-- notes and links on moblogging, temporal and spatial rhythms and visualisation.
Below are some of my notes on web- and moblogging, and some of the work that i have found that attempts in some way to further contextualise posts. In my discussion of placing posts in contextual landscapes, I considered temporal, social, spacial contexts, and argued that of these, temporal information has had the least attention in terms of effective visualisation despite the storage and availability of many forms of temporal data, that could easily form a visual rhythm as a backdrop for posts. I have sorted my notes into these same categories below.
Time
moodstats.com
The 'Cuban Council' produced this form of diary that they termed "emotional software" for designers. It uses a central server to allow users to compare
their own
(self recorded) mood,
creativity etc with
the design community as a whole (or at least, others who have purchased
the software. 
Visual
output is in
the form of a bar graph. I have found
no examples of designers publishing or sharing this data online.
Privacy level of information submitted to server is controllable.
Motivation for sharing statistics with others is sold as a
back-up/crash-recovery service.beardcontest
By collecting this series of photos together, the author of this site emphasises
the changing of
his and others' faces over time. People seem drawn to the 
chance
to document the mundane, and can't resist
including peeks at other elements of their lives. Themes of time, date
and events such as birthday and christmas feature heavily in the
images, possibly provoked by thinking about time passing (and beards
growing).boxercox.com/jenwear
record of clothing.
large projects like this often fail to continue due
to the high level of daily maintenance. seems to me there is a strong
need for ease of posting and ordering daily images.webcam example
the act of framing and taking pictures also becomes a centre of activity and interaction.
http://www.ellieharrison.com/_homepage.htm
Much
of the british
artist Ellie Harrison's work tackles issues of
personal daily records. She records data such as food eaten, distance
travelled etc in her web based projects. She also comments on the
effect the act of recording can have on ones actions. As with nearly
all of the above examples where images are placed side by side for
comparison, Ellie has chosen to organise her chronological images into
a tabular format. These formatting decisions seem based on fitting as
many images on screen at one time as possible. The Greed
animation is a notable exception.
http://airlinemeals.net/Many sites have sprung-up as repositories of the mundane. Snap shots of time passing, following certain publishing constraints (see the section on moblogging below for further discussion on this).
lifelines
timefinder
Research such as C. Plaisant et al.'s LifeLines project and Hochheiser's TimeFinder have started to tackle the challenges of organising large collections of chronological data.
http://robin.www.media.mit.edu/people/robin/thesis/
In his thesis "Dynamic Timelines", Robin Kullberg describes some of the issues central to the challenges of presenting this type of temporal catalogue of images, what he terms the " visual communication of historical information".
http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/collections/
Fernanda Viegas discusses these issues further in her collections project, and further investigates the needs for varying ranges of privacy and images access depending on audience, arguing that our audiences directly effect our narrative style, and that image repositories should reflect this dynamically, based on a priori audience sorting by an image author.
Many people invest considerable time in taking, organising, cataloguing and sharing photographs as a record of their personal histories, and of the 'moments' shared with family and friends. The images collected serve as a basis for descriptions of recent activities and events and are then sorted and often placed into photo albums where they serve as longer term historical documents, and are particularly effective as labels of much larger time spans. They are viewed and re-viewed and form a substrate and memory aid for storytelling.
http://fotos.fliarubinstein.com.ar/
http://zonezero.com/magazine/essays/diegotime/time.html
This effect of invoking rich descriptions of history by juxtaposing chronological images has been investigated by many artists and personal projects and in work such as the documentary Seven Up (directed by Paul Almond and Michael Apted) which has documented the growth of fourteen British seven year olds every seven years since 1963.
