My Digital Life

I was just going through my RSS feeds and spotted a post from Laughing Squid about a video IBM commissioned in 1968 as a glossary of computer terms.

I was going to send it as a joke to a mate of mine who’s doing something similar, but having watched it I was surprised that it’s all still more or less accurate.  Not sure why it surprised me, after all the basic principles are all still the same.  I guess I still think of this stuff as being modern!  It’s easy to forget that we’re not really doing anything new… we’re just doing in differently.  Hell, before computers people managed and organised data and information quite happily for centuries.

Oh… and there’s a nice bit of early DeepZooming in there too!

A computer glossary or, coming to terms with the data processing machine from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

I’ve just been playing with Deepzoom as a way of publishing some information I’ve been working on over the past few weeks.  It’s a very powerful tool and it’s giving me a great way of publishing every level of detail - whatever the intended audience - in one place.  I’ll try to strip out the company specific stuff and put an example on here at some point.

Anyways… the question I have is, does anyone know if it is (or will be) possible to embed hyperlinks into Deepzoom?  There are a few times where it would have been useful to be able to link out to related word docs.  I’m only using the beta composer tool at the moment so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance! 

There’s a good post over on the MS Digital Memories Experience blog about how you can use the various Windows Live tools to add Geotags to photos without the need for GPS.   It’s then followed with another post about linking your photos to a tour within Live Search Maps.

It got me thinking… That’s pretty cool stuff, and well done to those guys for putting it all together, but something that does all of that in a more integrated way would be so much nicer.  I’m a fan of Live Photo Gallery and given there are so many other Geotagging tools out there it would seem like a great thing to add to this ’software’ part of the Live ’service’.  Given MS’s other mapping and virtual earth tools this shouldn’t be a too hard to integrate (can you tell I don’t do development?!).

What I’d really like to see though are the things like Photosynth and Deepzoom.  Photosynth still impresses the hell out me, and I can’t wait to see it working in a product form.  I’ve used it in some demos at work as an example of what sort of technology we can look forward to and it always seems to capture peoples imaginations.  Everyone can think up a use for it.  Hopefully something will appear before too long. 

Having played with the PhotoZoom site a little I reckon that would be another good addition to Live Photo Gallery.  It’d certainly be a good example of Software + Services - click a button on your desktop and MS processes your photos in the background.  Quite what format they’d be delivered in I’m not sure, perhaps similar to what’s on the site now, an object you can paste into an email or website.  Sounds good to me.

Anyway… enough rambling from me.