| Phonecams and moblogs | 2003-06-16 22:49 0 comments |
 by Flemming FunchI'm green with envy about not having a cell phone with built-in camera. Xeni Jardin has a nice article in Wired about the phonecam phenomenon. The trend started innocuously a few years ago, when novelty cameras that plugged into mobile handsets were marketed to gadget-obsessed kids in Japan and Europe. But in the past few months, a global phonecam revolution has begun to emerge. Take the device's portability, add its ability to post images online, multiply by its growing ubiquity, and what do you get? A cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts.A "moblog" is then when people post pictures they take with their phonecams on weblogs. Which provides a more lively way of connecting with what people are doing and what they experience during the day. I always have a digital camera in my pocket, but still, since I have to go through several steps, of taking it home and downloading it, and uploading a picture, it isn't really something I use to document my day. But with a phonecam it would be more of a one-step process and would flow more easily. So, I'm hoping that a Nokia 3650 will fit in my budget sometime soon. Like, when I get new cell accounts in France. The deals don't look as great there yet as in some other places, but hopefully they'll get better. |