for a long time that this moment was coming.  They may even get annoyed when the wider world figures this out and crowds the pool.

However, there are still two things that need to happen, in my mind, before we hit the goal line for this combination of services:

1) Video.  I need Flickr to host videos I capture with my phone.  I don't really need more storage on my phone if this works (though it would be nice), as Flickr will serve that purpose.
2) Private RSS feeds.  I want to put the Flickr feed of my private family photos on my mother-in-law's start page.  She should always see the latest photo of her granddaughter when she opens a browser.  That is more important to her than today's news, the weather or her stocks.  And I don't want those images to be public.

There's no doubt that this toolset will be user-friendly enough for technophobes, and it may bring a wave of older generation types into the photosphere, at least those who aren't afraid of cameraphones. 

I'm a little frightened by what teenagers will do with it, but that's why we don't call them adults and feel comfortable shaking our heads when they do something stupid.  Bring it on, kids.  A new medium is here.  Show us what it can do.

Comments:

Re: The ultimate photoblogging toolset: Nokia + Flickr + ZoneTags
by ian kennedy on Tue 04 Apr 2006 04:21 PM EDT iankennedy

"She should always see the latest photo of her granddaughter when she opens a browser."

Why stop at the browser. There are several utilities that will change your desktop photo or screensaver based on an rss feed of flickr photos. At CES they showed a couple of photoframes that could take an RSS feed via wireless as well.

http://cavitate.net/flashpoint/2006/01/wi_fi_enabled_lcd_picture_frame.html

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