Well it has been a little over a week since I went to MacWorld and I have gone through all my handouts and looked through the various demo disks to see what is really worth pursuing further. The one thing that really stands out for me is an interesting tool called Memory Miner. Be sure to watch this video to get a sense of what it does.

This tool is used to take photos and quickly mark them up in such a way as that they can tell a story. You can spend as much or as little time as you want on photos, marking people, places and times. You can of course annotate photos if you like. From there the software takes over and you can select various filters to display just the photos of a particular person, or a particular place, or a particular time or any of the photos where any of these things intersect. You can pick two people and see only photos that have both of them, for example. Or pick a time and place and see what turns up. It will do things like fetch maps of places from the Internet, so you can put this stuff into that kind of context. You can then export stories to the web, create slide shows, etc.

At the price, this can’t be beat. But beyond this particular tool, it is this kind of context driven way of looking at information that is truly revolutionary. Can you imagine this on a grand scale?

The age of photography started over a century ago. Photographs were precious things. Then they became something that filled shoe boxes. Then iPhoto allowed us to have a digital shoe box. By applying context to the images and putting them in some sort of shared space, they could become an interconnected web rather than singular items. I wish I could be alive for another century to see what happens.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 5:52 pm and is filed under News, Review, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.