see a puffin eat a fish

We’ve finally made it to Seattle after our cross country roadtrip ($414.44 in gas). While checking out Powell’s Books in Oregon, I picked up a copy of The Camera Phone Book, a new guide on mobile phone photography which mentions WayMarkr. Check out Page 65!

On another note, i’ve updated my portfolio website and added a few projects from this past spring. Always nice to stay current.

I just arrived in sunny San Jose to present WayMarkr at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference. Very cool. I’m still on east coast time and it’s pretty late where I came from so I need to get some sleep. I don’t want to miss all the great talks tomorrow. I’ll keep up on posting here but you can also see what’s going on by keeping an eye on the Where 2.0 press page.

In related news, Yahoo! Research Berkeley released Zurfer a few days (saw it on DelG’s blog), a location based, mobile Flickr photo browsing application that has strong connections to CrowdScapes. Zurfer looks really nice and in some ways where i’d like CrowdScapes to head given more time and resources.  The design is insanely tight and in a thick client package while my present version of CrowdScapes is for mobile browsers and uses WAP. Zurfer is definitely worth playing around with. I especially appreciate the server side configuration through the ‘channels‘ page.

Outside of the great article on feature creep in the financial pages this week, The New Yorker also has a long piece on Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits project. Notice how the SenseCam photos look like the WayMarkr?  The difference being that only Gordon can use the SenseCam while anyone can use the WayMarkr.

I especially enjoyed the mixed media walk through that an assistant gave to a narrated view of Gordon’s life. We only see those kinds of walthroughs for individuals deemed globally noteworthy but emerging technology will allow us to do the same for people we feel are personally noteworthy. Definitely worth the read.

I’ve been meaning to duct tape a WayMarkr to the front of a treadmill at the gym for a while now. I wanted to see the kind of funny faces I make when i’m running. I’ve also wanted to get back into running. The weather is nice and I am envious of all the people outside I see enjoying the springtime weather. In a conversation I had with Tikva yesterday around her thesis, in which she is facilitating technological interventions for people (that is helping them recede from technology), I realized that one thing that really centers me when I have too much going on is running.

This morning I went for a short run around Brooklyn Heights/Cobble Hill/Redhook with a WayMarkr taped to my lower back. I still have to perfect the adhesive method, or maybe find an exercise pouch that was originally made for iPods, so I didn’t end up with a lot of photos as the tape came loose once I got into the workout. I am surprised by the high quality photos, I thought they would be much jerkier, and as always fascinated by the rear view mirror perspective that WayMarkr affords. You can see the full photo set here.

Running, especially when you haven’t done it for a while, isn’t pleasant. Things creak and your legs feel like lead. For me the pleasure of running when not in shape is the calmness of walking after running. When you’re beat and are just glad you aren’t running. It’s kind of like the joke about the guy coming to the rabbi because his home is so noisy he cannot stand it. I’ll have to tell it to you sometime.

This past Friday Anna and I went to see Hasan Elahi speak at the ITP. Elahi is a new media artist whose career took a strange turn when he was mistakingly identified as someone of middle eastern descent that had fled Florida on September 12th and left a storage unit full of explosives. None of these things were actually true but that didn’t really matter. For the next six months he was under intense scuritny by federal agents in what can only be described as a kafka-esque nightmare. Afraid that he would be disappeared to Guantanamo Bay, to try to clear his name Elahi told the federal agents everything he could about his life to prove that he had no association with terrorists. This led to a live tracking project, a public web site where Elahi’s whereabouts and activities are constantly being documented. We can see where Elahi is, what he ate last and the last bathroom he used. By putting all this information into the public domain, Elahi is both providing the federal authorities with his whereabouts and making sure that we know he is safe. If his dot doesn’t move for a while, we know he is in trouble.

This project has some very strong overlaps with WayMarkr as both projects explore our always on, always recording, always public emerging culture. I spoke to Elahi about possibly using WayMarkr as part of his tracking project. Currently the stills he takes manually.

My favorite piece was the airport project, where Elahi sleeps in airports. Airports are ambiguous entities. Like Guantanamo, the exist physically but have no political boundaries, they are international areas. For example, i’ve been to Zurich many times because it is a major European hub, but i’ve never been to Switzerland. Elahi flies to these airports, sleeps there for several days and then he goes home. He never officially enters a country. He may be a blip on his tracking map but politically he is nowhere.