We went ahead and moved the entire thing to merb - this allows much faster performance because it can handle more than one request at a time (unlike rails). This radical a shift should be infrequent. I wanted to get the code base ready for wider use. Next is to update the iphone client and perhaps get it into the iphone store.

Yay!

next steps:

Fetch image(map image) of your location to display location.

Friday 08/15/08

Nick and I are wrapping up the application! Yay!
Remaining to be done:

• Adding a cancel button to the application
• Server-side API Rest call (Anselm)
• Designing the server-side API stuff

Thinking about 5 hours of work total.

Next steps: Thinking about the marketing of whereis

• Add to the makerlab site
• Broadcast to Twitter
• Broadcast to local locative media people
• Broadcast to our companies

The spinny globe is finally feature complete on the fundamentals. There are many things that could be improved but nothing major. The real issue now is how to get people to contribute to it.

Papervision3d is making it pretty easy for people to roll their own spinny globes. But somehow the flash community seems more interested in trying to monetize their little projects instead of contributing to something bigger. What we're really trying to do here is encourage people to contribute to a foundation and take their rewards from the larger market that would ensue. The real question is how to build community and outreach so that there is a contributor resource pool? Right now this project is resource starved. How can this be fixed?

We were approved - so all that is left is to submit a proper paper. That means we have a good shot at going to FOSS4G on September 29th in South Africa. For us this means submitting a final paper this week and as well getting the merb version of the image wiki finalized. There is one new use case to try out - which is to let people organize their own collections of images - if they can give us an rss feed or a link to a page we can return clustered versions of their collection. This lets us collect data and helps users and validates the idea for a FOSS4G audience better. Other uses such as finding duplicate images on the net are useful but FOSS4G looks more for locative applications.

We had some significant performance problems with Rails and we didn't feel like running multiple instances of rails just to service multiple upload requests. As part of this transition we decided to upgrade to github as well - since this lets us track other people's changes to the work. The new depot is at:

http://github.com/makerlab/imagewiki/tree/master

We haven't integrated this with the http://svn.makerlab.org view - but the hope would be to move everything to github or at least git.

OkStupid has several defective patterns. You can not search for dating roles outside of the traditional heterogopoly. You cannot select for a whole variety of other criteria; tattoos, Everything is phrased in a dating context with too much pressure - it is anti social.

We can imagine something different and playful.... Such as:

1) Something without words at all; where you maybe had sliders indicating things like more tattoos or less tattoos - kind of like dress up dolls; making a fetish object that is a projection of your interests. It explores the perversity of human aesthetics, mocks and ridicules the participant but in a way dissects the stresses associated with choice; liberating the participants to be expressive because they've let go of their ego.

2) Encouraging a more casual less stress out conversational tone - more about friends rather than fucking. Where you could just chat in a shared open space with each other; perhaps in a funny way perhaps in a serious way.

3) Allowing search, and allowing a wider range of personal expressiveness from the casual to the carnal. OkCupid has a tone that comes across as stilted. Perhaps this best could be accomplished by allowing one to forge multiple persona to express different character traits as separate identities.

4) Allowing for an expression of intersections rather than the self. People are often changing in response to whom they are around. There's a need for a way to reflect not what ones interests are (and to find similar matches thereof) but to find complementary interests - similar is not equal to complementary. Many of the social dating sites ask personal questions that are highly context specific and that truly fail to capture the 'wheels within wheels' that drive our deep behavior. Blake points this out in the Relationship book.

5) Federated; not a silo and not tied into an idea of secrecy. Twitter has such a huge defect in that the friends of friends are not implicitly visible; what is really desired is something vastly more social and open and anticipatory - that shows you a landscape of not personal connections but of an extended network of possible connections. Leverage Dopplr and everything else - don't be some lame little secret service in a corner.

Thoughts?

The hope right now is to try and articulate this vision as widely as possible and to get feedback on it. In that light we're going to pop in on the major events and hopefully get into one or more of them. At least we'll have a good excuse to travel! South Africa also sounds like fun.

See //conference.osgeo.org/foss4g/2008">http://conference.osgeo.org/foss4g/2008 about FOSS4G. Basically it is a group of open source social cartographers and hackers coming out of the same community that has been pursuing this for the last ten years but now really picking up steam.

Here's what we submitted for FOSS4G:

About the ImageWiki Project,

The ImageWiki ( http://imagewiki.org ) is an attempt to build an "image commons" around the emerging possibility of visual search. It needs help, input and support.

Many commercial organizations are rushing to build visual search engines and each of them has specific markets in mind. We are also doing something similar except that we are doing it as an open source public utility.

Using the SIFT algorithm we are able to cluster images together based on similarity. We can assert that a a series of images, such as a series of pictures of a specific beer bottle label, taken from different vantage points, or partially obscured, or upside down or blurry, may in fact be referring to the same beer bottle label.

Effectively we create a strong relationship between images and we can then leak meta-data between those images. If a given image has a description, a link, tags or a location associated with itself, then we can make a leap that other images may also have similar associations.

This has strong locative aspects. If you take a picture of a store front with your camera phone, and you post it to a shared server - then somebody else who takes a picture of the same store front may be able to discover that you were nearby and when. So for example if the image commons were to be populated with Google Street View - you would have a way of using photos of buildings themselves as a kind of GPS.

There are however a variety of other interesting and unsolved implications. It is clear that an Image DNS will emerge and there is a question of who will own that Image DNS. Wikipedia faced the same challenges in attempting to define an objective database of human knowledge. There are specific participants such as corporations who invest a lot of money in defining a certain brand identity - will they protest when visual searches do not return their website first? OpenStreetMaps also faced similar kinds of problems in that the ownership and provenance of their data had to meet the highest standards of integrity or else be at risk of putting their entire database and their entire effort at risk. Creative Commons Licensing and Copyright Law does not seem to cover the case of what metadata should be returned on an visual search query. This appears to be new ground.

We will present on both our open source effort to define a shared durable open and public Image Commons and will comment on some of the unexpected and rather surprising social, legal and political implications that will come out of this new capability that humans will soon have.

After much wrangling on the text - we submitted for Ignite Portland. Fingers crossed! Here's the submission entry http://ignite-proposals.pragmaticraft.com/proposals/43