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Dilbert Author Invents ZoneTag

From a recent post by Scott Adams on his Dilbert Blog:

First, my digital camera should have GPS so it always knows where I am. When I download my photos, a Google map would pop up, and the photos would go into storage according to the points on the map where the pictures were taken, ordered by date. The map forms the backdrop for organizing the scrapbook.

Second, I would use a special credit card for all purchases on my vacation, from gas stations to hotels to restaurants. The special part is that the records of my purchases would feed into my automatic scrapbook software and coordinate it with the camera’s GPS data. That would be enough data for the scrapbook system to intelligently guess the name of the restaurant or attraction where I was at the time of the picture.

Third, the system needs face recognition software so it can label photos with at least the names of family and friends who appear in them. It doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, but it could give you a big head start.

Minus the face recognition (which ZoneTag compensates for by suggesting tags based on your history and the tag’s likelihood, which often gets the names of the people in your images), we’re already there. And there’s no need to get into your credit report, Scott! ZoneTag knows where you are and will show you names of restaurants, landmarks and attractions around you as you take a photo. Just click, and it’s captures.

Get a Nokia N95, Scott, and start ZoneTagging. If you need help setting up, feel free to drop us a line. We’ll see what we can do (an originally-signed strip of Dilbert will get you up and running — and you know what — we’ll send you the phone pre-installed as well…).

via Andy.

Got N95? ZoneTag Now Runs on Nokia 3rd Edition Phones

You have a spiffy new Nokia N95, N73 or one of Nokia’s latest and greatest new cameraphones, but you were not able to run ZoneTag? Be sad no more. We’re very happy to announce ZoneTag now works for Nokia Series 60 3rd edition phones. For phones like the N95 with built-in GPS, ZoneTag will make geotagging easier than ever.

So, what are you waiting for? Get ZoneTag now. If you are a new user, just click the big orange “Try it now button”. If you are an existing ZoneTag user looking to upgrade (come back to ZoneTag!), click on the My ZoneTag link on top and you’ll see instructions on how to upgrade.

While you’re at it, make sure you check out ZoneTag’s faithful companion, Zurfer, the coolest mobile photo viewing experience on the planet. And let us know how it goes.

Looking forward to seeing all your super hi-res photos up on Flickr!

Hack with Y!RB in London

What’s in a location? Our Tag Maps, ZoneTag, and Zurfer applications all involve some location-based services. In Tag Maps, we have a bounding-box query that returns a list of automatically-computed landmarks/attractions nearby. In ZoneTag, a location query returns a list of tags that might be relevant to the user at that location — perhaps useful to tag a photo they have taken there. ZoneTag also helps with Cell Tower tracking: give the ZoneTag service a cell tower ID, and it might actually tell you where in the world that cell tower is. Zurfer can also offer a few useful services - but these are not yet released.

These services are already available on the Yahoo! Developer website. If you happen to be located in London, though, and you are a hacker, and you are planning to come to Hack Day… then you might be hearing about all of these Y!RB web services first-hand this weekend.

Plus, FireEagle!

Why We Tag?

When ZoneTag was released early last year, we made it easier for users to tag Flickr photos directly from their phone. An incidental test, for example, quickly showed that on average, a public ZoneTag photo has twice as many human-entered tags (2.2 tags when we checked) as a public photo from another uploader running on similar phones (0.9 tags).

It was also immediately clear that, even with ZoneTag, many users do not tag their photos before upload, and some users never tag their photos at all. In fact, even in Flickr, most users do not tag their photos. Presumably, tagging is something to be encouraged because it makes the system more usable for each individual user, creates more information for the community, and so forth. Let’s imagine for now that tagging is indeed a behavior to be encouraged.

As a first step, we set out to understand the tagging behavior and motivations of people that do tag in ZoneTag (and Flickr). In a retrospective study led by Morgan Ames, one of our “rock star” interns, we conducted a series of interviews designed to extract this information. The study will be presented as a full paper in the upcoming CHI2007 conference.

The primary interview method we employed in our study was “photo elicitation”. This method is borrowed from anthropology — the idea of using photos (sometimes taken by the interviewee) to trigger and frame the discussion. Professor Nancy van House at UC Berkeley’s I-School has adapted this method for use in cameraphone studies: use the photos the interviewees have taken to trigger discussion about the circumstances of the photo capture and other information around the photos (in our case, the photo’s tags). The cameraphone study of Tim Kindberg, Mirjana Spasojevic, Rowanne Fleck and Abigail Sellen also had a foundational impact on our work - read it! We were lucky to have Mirjana comment and suggest improvements for our paper before submission.

