Color photos are extremely attractive to me as I am reading all but the most conceptual articles. Now that digital cameras are everywhere including phones, there has been an explosive increase in cheap color photos available to illustrate news stories.
But newspapers and web pages haven't changed much in response to this big change. Lots of stories have no photos at all. And if you are going to provide the added value of color photos in your stories, how do you make room for them?
I love what Flickr is doing off in the corner with their foto notes, sets, tags, chronological timelines and such. These kinds of technologies need to move into our every day news reading experience. When I read a story, why can't those kinds of tools be available to me online? How can all this bandwidth enhance my experience?
Offline or hard copy is a whole other matter. We now have cheap color photos available but printing color photos is still going to cost a lot in ink if nothing else. The ability to provide more color photo illustration with extra power like what you see in Flickr would increase the advantage of reading your news online. We already have linking which is a huge advantage to online story reading. I'm guessing that your average citizen may start reading more online than off like I do (except for novels and such).
It may be that the wealth, ubiquity and timeliness of digital color photos could speed the adoption of connected mobile devices like cell phones to read the news. The only problem with the cell phone is that the screen is too small to take full advantage of all these screen-hogging photos.
With color photos on the rise as a component of our news reading experience, the tiny cell phone screen seems lacking. There could be room here for a larger wirelessly connected PDA device with a bigger horizontally-oriented screen (say 4-6" in size). I'm thinking of a sideways color Newton or the 1/2-sized tablet that Microsoft has been talking about. It would need enough CPU and GPU horsepower to give us a desktop experience while lying on the couch. Right now, Palm's Lifedrive fits this profile as well as anything I've seen.
I suppose a new media player like the Creative Zen Vision or the rumored video iPod would work, but I sure think the linking and live access features of a wireless device would be preferable. I want to be able to spontaneously cruise over to other sources than the ones I've subscribed to and downloaded in advance.
Now that I think of it, I should be practicing what I preach here on Tech Ronin. I need the blogging tools to let me do what Flickr does and present photo-rich pieces for your reading pleasure right here. Looks like there's room for improvement. Which is a great thing to look forward to.
[photo by Simon Jacquier]
Technorati Tags: digitalphotography, ebooks, handhelds, iPod, mobility, PDA, reading, smartphone, videoipod