Jon Udell has a screencast and a discussion of photo tagging in the Vista Photo Gallery: Tagging and foldering in Photo Gallery.
While I think tagging is a cool geek idea, how do you make it more automatic, and if automatic, how do you make it correct and useful? Let alone inter-op with all applications, beyond the OS, that want to use the tags?
One thing that worries me looking into an XMP is that XMP is going to become like RSS: littered with namespace extensions of companies and people who don't understand what's already there or people who don't have a foggiest notion of well-formed XML (e.g., Apple and it's initial audio-cast streams).
Think if you had to write an RSS feed parser (really simple syndication, right?): how many special cases and work-arounds would you have to put in?
Meta-data is on the edge of falling into the same pit.
(Oh, and P.S.: it's a shame that the first comment on Jon's post above is someone ragging on him for being Microsoft focused on the technology being covered; get-over it! Go blog yourself about how great some other piece of technology is and don't have such a shallow sense of self you have to rag on someone for not tooting your horn.)
¶ 2/21/2007 10:13:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Jon Udell has the following entry: Truth, files, microformats, and XMP.
It's interesting to me because I'm working through in my mind how to take a GPS GPX track file, Virtual Earth, and a bunch of photos taken over time near the GPX track file, and merge these all together, allowing the meta data in the photo to have lat / lon info inserted in (or updated).
Mr. Udell's article then led to:
Microsoft Photography Blog, and
Professional photography with Windows XP (see downloads for the Microsoft Photo Info tool).
As more useful metadata both gets into photos and is exposed by photos to be manipulated, really interesting scenarios come into play, especially around the photos you collect from friends and family.
What will be especially interesting is if thumbnails expose a bit of this metadata as embedded microformats, allowing search engines to do more accurate search results for media.
I mentioned to Chad a super-interesting group in Microsoft recently and he highly recommended the book Future of Memories: Sharing Digital Photos; by Dane Howard. Ends up MSLibrary has a copy so it's on the way to my building! MSLibrary - another great benefit of working at Microsoft.
When I think of a hard-disk crash at home right now it scares the bejeezus out of me to think what I could lose, especially those early pictures from my first Kodak digital camera. It makes me think of wiring stuff up to S3, let alone burning (and hopefully not losing) a stack of DVDs.
But that's just archiving. Organizing, coalescing, building, linking, sharing... hard stuff with wild rewards.
I look forward to Dane's book. Seems to be the right book at the right time.
Alright! There was a bit of a services burp but now things are back to normal and I can publish via Word 2007 to my Blogger-managed account again. I had switched to the new Blogger (hoping for some snazzy layout magic – except that seems to be reserved for BlogSpot blogs and not FTP blogs) and for a bit the new Word didn't work well registering that account.
Fortunately the issue was looked into on both sides of the equation and it all is working. Just in time for our one-week old release.
So, if you have Word 2007, give it a try! For quick blogging, especially linking to something, I still enjoy Windows Live Writer, but WLW doesn't have grammar check and it doesn't have the new blue line, and I need all the language help I can get.
Via Scoble, a link to the VUVOX demo: DEMO.com VUVOX - VUVOX Network, Inc. .
Interesting build environment, I wonder if the audience audio was cut off though? I would have like to have heard if there were any "Wows" to what they were showing. Some of it seemed non-Wow-ie to me. I of course want more info about their bits and if it's all script (doubtful...). And what's their monetization strategy?
Anyway, another reason to link to it is to have a link to the DEMO site in general. The demonstrations have to be short, so it's a good way to see how the good presenters quickly go through the highlights of what they are showing down to the most essential message.
¶ 2/01/2007 03:36:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
I'm not sure how long it's live, but here's the clip of Stephen Colbert talking about wikilobbying and reality as a commodity (found from Brian Jones' blog).
Good to know that reality is currently protected from Colbert vandalism.
¶ 2/01/2007 12:25:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
