Jason Pearce

Capturing photos and videos via a mobile phone is easy. Posting those files online from a mobile phone, however, is often tedious. In most cases you would email or MMS photos individually to Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook.

I was looking for a way to upload multiple images and videos from my mobile phone in a batch. I found two solutions for my Windows Mobile 6 device.

Yahoo! Go

Flickr is a Yahoo-owned property, so I thought I’d first see if I can find a tool they developed. I found and tested Yahoo! Go 2.0 (the 3.0 beta was not yet compatible with my Samsung SCH-i760).

Yahoo! Go 2.0 includes an interface for Flickr, among other things like your Yahoo! calendar, email, search, news, maps, and weather. It’s simple and works great on a mobile phone. It permits you to select multiple images to upload, but no more than six at a time. This was close to my solution, but it limited me to six photos at a time and worked only with Flickr.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 Flickr Tour

The Flickr section of Yahoo! Go 2.0 features an easy “Upload photos” section.

Photos are available in groups of six (no videos). Here I select two of the six photos I wish to upload.

ShoZu

Where Yahoo! Go falls short, ShoZu excels — and then some. Not only does ShoZu support batch uploading of photos or videos to Flickr (just photos), YouTube (just video), and Facebook (just photos); it also interacts with Blogger, Box, Cellfish, Kodak Easyshare Gallery, LiveJournal, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, and many more sites I’ve never heard of (see complete list).

With great flexibility, ShoZu also lets up upload to any email address or FTP account. And to take it one step further, ShoZu offers what it calls multiple destination uploading, which is a fancy way of saying it will automatically carbon copy (cc) up to 10 other sites (or FTP accounts, or email addresses, etc.) with the photos or videos you upload.

What this means is that when I use ShoZu to upload a batch of 20 photos to my Flickr account, I can ask it to also post those same 20 photos to my Facebook account, my Picassa Web Album, and store a copy in my FTP account for good measure. It’s a true one-to-many FTP-like solution that resides on my mobile. I don’t even know of a desktop client that does that.

ShoZu Tour

Here I have configured ShoZu to recognize three of my destination accounts: Flickr, YouTube, and a personal FTP site. My carbon copy sites are configured via their website and are not available via their mobile client.

Similar to Yahoo! Go, you may select multiple photos, but you have to first enable the ability to mark multiple images or videos.

Here I select two images to upload, but I may select all of them if I would like.

I may also select videos. Here I select two out of three videos I wish to upload to YouTube. Too bad they don’t offer a thumbnail to help me determine my selections.

I may even view the status of my uploads, which continue to run in the background.

For example, if I wanted to add a few more images to the upload queue, I may easily do so.

When ShoZu finished uploading, I found my photos on Flickr (primary site), Picasa (cc site), and Facebook (another cc site); and my videos on YouTube. My FTP site (also a cc site) had all of my photos and videos. Way cool!

ShoZu Shortcomings

In many regards, ShoZu exceeds my expectations. But now I’m hooked and I want more. Here are a few shortcomings or opportunities ShoZu’s developers should address.

1. Flickr Video: Flickr now supports both video and photos. ShoZu needs to catch up and permit users to also send Flickr videos their way.
2. 10 megabyte per file limitation: While photos won’t hit the 10 MB ceiling, videos most certainly may. With 1 GB memory cards common-place, they should bump this limit up to 150 MB or more.
3. Support more phones: While they already support many phones, my Samsung SCH-i760 Windows Mobile 6 is unsupported. I took a guess and tried their software for another phone, which (mostly) worked.
4. Toggle CC Feature: Sometimes, I won’t want to send a photo or video to many locations. Provide your uses a way to toggle the carbon copy feature on or off. Better yet, let them multi-select the sites during each upload, much the same way they can multi-select which images they’ll upload in a batch.
5. Develop a desktop multi-file upload interface: Although ShoZu offers an upload tool for the desktop user, it uploads only one image at a time. If they developed an AJAX interface similar to Flickr and YouTube’s multi-file, browser-based upload tools, they would gain many more users.

This morning, residents in the Midwest were shaken awake by a 5.2-magnitude earthquake that originated out of West Salem, Illinois, approximately 187 miles from my home in Carmel, Indiana.

According to USA Today …

“The quake is believed to have involved the Wabash fault, a northern extension of the New Madrid fault about six miles north of Mount Carmel, Ill.,” said United States Geological Survey geophysicist Randy Baldwin. The last earthquake in the region to approach the severity of Friday’s temblor was a 5.0 magnitude quake that shook a nearby area in 2002, Baldwin said.