Space
http://headmap.org/
Much of the location aware devices developed have been motivated by projects to 'tag' real world locations with virtual messages.
http://www.blogmapper.com/
One of several implementations of online
mapping
interfaces that use
the location metadata associated with some blogger's posts the provide
a geographical context to each post. The implementation is still a
little cumbersome at times, shifting the focus away from the blogs to
the interface, but this is developing with higher bandwidth connection
and better interface design. This associated context often acts to
provoke further description of location in some weblogs that use this
software.http://www.mapbureau.com/
the map bureau is one of the companies motivating these developments.
http://www.brainoff.com/geoblog/
http://www.reenhead.com/map/metroblogmap.html#
As more
and more people start to associate location with their posts
(as technology like gps appears in handheld blogging devices for
example) we can start to explore new ways of finding posts of
interests, such as searching by location rather than content. This has
started to be realised on global and local scales.
http://www.skep.tk/newsquakes/
Similarly, Newsquakes allows users to navigate news stories based on their geographical relevance.
http://www.bryanboyer.com/indyjunior/blog.phtml
This location centric blogging is particularly suited to the many bloggers who use the technology as a travel journal, documenting each new place visited.
Indy
Junior is an example of the software developed
to support this sort of mapping. It uses flash to present an
interactive map of the locations a blogger has visited and posted from.
By associating these posts with an instantly recognisable map, a series
of text entries are transformed into layers of information on path
travelled, time taken, places visited. All supplementing the posts
themselves.http://geourl.org/
Here is a location-to-URL directory for searching for blogs by their proximity to a location. The number of points found in the middle of the ocean seems to testify to a question of accuracy in many of the locations people manually enter.
http://beta.plink.org/
Plink is a new web site which attempts to tie friend-of-a-friend social connections (similar to friendster) to a location based visualiser.
Moblogging
Below are some examples of picture based blogging (termed moblogging) which has started to become popular as mobile devices and web software that support the uploading and posting of images becomes readily available. As people start to post images as part of their daily routine, a new form of journal or diary, continually recording and sharing a poster's experiences starts to take shape. Augmenting these images with geographical, temporal and other context weaves these posts into a rich fabric of narrative and personal record. The full possibilities of such tools are only just starting to be fully explored.
http://www.moblogging.org/
http://www.marginwalker.org/1imc/
http://www.hiptop.com/
http://www.treasuremytext.com/
Resources such as moblogging.org have begun to develop to disseminate information on developments in this field. As interest grows (especially with mobile phone companies who are starting to promote moblogging with their picture messaging phones an example of this can be found at hiptop.com), further discussion can be found at events such as the first international moblogging conference.
http://wearcam.org/previous_experiences/
The history of moblogging is rooted in the research of wearable wireless devices. Steve Mann's 'wearcam' archive is a good example of this.
http://www.media-diary.net/24/
Interesting project in which the photos taken by 12 regular mobloggers are presented side by side.
http://kokochi.com/
http://www.tokyotidbits.com/
Good example of an active moblogger. Pictures, text and occasionally gps location marked on a map are all intertwined and published as a daily record of 'normal life'. See also Mie's older site (tokyo tidbits) for more examples.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2780295.stm
In the same vein as the developing moblogging journalism and activism, the BBC has developed a site for readers to post and view an edited selection of pictures.
http://www.listenlab.com/
http://resonancefm.com/
Listen lab have produced a site audblog, which allows subscribers to add an audio recording to their blogs using any telephone. In it's raw form I am yet to see it in regular use, or high popularity. However a similar project on resonancefm, a radio station in London, which broadcasts half an hour of live audio from a different location in the world each week has proven popular listening.
http://www.mirrorproject.com/
http://www.photomemes.org/
http://www.photoblogs.org/
In Heather Champ's MirrorProject, a rapidly growing collection of online self portraits, constrained by the requirement that they be taken in a reflective surface, is to me, another example of the appeal of working within tight constraints.
The popularity of these forms of photo communities are documented at photomemes.org which is maintained by L. Brandon Stone, creator of photoblogs.org. As with the beard contest, the limitations imposed on the photos submitted adds a level of coherence and interest to a collection of otherwise unrelated images. There is also something particularly compelling in the use of self portraits. As Champ describes, "you tend to see people as they see themselves". She describes her own motivation for capturing images of her self as an attempt to record moments in her life, "I was trying to find a way to capture time and memories".
Ben Dalton (2003)