Nancy’s Blog

NY Times Sunday Jan 6:

The British novelist/actor/comedian/poetry tutor Stephen Fry is quoted as saying of booksignings– in the past someone wanting a picture “would go behind the signing table to put an arm round me or a hand on my shoulder as I signed the book with a flourish while looking up into the lens grinning soupily. Of course B wouldn’t be acquainted with A’s particular make of camera. Today everyone has a camera. They have a dedicated digital machine or something built into their mobile phone. As a result of this ubiquity the signing queue has become such a living hell that I don’t do them anymore. All the pleasure has been sucked out.”

I said before that I have a new Nokia N-80, courtesy of my friends at Nokia. I’m using it a lot for both its camera function and its web access. What prevents it from being a viable working multiple artifact: power.

Web access: I’m surprised at how much I use the N-80 for web access: for Gmail and for Google searching. I used to think I didn’t want my email in my pocket all the time, but I find it extremely convenient to have all-the-time email access. For example:

• to check to see if a meeting is still on.
• to send a quick note, instead of having to remember to do it when I’m back at a computer.
• to use wait-time to deal with some quick email, or delete msgs I don’t have to deal with.

And I use the Google searching:

• Was in SF yesterday and didn’t know the exact addresses of two stores I wanted to go to; found them online.
• Was at a meeting with a friend who asked if I knew which person on the room was so-and-so; I searched Google images and the person was sitting 2 rows in front of us.
• I was in a bookstore looking for a book for which I remembered the title but not the author.
• In a meeting during an earthquake — a friend found the magnitude faster than I did (3.4) as we both searched our handhelds.

None of these are major, and most could be dealt with another way or don’t need to be dealt with at all. But what I like is that these noticeably reduce some of the small stresses of daily living. Finding the store or the book easily reduces the effort, the mental tension, and the time required. Needing to remember something for later is a small but noticeable burden — and not remembering can escalate to a problem. We didn’t NEED to know the magnitude of the quake, but for those of us who remember the ‘89 quake, there’s always the possibility that what doesn’t feel like a major shake just mean that we are on the edge of a major quake.

Life is full of stresses, small and large — something that eliminates some of the small ones contributes to the quality of life.

Camera: The N-80 camera has most of the features of a medium-price digital camera. It can be fully automatic, but the photographer can also control the exposure, color saturation, and contrast. It has flash with red-eye reduction, and a significant zoom. And, until Zonetags is ready for this generation of phones, I can upload to Flickr using Lifeblog. The result is that I’m more inclined to grab my N-80 when I see something photogenic (and not just my cats).

I was in a store looking at desk combinations for my study at home. I wanted to remember what the alternatives looked like and, of course, measure the pieces — so I took pictures of the pieces with my measuring tape, instead of writing down all the measurements.

Power: The problem, of course, is that all these functions use power, and I’m exhausting the N-80 much faster than I did my previous cameraphone. I’m working at exhausting and recharging the battery several times, as is recommended to max the life of batteries (and which no one I know but me actually does). I have chargers at home, office, and car, so most of the time power is not a concern — but I’m not inclined to, for example, take the N-80 as my only camera to some places where I might otherwise, for fear of running out of power. I most need its networking function where I don’t have a computer, where not likely to have a power supply.

It’s likely that I’ll find more new uses of the N-80 and make it increasingly a part of my life — as long as I’m not limited by a concern for running out of power. Nokia and the service providers would of course like for us to integrate these devices as fully as possible in daily life — but we won’t be able to as long as power is a concern.

I am finding that what I like most about ZoneTags is not the geo-tagging (not during my daily life) but the automatic uploading.  Uploading from my “real” camera to my laptop to Flickr is not hard, but certainly takes more effort, and more steps.

And while my “real” camera takes better pictures, my recent spate of kitten-in-a-pot photos are much more successful with the cameraphone.  My regular camera has too many dangling things — neck strap and lens cover.  The kittens attack the camera (and therefore stop whatever they’re doing).  The unobtrusiveness of cameraphones works even better with pets than with people.

Put these two together and when the cats do something photogenic, I’m more likely to reach for my cameraphone than my camera.

