Slide Show

As a rhetorician, I have to say that I hate corporate talks, especially ones in the church of Microsoft that incorporate ads for BMW, but it's worth waiting until the demo of Notre Dame on this one to see how the idea of creating 3D virtual landmarks and landscapes from images on 2D digital photo-sharing sites like Flickr is being realized. Microsoft's Photosynth project, enabled by the acquisition of Seadragon, points to how Web 2.0 might already be evolving into Web 3.0. Although his talk is full of e-culture buzzwords about the "long tail," "emergence," the "metaverse," "collective memory," and "virtual earth" initiatives, speaker Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an interesting figure for print culture as well, because his research cast doubt on Gutenberg's status as the founder of movable type. See this video for more on his work as a Gutenberg-denier (or Gutenberg-revisionist). I thought it was interesting also to note his comment about how "the lawyers" who are protective of the copyrights of individual photographers could be an obstacle to this project.