Into The Unknown

If you've been sleeping on The Next Web Conference 2008, it's being broadcast live in high-quality WMV and Silverlight... Just had a presentation from one of the founders of Pownce, now Netlog's developers are on (oh wait, they just finished - Lookery now) and Wakoopa are coming up soon.

Tune in live at http://www.silverlightstreaming.eu/tnwc2008 - the conference runs until the end of the 4th of April, so if you're interested in emerging web technologies and ways in which companies are transforming how we use the web on daily basis... Well, tune in!

One thing's for sure - their web site needs some better Search Engine Optimisation, because it doesn't come up at all on the front page of the web site (being largely shrouded by tech news blogs).

I've been taking a load of photos for one of my other sites recently, and adding some of them to Flickr for the Birmingham groups - and one of my biggest hassles has been geotagging each photo.

I have a Bluetooth GPS receiver which I use with my PDA for its satnav software, which outputs its data in the standard NMEA format - so why can't I just fire up a Bluetooth interface on my camera, sync it with the GPS receiver, and automatically have it add the GPS coordinates to the EXIF data for each image? I know there's some VERY high end DSLRs that offer this facility, either through integrated GPS or a dock/holster-style fitting for a compatible external receiver... But this shouldn't be something which is purely the reserve of well-off pro-ams or industry professionals. The technology is freely available and already quite cheap, so in the age of the Semantic Web and an ever-increasing insistence on metadata-for-everything, why is this whole process such an arduous one complete?

Web 3 will never take off if it's as long-winded as this to input data into the Matrix in the first place - never mind extract it at a later date...