More on ZoneTags: how it has changed my photo practices:

• I was taking cameraphone pictures, uploading them, then reviewing them to see which I wanted to leave on Flickr. I often take multiple shots of the same subject, to see which will turn out best. When I went online, I would often find that an image that I decided to delete had already had several views. This was inconvenient for viewers, I assume: they would see multiple shots, including poor ones. The adjustment that I made: mark photos private by default, instead of public, and then change some to public when I viewed them. So, instead of take, upload, and edit, now I take, upload privately, edit, and then make public later.
• At the moment of taking, I am aware that the pictures that I take are or may be viewed by others. Sometimes I take pics that I might not have, for that reason; until I realized I could just make them private, I would sometimes NOT take pictures that I thought might not fit what I thought my audience wanted to see (e.g., how many cute kitten photos will they tolerate?).
• I would like more discrimination about which photos are visible to whom: some of my friends like lots of kitten pictures! The friends/family distinction isn’t sufficiently fine-grained for this.
• I would like an easy way to link pictures made in the same time and place by me and others who are present. It wasn’t critical to be able to link my picture with Elizabeth’s when we took ZoneTag pictures of one another. But in other circumstances there could be more reason to want to be able to gather the pictures taken in that place and time. Other people in the room were taking ZoneTag pictures, too, but I’m not sure who, and some were people I don’t know. Imagine something very significant happening, and us wanting to connect all those images. It should be easy.
  • Bluetagging (which we did with my colleague Marc Davis’ MMM2 system) would do this, but (1) we aren’t bluetagging, and (2) that raises privacy issues. I don’t need to see all the pictures made by those people, just the ones made in the same time and place with mine.

Dueling Zonetag Cameraphones

Originally uploaded by NVH.

ZoneTag Photo Friday 15:06:56

Originally uploaded by xeeliz.

I’ve started using Yahoo/Flickr’s ZoneTags system for cameraphone images. Later, when I have more time (and more experience with it) I’ll write a longer comment. Here’s the short take:

• I VERY MUCH like it that it makes uploading cameraphone images easy. After each image is captured it asks whether I want to upload it to Flickr. Since it’s often hard to tell, on the small screen, whether the picture is any good, the auto-upload makes it easy to review images on a larger screen later and delete the bad ones.
• This means, obviously, that more of my cameraphone images get uploaded to Flickr. In the past I would periodically bluetooth the images to my laptop, look at them, and then pick some to upload. Now I tend to upload and edit rather than edit and upload.
• This has meant a switch in my thinking about my cameraphone images, thinking of them more often as public/communicative. This has made me self-conscious about all the kitten photos I’m taking. I’m not at all self-conscious about how many I’ve taken with my “real” camera (kittens are cute but that’s hard to capture, and they move a lot, so I assume it’ll take tons of pics to get one or two excellent ones) — because no one but me sees that. But with my upload-and-edit use of ZoneTags, by the time I get to my Flickr page the images often have many views and even comments. And kitten photos are about as generic as one can get. Not sure what I’ll do when images are more personal. (Note to viewers of my Flickr stream: the kitten photos will taper off, I promise. But there’s not much else going on in my life right now that’s photo-worthy. And the kittens are, well, they’re still kittens.)
• This also hasme thinking more about what I might take pictures of — that might be of interest to my viewers. Again, more public/communicative. Hearkens back to the MMM2 days when I was consciously taking pictures of things I saw around Berkeley.
• I am getting more comments on my photos — maybe because I’ve also picked up more viewers and contacts lately.
• I’m not so crazy about the automatic location tagging (which I can choose not to do). Mostly because (1) in daily life I don’t need it, I travel mostly between home and campus, and (2) I do have privacy concerns. But I do like the idea for when I’m travelling.

Good article on LifeHacker.  I won’t repeat their points, since the article itself is concise.  Don’t bother following their links to other articles — they all say the same things.

We had a very successful workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing (PICS) at Ubicomp 2006. Cameraphone-related research from around the world.

In addition to talking about our work, we did a field trip at Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach with ZoneTag-enabled cameraphones. Pictures are on Flickr — we had 5 groups with Flickr userids pics2006a through e. I liked ZoneTags, but I quickly got frustrated with the tagging — although ZoneTags makes it fast by suggesting tags, it’s still slow, working through the different screens and checking/unchecking tags. I quickly stopped tagging and just hit “upload.” However, this wasn’t always a good idea. Tags and title persist across images, which is both good and bad — it saves work if you are re-using tags, but it led us to mis-tag and mis-title images when we just hit “upload” and didn’t go back through the tags.