To summarize the main findings in our work, we believe that Flickr is a vibrant, successful tagging platform because tags on Flickr have multiple, pervasive benefits. The interviews surfaced a taxonomy of motivations for tagging, which every single participant in our study had multiple motivations from the taxonomy come into play for every photo they have taken. And I will explain.

Here is a figure that illustrates the taxonomy developed by Morgan:

The taxonomy is broken into two dimensions, functionality and target/sociality.

• The Organization/Self square (upper left) is the classic reason for labeling or tagging any type of content: being able to find the content later. This is the primary reason why people (should) label their photos on Picasa or iPhoto, but rarely do.
• The next square, Communication/Self on the upper right, is akin to the reason you write notes on the margins of your printed photo albums: to help yourself recall the context of capture, or the non-obvious details about the content of the image like the names of the people in it.

The bottom (social) part of the taxonomy figure is where Flickr makes a difference.

• The Organization/Social square (bottom left) reflects the motivation of people to tag their photos so that their photos will be discovered by others. When discovered by others, the photo gets more views, maybe even “favorited”, and the photographer gets some good ol’ vibe. Now, why would people need that vibe? This question edges into social psychology and is out of our scope for today…
• The Communication/Social square (bottom right) identifies the motivation to tag in order to communicate information about the photo or its context to other people. For example, a benefit of adding the “Red Elvises” tag, to a picture taken at their concert, is that my friends would know what the picture is about, and that I attended said concert.

An interesting point is that our interviewees often discussed aspects related to Communication/Social in terms of known others (family or friends), while aspects related to Organization/Social often referred to the general public. In other words, they didn’t care much about explaining their photos to strangers, and on the other hand, also didn’t care much about helping their friends find particular photos…

You can refer to the paper (on our our publication page) for more details about the methodology; reflections on the effect of suggested tags; and implications of our work for designers of tagging systems everywhere (briefly: make sure your tags “go a long way” and serve a number of purposes). If reading is not your “thing”, come to Y!RB’s Brain Jam on April 13th to see Morgan presenting this work (our other CHI paper on privacy will also be presented), or just catch the presentation on Wednesday, May 2nd at CHI 2007.

Do you listen to your cell phone?

Really, do you really listen to your cell phone? Does it compel you to take photos? Can it remind you to SMS a friend to meet at the park? Or maybe tell you to lay off the double-double at In-N-Out burger?

Last Friday, a few of us were on the greens of Stanford University trying to find some answers. Fortunately, that day members of the Persuasive Technology Lab were hosting a day long workshop on Mobile Persuasion which focused on several aspects of persuasive mobile technologies from games to advertising, from health to design.

The question of `how can mobility persuade you’ was addressed from several angles. Alex Kass, from Accenture Technology Labs showed a demonstration of a mobile coaching device which would remind you not to grab that candy bar from the machine or point out the stairs next to the elevator as the healthier option. Something about mobility being that little voice in your head captivated the attendees.

Thinking about mobility as location, Ian Bogost demonstrated Airport Insecurity: a game about inconvenience and insecurity in American airports. A game for Series 60 Nokias where you get to be the TSA agent screening passengers against a changing security checklist. Ian suggests the game is played best while waiting in the airport security line. It’s actually quite fun, but I haven’t had the chance to play it in situ yet.

Mirjiana Spasojevic from Nokia Research presented several principles for mobile design, reminding us to think of mobility not as a mini pc but as an ever present technology (not just on the go but also on the couch). The idea of mobile ‘web browsing’ was generally discouraged, rather technology should be proactive and provide what is essential just in time.

And while there was much discussion on social collaboration and connectivity, many of the speakers did not account for the phone’s contact list as a persuasive artifact. It’s clear that my phone can motivate me to do cool things, but I find I am more persuaded if a friend from my contact list sends me an MMS video message. I listen to my cellphone; I respond to to my friends.

Our own Mor Naaman presented a study the lab ran on the sharing motivations with geotagged images from Flickr using ZoneTag. In the talk, he presented a taxonomy of motivations for tagging and a breakdown of privacy considerations. We will post more about this soon; I have to go—my phone is telling me to get that double-double…