I finally joined the 21st Century and set up this live photoblog.
Technically my phonecam belongs to its manufacturer, Nokia. But it's mine for the semester.
(Definitions: A phonecam is a mobile phone with a camera built in. A live photoblog, also called a "moblog," is a site where snapshots from a phonecam appear live as they're taken in the field; the photographer can update the site using nothing but a phonecam.)
The phonecam I'm babysitting is a Nokia 3650; it can capture still photos, audio and short video segments, and it can send this content to any e-mail address. With a little messing around, you can use this to build a photoblog.
I'm working on a project for Nokia at Berkeley; we're developing applications for these phonecams and creating metadata frameworks that we hope will make it easier for regular people to create, annotate, retrieve, share and work with photos and video. Here are details of the project.
Stay tuned...
Yeah! Oh my gosh. You are going to be sooooooooooo addicted! I've felt lost without a phonecam and didn't feel 'right' to just blog written musings. Poor Dav is busy as a bee but is trying to help me so I can post several photos at once...the phone seems to allow only 1 pic per email which sucks! Since I've been spoiled with Japan, my standards are way high...I'm ususally happy with whatever technology offers, but this time, I know exactly what I want. I'm still thinking of a new site name but wanna show SF tidbits from an outsider/Japanese perspective...maybe...it all flows into whatever it's gonna be anyway as I get in the groove. The 'voice' kinda develops on its own in relation to the city...let's exchange experiences...and we must simul-moblog each other with our phones, OK?
Posted by: mie on September 21, 2003 09:30 AMMine allows you to attach multiple photos to a message... Just get an e-mail ready to go with one photo, then choose SELECT -> INSERT -> IMAGE. Repeat for each image. At least that's how -my- phone is; mine is actually the British model and the Nokia folks say that some portions of it are different, but I doubt that would be one of them.
BUT -- your e-mail server on the receiving end, or the service provider on the sending end, might impose a maximum size on e-mail message length. So you couldn't just send dozens of photos on one message; it would reject a message that's too big.
Maybe they have a very low ceiling on that and that's what you're running into... In any case your service provider can tell you, or you could test it via e-mail from/to other e-mail accounts.
By the way you/Dav might want to check out the following two software tools that I found which run on 3650's. They supposedly help you photoblog from the field with Moveabletype, and they both are based on J2ME (a java-based mobile device platform) so Dav can probably work his mojo with them:
http://www.blogplanet.net/manual.shtml
http://www.rawthought.com/projects/kablog/
I think/hope these tools will make moblogging much more efficient than dealing with the multi-step e-mail based scheme I have going now... And I want to set up a lot more control on how photos will be displayed (tell it to rotate a sideways photo from the phone, compress the photos better, etc.) PHP can handle that if these tools can't...
Posted by: sean on September 21, 2003 04:35 PMGroovy...
Have been considering this for some time, now I'm feeling really inspired...
What software are you using at the server end to blog the entries?
Posted by: tbn97 on September 24, 2003 07:31 AMI'm limping along with Moveabletype and mfop2. The first is excellent blogging software and the second is a basic e-mail based service that allows you to mail it photos and have them automatically posted on your blog. Trouble is, it doesn't give you any control over image size, rotation, etc., and it doesn't allow for thumbnails.
When I get a chance I want to configure Kablog or possibly Blogplanet (see links above) and if necessary screw around a bit in PHP to allow for that.
-Sean