Geo-localisation boom and future historians

Flickr users broke the 10 millions geotagged photo milestone few days ago.

This is already impressive given the manual process users have to go through (drag and drop the pictures on the map or using Picassa + Google Earth + Flickr upload for example).

As GPS + Bluetooth chips are coming soon for 1$ it is obvious that future mobiles phones and camera will automatically and accurately geotag and date all the pictures we take.

As more and and more people share their pictures on site like Flickr our history will be able for data-mining in a way historians never had before. Also as folksonomy continue to spread the meta-data available improve the usefulness of these data.

For an historian looking at the 21st century it will be much easier to understand how a place changed though time (environment, architecture, wealth, etc.) or find the evolution of particular objects or see any important events through the eyes of their witnesses.

All this is possible thanks to amateurs tagging and geotagging their contents in a public way which can be mutualized by sites and API like Flickr.

Oh by the way ... amateurs can also then access these data to become historians ...

Other links:

Geotagged pictures on Flickr
My geotagged pictures on Flickr

"Wikipedia and Knowledge Communities"

While assemblying an Ikea shelf ... my ears discovered another interesting presentation which landed on my iPod (my main M-learning tool) :

"Wikipedia and Knowledge Communities" is a presentation of Mitchell Kapor available on Open Source conversations.

Wikipedia is probably one of the most impressive Pro'Am project and there's plenty of interesting thoughts and informations in this presentation.

The Wikipedia is having a dramatic and unexpected impact as an open source-based, community-driven method of creating and disseminating valuable knowledge and information on a global basis. How is a free and open online encyclopedia, entirely written and edited by its users, managing to outstrip conventional media in audience, breadth, and depth? What are the implications for other kinds of content, for publishing, and for information technology, especially open source-based business models in general?

Mitchell Kapor, President of the Open Source Applications Foundation discusses the controversial aspects of the Wikipedia, particularly the fact that anyone can edit any article at any time. He believes that while the user-written model has problems, it can succeed with the right mix of community and peer review. He states that it is not necessary for someone to be in charge. In the end, he says that the Wikipedia can't possibly work... but it does.

User generated online video boom

According to Sreendigest (a media analyst firm):

London 15th January 2007: The user generated online video market (UGOV) exploded in 2006 and by the end of the year, user generated videos made up 47% of the total online video market in the US. By 2010 more than half (55%) of all the video content consumed online in the US will be user generated, representing 44 billion video streams.

Although accounting for more than half of all online video content consumed – user generated videos will make up just 15% of total revenues. These are the latest findings from Screen Digest, the media analyst firm, which today releases its latest report on the UGOV market.

Source: screendigest

Unsigned band make chart history

Another example of emergent success without the help of the big labels.

Essex rock band Koopa have made chart history by becoming the first unsigned band to land a UK top 40 hit.

Koopa, from Colchester, have been together for seven years in various forms and have built up a fanbase on the internet and on the live circuit.

The BBC article.

"Amateur Means You Do It For Love"

... is the title of an interesting presentation I found on my iPod (from IT Conversations feed):

The presentation (from Dave Slusher)