see a puffin eat a fish

Is now on my blog (look to the right), in (mostly) real time. For real. I’ve actually incorporated Fire Eagle into my daily activity. A while ago I wiped out my N95 and decided that the extra hoops ZoneTag wants me to jump through to upload my images to Flickr weren’t really worth it. It was much simpler for me to use the native photo app and send MMS photos to Flickr.

Well I was right, without ZoneTag my photo uploading interaction was simplified, but I really missed having a photo’s location on Flickr. And I would get ‘where are you?’ comments on my photos, so my friends must have gotten used to ZoneTag too. Today I reinstalled ZoneTag and noticed the Fire Eagle integration. Well since i’m uploading photos w/location info on a daily basis, why not keep my location current? All I have to do to get that working is authenticate ZoneTag against Fire Eagle. No problem.

So far so good, but then how do I display my location? The Fire Eagle application gallery has a number of integration points (Loki, Dopplr, Outside.in) but all I wanted to do was display my location on a blog, not have to deal with yet another service. There is no Wordpress integration in the Fire Eagle application gallery, but I did track down a Wordpress widget Klaus Komenda wrote appropriately titled ‘I am Here’. After hacking at it for a bit (incorrect paths, outdated versions of the Fire Eagle libraries, adding support for older wordpress versions, etc.) I got it to work with my blog.

My integration is still a little busted up, the map isn’t showing just yet, but it’s a great start. Now all I have to do is go somewhere else, take a photo and see if my location badge updates. If anyone is interested in how I got this thing going, let me know. Maybe i’ll even write up a WordPress plugin of my own.

This weekend in Philly, I attended the broadcast side of Shawn’s show for a gallery in Jamaica Plain, MA. Shawn showed videos (one of which featured Anna) and broadcast awkardly from a basement. It wasn’t social or interactive, the content only flowed one way and the packed house on the other end couldn’t provide any feedback. No call ins, no clapping, no support from the remote audience.

From the Times, pictures and audio diaries from the last stop of every train line. I love these kinds of projects that are driven by simple, beautiful thoroughness.

236.com is doing animated versions of Get Your War On. Very cool. + I found this out from the New York magazine’s approval matrix. Half way between lowbrow and highbrow and all the way to the right, meaning brilliant.

Great article in the Sunday Magazine on the science of merging and how our self righteousness has the habit of having unintended consequences. The cast includes exit-laners, line uppers, side zoomers and other lane drivers. Very Seussian.