Augmented Moblogging

"Mobile blogging, or moblogging, [is] where you use your digital camera, PDA, or mobile phone camera to send pictures or text to your weblog or photo album while you're away from your desktop computer."



Augmented Moblogging



Here's some interesting information from social software guru Ross Mayfield :

Augmented Reality and Moblogging are going to converge, the question is when. This might border on science fiction, but here goes...



Augmented Reality overlays information within an environment to enhance a person or group's capabilities to act in an environment. Data, text, images, sound & video.



AR TOMORROW: RECOGNIZING FACES

Ever forget a face? Augmented reality will help you recover seamlessly when you bump into some-one and can't remember whether she's a college acquaintance or your accountant's ex-wife. Your AR system will automatically search a personalized face-recognition database, then provide text that tells you not only the name of the person you're looking at, but some key personal details as well.



Augmented Reality will likely follow a similar path [as virtual reality]. It benefits from Moore's Law in processing, but also the commercial R&D efforts towards saving power and miniaturization (is there a Moore's Law for miniaturization?). The largest cost barrier will remain quality head mounted displays, but there is a display revolution going on as well.



InfoTrends Research Group has found that Japan accounts for almost all (98 percent) of the wireless imaging market that is forecast to grow from 6.6 million in 2002 to over 160 million by 2007, representing a compound annual growth rate of 93 percent. Outside Japan, camera phone costs are still prohibitive, and the market is growing in fits and starts.



Moblogging's current humble beginnings is based on the increasing adoption of wireless imaging. And this cateogry of commercial hardware R&D will grow to include GPS and other functions.



But its also based upon the formation of groups. Early Mobloggers are explicit about their identities and do not shy away from sharing their presence and experiences with the world. When Moblogging, and indeed blogging, begin to offer authentication and permissioning it will appeal to a wider set of users. People who want to communicate in groups with strong ties. This is where Reed's Law of group formation takes hold. A base of strong tie groupings of content will extend to other groups and to those with weaker ties on a post-by-post basis. The result will be a large base of levergable content -- and the content gains context with GeoURLs.



Of course, to realize the AR dreams in the images above, much needs to happen in the core software system for managing and displaying the content (recognition, recognition, recognition) and we have to wait for hardware costs to fall. But as Adina pointed out, there are simpler versions of augmented reality being developed under the rubric of social software. I don't need a $20k head mounted display to tell me where my friends are and what's around the corner.