Reporting from the Field
Last week, Bryan and I had a call with Erik Sundelof, a fellow of the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University in California. Erik had set up a test page for WITNESS on his inTheFieldOnline.net site. After a short registration process,users can send images, video and text straight from a cell phone. It was quite impressive although it was still a test site. Thefact that certain parts of the interface were not in English made things a tad confusing for non-swedish speaking folks. Erik had to cut the call short as "CNN" was on the line.
Anyways, here's an article about Erik's other project. Presumably this is what CNN was calling about....
Cell phones: A new tool in the war-zone blogosphere
Empowering technology also raises safety, credibility issues
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/08/01/newblogs/index.html
Although the immediacy of being able to send media through a cellphone is extremely attractive, it is currently one of the least secure ways to send information. Especially if you are registered in a system that stores your number. A group of ITP students (Freeformed.org) who are also working on a mobile uplaod project had the interesting idea of using a 'phone relay'. If you want to remain anonymous, you send your media to a relay which would then resend it without storing any of your data. Now if we can set up local relays...that would solve the long distance calls. Apparently it cost Bryan 30$ to send a video from his phone....
As for our test page. If any of you folks are travelling, we would love to get some test results from people abroad. Check out our test page at: http://www.inthefieldonline.net/witness/