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19 Dec 2007
Microwebbing memories
For a while I am at the look out for MicroWeb applications or services. I see the MicroWeb as the next step from MicroContent itself. MicroContent concerns itself with creating the basic records, such as blog-items, audio, video, recipes, places, etc. microwebbing is concerned with creating the connections between individual MicroContent Items.
Progress has been slow for a while. Naturally there has been a lot of action around mashing. However often these mashups can be seen as rudimentary microwebbing. And on the client side not much was happening either.
So I was very happy to come across the MacOSX application Memory Miner. Memory Miner calls itself 'digital story telling' software, which is a good description. The idea of this application is to tell the story of your family based on pictures. For this it uses images of your family, the persons in your family and places. And also the time an image was taken plays a role as well.
The user can add images from the iPhoto library that it deems relevant to Memory Miner. On an image the user can indicate the persons visible by drawing a square around them (similar to Flickr). These persons however are taken from the AddressBook. And the user can assign a place to a picture through integration with Google Maps.
The application can import gedcom files in order to define persons and/or define the relations between persons. When one just uses the AdressBook one can define the relation through a pop-up list: select son, father, etc.
And finally the application uses to the date of the images to create a timeline of your family, your relations, etc. It has interesting search possibilities. So one can look for images with certain persons, in certain places and in a certain time-range. It is possible to publish timelines to the web.
I will do some work on my images and create an example. You can however have a look at the introductory video of the application.
Thus this application creates an extra layer on top of all the images, address cards, we have stored on our computer. It does remind of the 'old' photobooks, where one documents it's holiday, the events of ones life. But fewer and fewer people seem to this anymore. And even fewer annotate the images for posterity.
Memory Miner can help here and the idea can be extended to many other areas as well. I'll get back to that. I see Memory Miner as an exciting example of the next step of MicroContent towards to the Semantic Web.