Publishing from a muddy field ...
"Oh is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?
Or just 20,000 people standing in a field."
[Pulp, "Sorted for E's and Whizz"]
And all of them taking pictures with their phones ...
Another small step forward recently (well, for us, within the context of the BBC anyway). My software team were part of a project to build what we're calling the Mobile Interactive Producer, or MIP (gotta hava TLA). This enables BBC radio & music producers and broadcasters to post images and text directly from a mobile phone on to a relevant bits of the BBC's various radio & music websites, direct from the field - and in the case of Glastonbury recently, I mean the field.
Moblogging is hardly new, but the real work here was thinking through the issues around as secure an interaction as possible (big name DJs standing in middle of rock festival with direct uplink to web via mobile is an interesting scenario to work with) and getting it to work within the BBC server environment, which is built to scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users but not necessarily to enable dynamic real-time data interchange. After snapping the pic, categories (or destinations) and captions could be inserted in the text component of the MMS. After verifying the authenticity of the communication, the software then builds photo gallery pages automatically, with auto-resizing of images to fit. For the record, I believe producers and broadcast assistants generally used Nokia 6600's, but it's been built to work with any camera phone, as it simply uses MMS. We've got more work to do around ensuring URIs for each photo etc. and permanent linkability. We've also had interesting discussions regarding 'image quality versus immediacy' - I'm tending towards the latter being more important in this context (we should probably manage the users' expectations more at this point - yet that will all become somewhat academic as phone cameras keep advancing in quality).
The initial results are gently compelling, to my mind, having a real sense of immediacy and intimacy. Have a browse around the galleries for Glastonbury 2004 (e.g. Radio 1's Vernon Kay in Tent City), Red Hot Chilli Peppers gig over at Radio 1 as well as Pete Tong in Ibiza, and Five Live broadcasting from Euro 2004 in Portugal.
Notes: It's an extension of the mobile messaging infrastructure built for the 10 Hour Takeover - again the principles of loosely-coupled extensible architecture come into play, all Matt Biddulph's thinking - and credit in my team should go to the various Matts: Patterson, Webb, and Biddulph, plus Paul Hammond (as well as others in related teams: Dan Pike, James Whitmarsh, plus those who build the eventual repositories for the pix). Next development is to publish SMS from phones to the BBC Radio's LiveText streams over DAB and Freeview ...
