Friday, October 04, 2002

Simple Rich Media Communications Marc Canter has some nice thoughts about activity-based computing and its apparent manifestation in this cool tool for capturing, managing and distributing photos online. The thinking is right on --- getting complex media (images, audio, video, even text) from a device or source material and into a computer, manipulating it, packaging it, and distributing it (through whatever electronic means) is just too hard. And it seriously limits the usefulness of computers as rich media communications tools. The range of "online photo tools" like this, Ofoto, Shutterfly, etc. are good examples of making things simpler for the average consumer, but we've still got a long way to go, especially as we consider richer, more composite forms of media-centric communications. 9:48:00 PM    comment []