GPS

Rollercoaster at Linnanmäki amusement park kuva: tuija.

This ending year has been a huge learning experience for me as to what tools there are for storytelling and sharing experiences captured on photos, sound clips, videos - the media themselves of course not being the point, but the emotion and information they carry to the receiver.

I have recently begun experimenting with the Nokia N90, which captures pretty decent video. See for instance the experimental "one year from the tsunami" videoblog from Thailand by Katri Makkonen of YLE - in Finnish only, sorry. "If only I had had that with me last year", she said, having been on location, spending her holiday in Thailand when the tsunami hit.

Podcasting has begun to spread modestly in Finland this year - a handful of noncommercial podcasters as well as the first independent commercial one Stara.fi and of course the established public service broadcaster YLE with its selection of 30 plus podcasts.

Google Earth has of course impressed everyone with it's ability to support such a variety of content - and we've only just seen the beginning.

For easy audio capturing there is a fresh innovation in Finland, mprec.com. It only functions with finnish operators' accounts but the functionality is simple enough: you register once via sms sending your email address along. You then make a call to their phone number, speak your message which can be as long as you wish, and moments after you finish, receive the audio you just recorded in your email as an mp3 file. I can imagine endless uses for this. Might there already be something like that live in other countries?

And what about sharing pictures and music tastes. A friend & colleague opened a new world to me by inviting me to try Flickr and Audioscrobbler in January. I was instantly hooked.

My wish for 2006: a modestly enough priced digital pocket camera or cameraphone with built in GPS-metadata tool. I love the way Geobloggers.com (apparently on maintenance/holiday break at the moment) lets me put my favorite snapshots on the map. It is too much of a hassle, however, to do that manually with all the photos. I want that as a standard automatic "one-click" feature, thank you. And while we're at it, I wouldn't mind having the same GPS metadata features on professional AV gear as well. Surely news reporting would greatly be enhanced by the possibility of geographical filtering.

Can't wait to see what's ahead of us around the corner. Any good guesses, anyone?