Michael Zimmer.org

The New York Times recently extolled the virtues of using GPS in digital cameras and camera cellphones to “geotag” photos with the location at which they were taken:
…advocates of geotagging, like Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the photo-sharing Web site Flickr, contend that linking pictures to maps can lend a new dimension to photography. For one thing, it can help people make some sense of the mounds of photos accumulating on their hard drives.
”The value may not be immediately apparent. But 10 years from now, nobody who’s geotagging their photos is …

FlickrInspector is a new tool to help make amateur data-mining of Web 2.0 more efficient. Enter a Flickr username, user ID, or email, and FlickrInspector gives you all the “publicly available” information on that Flickr user, including “interestingness”, recently uploaded photos, favorites, contacts, tags, sets, etc.
It’s a convenient way to stalk learn more about your favorite Flickr user, all in one place.
[via Lifehacker]

Imagine you’re partying with some friends, and you take a photo of the group. Everyone is having a good time, drinking, smoking, etc. You want to post the photo to your Flickr, MySpace or Facebook account, but think maybe you should crop out the face of your friend who was smoking pot in the photo, since you don’t want to get him in trouble. Well, depending on your camera and software used to crop the photo, there’s a good chance someone downloading that photo from your website might find his …

I’ve stumbled across a few blog posts extolling the virtues of having a GPS-enabled digital camera. For example:
My wife doesn’t want to have to carry around two bulky devices and greatly extend the already considerable time it takes her to get photos online by manually tagging photos with lat-long, she just wants to be able to find all the 2004 photos of the kids in New Zealand in one quick search.
Yep, that is a cool benefit of having locational data automatically attached to the photos that we post and share …

Today’s Colloquium on Information Technology & Society at NYU Law School featured talk by Jonathan Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on recent developments in facial recognition technologies and algorithms. Some of the results suggested that having more than one image of a subject in the database to compare to improved the accuracy and reliability of the system (which makes sense).
My concern with such a finding is that if the makers and users of facial recognition systems see a value in having multiple pictures of me …