Fotonotes: Every Picture Can Tell a Story.
Greg Elin has been working for a while on a new kind of photo-related application. At PC Forum he showed me the latest beta, and I'm ready to say that this is one very cool piece of work.
It's called Fotonotes. Basically, it's a tool for annotating JPEG pictures inside the pictures themselves. Here's an example.
I took the above picture at last month's Demo conference. Left to right are Dan Bricklin, Les Vadasz and Mitch Kapor.
Now, here's a view of the picture after editing it in Fotonotes and rolling my mouse pointer over Dan's face:
I created the same "meta-content" with Vadasz and Kapor, and could have annotated other parts of the photo. Although I only put their names in the picture (the text is stored literally as part of the JPEG), I could have written long passages about each of them, information that would pop up.
Now, this doesn't work inside all browsers yet, as it obviously should. Elin says some browsers do support it, and he's working on others.
He adds, in an e-mail, that the screen shots I posted are using "the cross-platform, downloadable Java application. The web-based version allows all browsers to view stories online, but adding of new stories via the browser is not yet supported by all browsers."
This expands possibilities for user-generated Web content. Weblogs have been about text, with pictures added. What if someone posts a picture of this kind, where various parts of the picture can tell a variety of stories? Or what if we can link, transparently, an audio stream? This could get interesting, fast.
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
I love this tool.
It is exemplary of the type of innovation going on out there! We really wanna work with Greg to make this "hot spot" within a JPEG format a standard!
Could you imagine a nice, tall, slinky photo of somebody in your gutter and based upon where you clicked on their body,,,,,,,,,
,,,,,,,now imagine a network of that sort of content between passed around and shared?
