morganya stanford.edu Why do people tag? Users have mostly avoided annotating media such as photos – both in desktop and mobile environments – despite the many potential uses for annotations, including recall and retrieval. We investigate the incentives for annotation in Flickr, a popular web-based photo-sharing system, and ZoneTag, a cameraphone photo capture and annotation tool that uploads images to Flickr. In Flickr, annotation (as textual tags) serves both personal and social purposes, increasing incentives for tagging and resulting in a relatively high number of annotations. ZoneTag, in turn, makes it easier to tag cameraphone photos that are uploaded to Flickr by allowing annotation and suggesting relevant tags immediately after capture. A qualitative study of ZoneTag/Flickr users exposed various tagging patterns and emerging motivations for photo annotation. We offer a taxonomy of motivations for annotation in this system along two dimensions (sociality and function), and explore the various factors that people consider when tagging their photos. Our findings suggest implications for the design of digital photo organization and sharing applications, as well as other applications that incorporate user-based annotation.

The mobile phone has become the central node of the ensemble of portable objects that urbanites carry with them as they negotiate their way through information-rich global cities. This paper reports on a study conducted in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London where we tracked young professionals ’ use of the portable objects. By examining devices such as music players, credit cards, transit cards, keys, and ID cards in addition to mobile phones, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s identity and activities, mediating relationships with people, places, and institutions. Portable informational objects reshape and personalize the affordances of urban space. Laptops transform cafés into personal offices. Reward and membership cards keep track of individuals ’ use of urban services. Music players and mobile devices colonize the in-between times of waiting and transit with the logic of personal communications and media consumption. Our focus in this paper is not on the relational communication that has been the focus of most mobile communication studies, but rather on how portable devices mediate relationships to urban space and infrastructures. We identify three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities.

In a series of studies, David Frohlich ' has shown that sound can do many things in relation to pictures. For instance, if one shoots a blurry image, sound can "save " them by making them still interesting enough to be shared later in photo-talk. There are few existing studies on sound in mobile multimedia, but they suggest that in the future, we must pay attention not just to the fact that camera phones have made cameras ubiquitous, but they also have made microphones ubiquitous. This paper discusses the implications of this fact to mobile multimedia.

Drawing from ethnographic research in Tokyo, this paper describes the social practices of photographing, modding, archiving and sharing Print Club sticker pictures. The case of purikura is presented in order to illustrate a pervasive image capture and sharing modality that is optimized to capture and display peer network relationships.

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The ubiquity of camera phones, coupled with the increasing mobility of citizens and the rise of digital production as an embedded technosocial practice, is creating incentives for many people around the globe to engage in media creation. Mobile phone users are beginning to explore personal broadcasting through live-streaming video, but little is known about the type of content being produced or how much of that content has civic or community value. At this technological and cultural moment, there is an opportunity to learn not only what is being created, but also how the medium can be embraced as a means of civic participation. This thesis analyzes overall production trends through a content analysis of 1,000 mobile videos on Qik.com, and goes on to investigate the motives and practices behind the production of civic content specifically. Looking at livestreaming mobile video production as a social practice through the lens of civic engagement, it analyzes how and why people are beginning to use this medium to become active citizens for the sake of educating or inspiring others. Research

Ó The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract What is the future of digital imaging? Mobile imaging technologies have been changing rapidly and will continue to do so. We explore new developments in cameraphone photography with the goal of improving the design of the next generation of mobile imaging devices. We equipped 26 diverse participants with cameraphones, photo uploading and sharing software, and access to online photo-accounts for 3–5 months. This study allowed us to identify emerging practices in mobile photoware. We report on new and continuing practices across the lifespan of photos in this new imaging environment, including image capture, upload, annotation, archiving, sharing, and viewing. Based on these results, we develop design criteria and implications for designers and makers of mobile devices, mobile imaging and sharing software, and desktop and online photo software.