i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

NYT story on July 28^th, 2010, (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/why-dont-more-cameras-offer-gps/) suggests that cameras with GPS functions have been in the market for a year or two. These cameras will provide either built-in or stand-alone add-on devices to capture the latitude and longitude of the location, and ‘geo-tag’ any photo with such information. The latest story on Sep, 21 on NYT suggests a hybrid camera that would even be able to geo-tag the location when you can’t have GPS signal. (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/casio-adds-gps-to-new-compact-zoomer/#more-36851)  

As suggested by the author, the idea of geo-tagging is brilliant, but he also mentioned that “camera manufacturers see GPS as a niche market”.

But is that so? I have written a blog earlier about “social objects”, (http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i202/f10/blog/what-next-social-objects) where physical objects could carry information in a social context, thus allowing personal social experience to be shared with friends, relatives, etc.

So let’s combine these two ideas together. You take a picture, camera automatically geo-tags it by location coordinates, or even better, tags the picture to be something like USA->CA->Berkeley. So, now you will see the picture could be able to group themselves all together. With a button click on your camera, those pictures are uploaded to your Facebook where your friends can see and tag/comment them.

How does this model sound?