The Indiana Geological Survey writes, “On April 18th at 5:36AM EDT a 5.2 magnitude earthquake struck southeastern Illinois. The epicenter was located approximately 5 miles northwest of Mt. Carmel, Illinois, 38 miles north-northwest of Evansville, Indiana, and 128 miles east of St. Louis, Missouri. The earthquake was felt throughout Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, and as far away as Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.”

The real data on the quake, however, can be found on the U.S. Geological Survey’s website. The cool thing is that the USGS has several map mash-ups that visually display data about the quake. They even have an online form that users can complete to report what they felt, as well as a map of their user-inputed experiences.

While the quake certainly woke and startled me, it was not severe enough to knock anything over or even set off car alarms.

Today I had the chance to ride at 80-miles-per-hour around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway track. It wasn’t in a race car or anything, but it was still rather exciting.

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Photos

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the Peace Corps, mostly because I don’t think much about it beyond my efforts of continually to funding and administering a website I created called ThirdGoal.com.

Peace Corps’ Goals

Most Peace Corps experiences last two years or less. The volunteer arrives to a country, gets trained, moves to a small village, and spends two years attempting to make a difference at a very local level.

The efforts of most Peace Corps volunteers likely accomplish two of the Peace Corps three goals very well while they are in service:

• To help the people of interested countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained workers
• To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served

The third goal of the Peace Corps, however, is mostly unobtainable to the average Peace Corps volunteer during their term of service, which is to…

• To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans

Sharing stories as they happen

It’s easy to understand how difficult it is to actively share your experiences as a volunteer to Americans when you are located thousands of miles away and are subject to intermittent power and water.

As an information technology volunteer for the Peace Corps, however, I had regular access to internet connected computers and managed to share my story as frequently as possible to as large of an audience as I could reach. I did so by blogging about my Peace Corps experience, posting photos, and producing MP3 recordings for people to download (a rudimentary podcast of sorts). I did all of this in 2002 from Georgetown, Guyana.

A sustainable experience

During training, one of the lessons that the Peace Corps tries to instill in its volunteers is to offer their local community a sustainable experience. This means that the community should not become dependent on the services and skills offered by the volunteer, who is scheduled to return to the states in two years. Instead, teach those skills so that they may continue to help themselves long after your departure.

What I find interesting about all of my efforts in promoting “a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans” by posting as much about my Peace Corps experience as it happened — even to my own demise — is how sustainable my efforts in 2002 have been.

ThirdGoal.com continues to receive more than 2,000 unique visitors a month who spend on average more than three minutes reading about the experiences of other Peace Corps volunteers. And while the quantity of phone calls and emails received regarding my experience and early departure have all but vanished, the community blog that I created at ThirdGoal.com continues to retain a steady and sustained pattern of use.

Peace Corps Wiki

In the past couple of months I have exchanged a series of phone calls and emails with Mike Sheppard and Will Dickinson, two individuals who are also interested in better organizing the wide and growing volume of content that more and more Peace Corps volunteers are posting to the web.

They have built PeaceCorpsWiki.org, a community-driven website focused on serving as a collaborative institutional memory for Peace Corps volunteers.

While I am not directly involved in the project, I am serving as an adviser of sorts. Recently, Mike and Will were interviewed on their efforts, during which they commented on ThirdGoal.com and my objectives.

“Jason encountered problems in 2003 when first started pod casting from Guyana; this lead to his early departure from PC. When he returned to the states he started “Third Goal” and the site has continued to grow over the past few years and is a terrific example of a sustainable Peace Corps project. It certainly meets “Goal Three” of Peace Corps ! “Thirdgoal.com” the first Peace Corps related website to my knowledge to successfully make use of Web 2.0 technology.”

Will’s quote reminds me of what Patrick Joyce once said to me while he was still serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guyana; “Jason, while your Peace Corps service may have been short lived, ThirdGoal.com might become the most sustainable thing the 20 of us will ever do.” Patrick was one of the 20 volunteers who I served with in Guyana and was a good friend.

I wish Will and Mike the best as they work to better organize and document the knowledge hundreds of volunteers contribute all over the web.

On her way to work today, Jenny was approached by a Leprechaun who asked her if she believed in magic. Here’s what happened.

Thank goodness she was wearing a green scarf. I’d hate to think the prank they would have pulled on her if she wasn’t.