2 posts tagged “air me”

Speaking of slicing life, part of the reason the 8:36pm project excites me right now is because new tools are becoming available that make slicing life a whole lot easier than it used to be.  Twitter makes it easy to create a quick sentence about what you're doing.  But I've always been more interested in the photo aspect of the project, about taking the picture that captures the moment.  30 years from now, the pictures are going to tell a better story about the life I was living than a sentence will.

So, obviously, having a camera phone and a way to send it directly to Flickr is really useful for this purpose.  My original inspiration, Jamie Livingston's Photo of the Day project from 1979-1997, were Polaroids.  That's obviously a lot more work to have to carry a Poloroid camera with you every day, and then carry the photos, sort them, and save them. 

The new iPhone also has the ability to detect your location, and attach this information to the photos that you take.  And, theoretically, Flickr could take this information and put the photo on a map.  Unfortunately, the current implementation doesn't seem to do this, and I hear that it's because the iPhone's email application strips the data of photos out before it sends them.  Why?

In any case, this is where Air Me (iTunes link) comes in.  They seem to be on the same wavelength as me in regards to finding a way to transport as much data about the slice of life a photo captures as possible.  Already, their app will attach your geo-location to the photo, and tag it with the city, state, and country you're in.  Also, magically, it will tag the photo with the current temperature (73 degrees) and weather description (Mostly Sunny) of that city.  Pretty awesome. 

Only problem, at the moment, they don't allow you to specify a title for the photo in question before it automatically uploads.  When I emailed support, Phil Easter, their CTO, responded within 5 minutes saying that they'd have these things fixed within the week.  Also, they are planning on adding more automatic tagging options as well. 

Here's my wishlist of features to make this work even better with my project (and I acknowledge that they might not all be features that are in the best interest of their product, but I think most of them are):

1. In addition to each kind of tag they automatically add to the photo, they should also add a corresponding machine tag, so that I can programatically extract the information from the photo as well.  Basically, in addition to "Mostly Sunny" they should add "airme:weathername=Mostly Sunny".  Flickr hides them, but gives access to them programatically so that it's easy to extract the data from the photo via their API.
2. A headline and link to the top news article on CNN or NY Times?  I was planning on doing this myself for each day, finding the top news items of the day to go with the photo, but if they did it then I wouldn't have to!
3. Option to post the subject line of the photo to Twitter, along with a tinyurl link to the Flickr photo.  I currently use Twittergram to do this, but they seem to be a little flaky with getting the Twitter posted with any expediency and consistency.
4. Option to add the photo to a photo set of my choosing.  I'm currently manually adding them to my 8:36pm photo set, and they currently have an option to automatically create a set for the photos.  They would just have to let me select the set rather than have it default to a "Seattle" set automatically.

I could come up with more, but these are the ones that are most important and exciting to me. 

I'm looking forward to their next few releases, and have high hopes for using the new features for this project.

I've been taking a picture of whatever I'm doing at 8:36pm every day now for almost 2 months now, and I'm still just as excited about it as ever.  Actually, a few things that'll be happening soon with a new iPhone app called Air Me will take this project to the next level.

When I was taking a picture at 8:36pm last night while having a catch-up-with-everything dinner with Kindra, she asked how long I plan on doing this project.  FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.  Which is a pretty ambitious goal, considering that there are very few things we plan on doing for the rest of our lives, and most of them are pretty serious habits, like eating, drinking, sleeping.  Things that aren't required for survival include brushing teeth, getting dressed, hygenic things.  Getting married is a promise to do something every day for the rest of your life too, and therefore carries a huge weight of importance with it.

I love the 8:36pm project because it has constraints.  It's one picture a day.  It's at the same time every day.  It's a slice of life that I don't have much editorial control over.  Sure I could try to do something interesting at 8:36pm every day, but that's gonna require more energy than I have.  It's the every day that I want to capture, anyway, the act of living rather than the act of projecting a cool or interesting life to the Internet.  And it's interesting because when I tell people about this project the first response is also, "I could never do that because I'm never doing anything interesting at 8:36pm."  Exactly.  Or, maybe once in a while you are.  But in any case, we of the Internet Age are so used to filtering our experiences and only expressing the highs and lows for the most part.  Of course, even our highs and lows will bore most people, since we have such a high bar for being interested in anything, but I think it's interesting to go the other route.  Capture the ordinary, the repetitive, the mundane, the fact that you eat the same thing every day or see the same people.  Because there's something beautiful about not editorializing everything. 

It's a relief of sorts to not worry about being interesting.  Since the constraint is forced by a particular minute of the day, it's also not necessarily "your fault" for not being interesting.  Instructions on how to play are here, if you feel like joining up.