From picturephoning.com:

“What counts as newsworthy, noteworthy and photo-worthy spans a broad spectrum from personally noteworthy moments that are never shared (a scene from an escalator) to intimately newsworthy moments to be shared with a spouse or lover (a new haircut, a child riding a bike).The transformation of journalism through camera phones is as much about these everyday exchanges as it is about the latest headline”.

You can see this in evidence among the selection of users’ shots at BBC News Online. Beauty, intimacy and humanity in the everyday are more commonplace in what people share than tragedy or spectacle.

Jakob’s latest alertbox: “Mobile Devices: One Generation From Useful” in which he states that GUIs and email must be fundamentally rethought for mobile devices, rather than squishing legacy UIs from desk-based devices. Gives me the excuse to dredge something interesting written by Chris from the comments on this post:

“I’m the external examiner on a couple of undergrad multimedia design courses, and this summer I’ve seen the first set of students who design intuitively for the phone. What I mean is, they don’t need briefs telling them to design for the phone, but because they’re the texting generation, they’re as comfortable with the alphanumeric keypad and txt language as a data entry method than they are with the point and click interface.

The phone-based projects they showed me just worked. when I asked for their research, there was little. They just knew what the best methods were, because they’ve spent their entire teenage lives texting.”

Can’t wait to see some of these projects…

The NE-USA blackout is being moblogged using TextAmerica. TextAmerica has comments. The former-audience gets a former-audience peanut gallery.

Chris is asking for help from owners of SonyEricsson P800 fooochurphones with some ad-hoc cellular mapping.

» Anti-mega: UK P800 owners

Psiloc is a futurephone app that activates events and actions on your phone based on your location relative to GSM cells:

“…you can create an event to have an alarm at the moment your phone logs in (or out) a selected cell. So you will be able to sleep calmly in your train to work or school – it will wake you up precisely at your station, even if your train is late?

For places like church, theater, hospital etc. you can set a flight mode event which will just switch the phone part of your P800 off as soon as you come there! No more embarrassing rings during performance!”

» Psiloc miniGPS for SE P800
[via Chris Heathcote on a mailing list found via phil]

“it works and its FREE – send a text message saying 2 (and nothing else) to 07919 315556 and you get a text message poem sent to your mobile phone. Send 2 again and you get another different one. Funded by the Arts Council so no nasty corporations get any money and its more fun than texting to Big Brother. citypoems.co.uk“

Found at the 20six moblog, “fisharepeopletoo”. Some lovely snippets there, including the author’s odyssey through the National Health Service to get a plastercast removed from their arm – including glum and surly waiting room inhabitants and the cheery nurse poking her tongue out at moblogging patient.

Recommended.

» 20six: fisharepeopletoo

Sometimes a phrase, however mundane the context or application, just hits you like sub-bass and makes your teeth vibrate:

“The problem is that it’s very hard to get a feel for how these new planetary-scale applications might behave in the wild,” says Timothy Roscoe, a scientist at the Intel Research Berkeley Laboratory. “That’s the idea behind PlanetLab.”

Planetary-scale applications. Ooooh.

» Intel Research: PlanetLab: “Thinking Locally, Experimenting Globally” by David Pescovitz

Reason One: you won’t be able to pretend you’re in the Kings of Leon.

Reason Two: they’re installing interactive TV.

“Having hair extensions can be a lengthy business. And going blonde requires patience, dedication and sitting still for hours. But what happens when you’ve  flicked all the way through Heat magazine? If you visit some of the UK’s top salons, the answer could be staring you in the face: interactive TV screens.

The screens – each measuring about 6.4in across and designed for one customer’s individual use – run a 45-minute loop of magazine programming, with fashion, lifestyle news and advertising. They invite viewers to touch onscreen buttons for more information on certain items, with the lure of prizes and special offers.”

» ft.com: telly, telly on the wall

Matt Locke, inspired by Natalie Jeremijenko, looks at subverting our notions of what an intelligent agent might be:

“Constantly trying to make sense out of an incomplete picture, the private eye is an imperfect avatar, always a few clues short of the whole story. In the classic gum shoe novels of Raymond Chandler, this anti hero is always getting in the way rather than getting to the truth, getting implemented in the crime and led down dark alleys. How much more interesting are these double agents compared to the dumb shiny world of the intelligent agents? The double agent recognises that intelligence can never be perfect, and those who hold intelligence cast a malign, powerful shadow. After all, even the best, most discrete butler always keeps a few too many of his master’s secrets.”

» Test.org.uk: (DOUBLE) AGENCY

…it’s all about scriptable dancing bluetooth robots performing West Side Story round the watercooler:

“so damn cool, so damn script them to dance when I get email, so damn walk around my desk and stand by my diary when it’s a birthday and eat that you closed garden SPOTwatch, so all of that that it needs to be said again: Dancing Bluetooth robots!”

Oh, and before I forget, I must thank Matt Webb for his nice words about the underlying concepts of BBCi Search.

» Interconnected.org: “slipping gently into the age of ubicomp…”