RasterWeb!I tried reading up on Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions Specification but the page would not validate!
I mean, come on guys! How can I take this seriously when you can’t even write valid HTML!
(Warning: This post may or may not contain some form of humor…)
We all know it’s easy to geotag a web page and geotagging photos is pretty common. In fact the geo-wankers think that every camera should geotag photos as they are taken, which is cool with me (and some manufacturers are doing this already) but as I’ve been working more with audio and video, I wonder how geotagging should work. The reason for this is because while a photo easily represents a moment in time at a specific location, audio and video are time-based media, which may have starting points, ending points, and many points in between.
On RasterWeb! we tag each post with lat/lon values and those values also appear in the RSS 2.0 feed. This more or less works, unless I post an entry about traveling from one place to another.
Anyway, this came up because in the videoblogging group there were some thoughts about geotagging the RSS 2.0 feeds so that the items, which also contain enclosures which are videos, could be geotagged. The problem again lies in the fact that you can easily start shooting a video and start driving and end up 30 miles from where you started. Or you could shoot video with footage from many locations and prsent it all as one. Does the geodata need to be embedded within the audio/video stream?
This seems like one of those problems that we can’t easily bootstrap ourselves without manufacturers of equipment building the features into the products they design. I could be wrong on this (and hope I am) and maybe there is a hack to do it, I’m just not the one to do it right now. Still, I think it’s an interesting problem…
Remember last week? It was my birthday! Rather than post any photos from the birthday party, I’ll just show you photos from Flickr taken on June 18, 2005 that match the word “party”, ok?
I guess that Gnomedex thing is going on, but of course, I’m not actually there, so I don’t know.
My idea for the day though was this: I’ve got cell phone numbers for at least three people there, and could possibly even dig up a few more. I thought about calling some of them and saying “Hey, meet me at the Citizen Media session…” or whatever. (If you want to get really tricky scour Flickr for Gnomedex photos of places/things you can reference.) I would then hope that people would mention that I was there but failed to actually find me. One must be elusive, like the unicorn!
Obviously I’ve blown my cover by writing about this. None the less, feel free to borrow my plan…
Ha! Look at that! blood and mathowie discuss me… (I said “discuss” not “disgust” mind you!)
But if that were the case, then all the early bloggers would be well known. RasterWeb (b. 1997), Now This (b. 1997), and the Bradlands (b. 1998) should have much more traffic than you…
The funny thing is, it’s sort of like “Hey, they’ve been around forever and are still unpopular! Which happens to be just fine with me, as popularity has never really been a goal of RasterWeb! or a goal of mine either…
For the record (not that anyone will read this, since, you know, I am unpopular and have no readers even though I’ve been at it for nearly 8 years…) Where was I? Rambling again, maybe that’s my problem… Ah yes, To give back to the internet, to share what I know, to open ports of communication and all that, to discuss with like-minded freak, geeks, and nerds the things I find fascinating, to write, and rant, and make cool things… I love the internet! Creative people need an outlet. Need it! Without that they go insane. This is one of my outlets…
I also think that what Matt overlooks is that he created or was involved with some very high-profile web sites, and was employed by high-profile companies, and of course does not live in the midwest. I also don’t really go to conferences or hang out with the cool kids of blogging, so few people really know me that well outside of this site. Crap, I’ve known Dave Winer on mailing lists and the web for like 10 years now, and last fall he thought I lived in Denmark or something!
Highlight of my day, mathowie says:
I still read RasterWeb…
Thanks Matt!
(BTW, the proper spelling is RasterWeb! but I’ll let it go, as I certainly don’t expect people to remember such minute details… I truly will claim the title of “toiling away in obscurity longer than anyone else…” Foo!)
(Update: rebecca fixed the spelling, except for the ! but I’m all Yahoo!-like with that anyway…)