Photos don't link?
Hmmm... I wrote my last post as a stream of thought as I was analyzing moblogging. Here's some more. Going back and thinking about it, my main problem is that there is no interactivity. But now I'm rethinking the thought and wondering to myself if that's the problem, then what's the solution?
Okay, many years ago I learned the lesson of Interesting Album Photos which is "always have a person in the picture." If you go on vacation and take a picture of a mountain or a view, later it's pretty boring and you ask yourself "what's this photo of?". People, however, are always great to see... "What were you wearing? Look at how tan I was! Who is that girl you're with?", etc.
And that's really the point. What do we take photos of? Well with the crappy digital cameras that are in mobile phones, we're not taking pictures of sunsets and wild flowers. We're taking pics of people, right?!?
So here's my thoughts. If you quickly labeled the photos before you blogged, if your server was intelligent, it could start linking, grouping and organizing these photos. Sort of a visual FOAF. Actually, you could use FOAF for this! I take a picture of John, who I know has a home page at a certain address, then I label it and post. When the photo arrives at the server it automatically links to other photos of John and to his moblog site, where you can see HIS photos and HIS links. Suddenly you're creating a network of people that you can see via their photos.
This labeling could continue. You could have a dictionary of labels and their links. If I take a picture of a monument, it could have links to that home page. If I take a picture of a train, I could have a label that corresponds to that make and model... yes, I'm talking about Mobile Train Spotting (you heard it here first).
Hmmmm... I'll have to put some more thought into this, but I think this might be the right direction. But how do you - still mobile - get that feedback which makes blogging so fun?
-Russ