Valley PR Blog

From Flickr to Photosynth (and Google StreetMaps inbetween)

By Angelo Fernando on June 12th, 2007 In Marketing, Social Media

If you’re using Flickr to upload photos of events linked to your blog or website, get familiar with Photosynth, something in the works at Microsoft’s Live Labs.

It’s a web-based software application that knits together (‘photo-synthesizes’) hundreds of digital still images of a place taken from multiple cameras. But it’s much more than this. You could click on the scene to change the angle, and tilt the perspective. There a scene of an artist, where you get the feeling of looking over his shoulder and moving around his studio. You could even zoom in on his table, and examine his brushes and media.

But here’s the kicker. The images don’t need to be taken by one person. They could be from digital image collections of strangers! Especially at popular destinations such as Venice, Rome, Times Square etc, the software taps in to the wisdom of the crowds concept. (OK, the camera of the wisdom of the crowds!) At St. Mark’s square in Venice, you could zoom in to a Coca-Cola logo on a T-shirt, in a vendor’s display rack, in the vast pigeon-filled piazza.

Got me thinking. Imagine how this could work elsewhere. Not just for brands (though brand managers would sure like that!) but for organizations trying to create experiences out of the collage of images that could be filed with details.

1. Obvious one: Tourism marketing for travel agents, countries, states and cities. Get people to submit holiday photos, and turn them into citizen photo-journalists.

2. Art galleries: Deploy street teams with digital cameras to cover a topic or art form and mash-up their work into composite experience.

3. Colleges. Stitch together thousands of images out there of campuses, schools, dorms, pubs and places of interest now in the hands of alumni. Create a multi-perspective virtual tour that belongs to them, literally.

4. Mega-events. Political conventions, the Olympics, Street marches and other crowd-magnets. Wouldn’t it be a great way preserve a historical record right down to the wording on the buttons, street signs and posters? Boggles the mind to think what Woodstock would have looked like with this kind of coverage.

This is the outer edge of social media.

There’s a similar use of 3D modeling and digital images in Google’s StreetView, but it doesn’t involve citizens’ input. We don’t know how Microsoft will do with Photosynth. But the concept is definitely exciting.

Share This

Hide Sites

Want Your Picture Icon? Go to gravatar.com and set a picture up to your email address for free. It also works on thousands of other websites, too!