As some of you may know, I've been testing out a Gigapan panorama photo system over the last week, after I received a loaner of their robotic camera mount from Carnegie Mellon's robotics lab. I brought it in to NPR to demonstrate it to colleagues and go on a photo safari to photograph the architecture at Union Station. Apparently, as far as Union Station's security operations are concerned, that's a criminal offense, since we nearly got arrested.
Here's a low-res version of the photo. Click the image to see the extreme high-res, half-a-gigapixel Gigapan version. (Don't worry, it loads dynamically, so don't worry about the size of the pic.)
I just got my hands on a Gigapan, a robotic camera mount developed by Carnegie Mellon University's robotics lab that allows you to take gigapixel-resolution pictures. And what does Dizzy try to do? Take over the photo shoot. Typical. -andy
Yesterday, I saw a note from the WBUR Twitter account pointing to a blog post about their recent experiments with Twitter. For those of you who don't know WBUR, it's an NPR member station in Boston that's been doing a lot of tinkering in the social media space as of late, so I follow their work pretty closely.
In his blog post, WBUR's Ken George talks about some of their social media projects, and how they're now heading into unknown waters with Twitter:
Now our media giant lumbers head first into the world of Twitter.
After dusting off the mostly dormant WBUR Twitter account, and fortified with copious amounts of coffee, I managed to accrue a modest following (hey its quality, not quantity right?). But in all honesty, I remain uncertain - to the point of apprehension - about what I should "Tweet" about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?
An excellent example of Twitter's utility is public radio station KPBS using it to receive updates on wildfires then consuming swaths of southern California, information they then could relay over the airwaves. My own personal "ah-ha!" moment came yesterday afternoon when someone Tweeted me about a misspelling on the site. It just then dawned on me that WBUR too now has a potential army of researchers and fact-checkers at its disposal. The cranial cavity expanded six inches yesterday... cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra."
So maybe the right question is: In what ways can we help each other?
Lemme spin that question another way, if I may: What would I expect of WBUR - and any other public broadcaster, for that matter - as far as Twitter is concerned?
One of our favorite things to do when the weather is nice is to take Kayleigh to Wheaton Regional Park, just north of Washington DC, where they have a charming toy train that rides through the park. I thought it would be fun to stream a live tour of the train ride; here's the archive of the video I shot.
During lunch at NPR today, a group of people from around the company brought in their instruments and participated in a jazz jam session. I had my Nokia n95 phone with me, and shot this video of them performing Miles Davis' All Blues.
I am so envious my NPR colleague David Gilkey got to shoot this footage of adolescent pandas at a research facility in China. As you'll see in the video, he had extraordinary, up-close access to the pandas. They are so cute it's almost painful.
It's also worth noting that the video was posted on the brand-new NPR YouTube channel. I'm hoping you'll see a lot more videos from us there in the coming months, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, there's also a high-resolution version of the video on NPR's Chengdu Diary, a travel blog published by the team at All Things Considered as they prepare to do a live broadcast series from Chengdu, China. -andy
With the Pope in DC this week, I thought I'd run down to the White House to see the Pope travel down Pennsylvania Ave in his famous Popemobile. I streamed some video on my mobile phone; here are some of the highlights.
Crowds of people - supporters and protesters alike - gathering along Pennylvania Ave. (This video is long; about 20 minutes.)
Video of the Popemobile passing by in a flash:
Anti-Pope/anti-gay protesters in front of the White House:
In preparation for the Pope's visit to DC this week, the good people who run our public transit system put together this promotional video to encourage people to ride Metro for Pope-related activities. They even have the Pope himself doing a cameo in the video - as a bobblehead toy.
Could be worse, I suppose - they could have employed a Pope-On-A-Rope as a prop.
This week I gave a talk at the University of Maryland/Baltimore's School of Networking Nursing on the role of social networking in education. I took a look at the history of online communities and the role educators have played in their development, as well as what tools are being used by teachers today - in particular, do-it-yourself social networking tools like Ning. I also talked a bit about new tools like Twitter, Qik and Utterz. Here's the Powerpoint:
I've been playing around with my new Nokia N95 for the last couple of weeks and quite amazed with its ability to stream live video from the phone to the Internet. Like last weekend when I streamed from the Smithsonian Kite Festival; for around 30 minutes I gave a tour of the festivities and took questions from users as they watched the stream over the Internet.
I've also spent some time talking it up with colleagues at NPR, brainstorming the possibilities of what would happen if reporters used these phones - or if their sources did. The example that keeps coming to mind regarding the latter scenario is the rioting in Tibet. While some video has leaked out, it's been limited and often delayed. Imagine if the protestors were able to webcast their protests - and the ensuing crackdowns - live over their phones using China's GSM network? The video would stream live and get crossposted via tools like YouTube, Seesmic and Twitter, spreading the content around so it can't be snuffed.
But that raises an obvious question - how long could protestors or dissidents get away with such activities before getting caught? If you were running software on your phone to send live video over a 3G network, like I've been doing on my N95, you'd think it wouldn't take too much effort on the part of the mobile provider and/or government to figure out which phone was sending the signal and its precise location.
So that got me wondering: is there a mobile equivalent of Tor?
For those of you who aren't familiar with it, TOR is a software project that helps Internet users remain anonymous. Running the TOR software on your computer causes your online communications to bounce through a random series of relay servers around the world. That way, there's no easy way for authorities to track you or observe who's visiting banned websites. For example, let's say you're in Beijing and you publish a blog the authorities don't like. If you just used your PC as usual and logged into your publishing platform directly, they could follow your activities and track you down. With Tor, you hop-scotch around: your PC might connect to a server in Oslo, then Buenos Aires, then Miami, then Tokyo, then Greece before it finally connects to your blogging platform. Each time you did this, it would be a different series of servers. That way, it's really difficult for authorities to trace your steps.
As dissidents and protestors embrace mobile devices for conducting civil disobedience or recording human rights violations, it would make sense for Tor and projects like it to adapt to their needs. That way, if that hypothetical protestor in Lhasa tried to stream live video over Qik, post a photo to Flickr or record a mobcast via over Utterz, they'd lessen the chance of getting caught so easily.
Does anyone know if there's a mobile equivalent of Tor, relaying voice connections or data from one network to another, anonymizing the user of the phone? If not, is it technically feasible? How might one go about creating one?
