Wednesday, January 16, 2008

and now for something completely different

Apparently there are some perks involved in running high profile creative blogs.

commercial frame

I'm a bit late in announcing this relative to the other participants, but in late Feburary (21st) through early March (8th) I'll be visiting seven major cities in Europe, the final participant in a camera-phone trial project entitled the "Urbanista Diaries" for the Nokia N82 device, which includes a rather advanced point & shoot camera, and GPS tracking, among other features. The project is organized by WOMWorld and the first participant (Devin Balentina) is already traveling through the United States!

Check out Nokia's slick intro video (which one of the participants capped for sharing on our blogs):



I never really considered myself a "blogger", as this is a pretty topic specific blog with hardly any text content, but I suppose one just has to accept the inevitable. I've also been slow to adopt "hyper-connected" ideas, my first camera-phone was the one I just bought before going to Italy. So the offer to participate was a bit of a surprise to say the least! I consider the whole thing quite an experiment. I also tend to have an aversion to pandering to corporate media and interests, so I consulted with a few respected dear friends and colleagues to get a second opinion on participating, and the answer was a strong yes. They pretty much nailed my weakness with the offer of free travel too.

So on February 21st I'll be off to meet the previous participant (Ms. Jen) in Vienna and then make my merry way through my own set of cities (all in Europe) and end up in Helsinki, home of Nokia.

My itinerary looks like this:
  1. Vienna, Austria on Feb. 23rd
  2. Berlin, Germany on Feb. 25th
  3. Milan, Italy on Feb. 27th
  4. Paris, France on Feb. 29th
  5. Bristol, UK on March 2nd
  6. London, UK on March 4th
  7. Helsinki, Finland on March 7th
  8. Austin, Texas (Home) on March 8th

I would love a chance to meet up with readers of this blog, artists, designers, photographers, creative folks, scientists, philosophers, you name it! Suggestions for what to do during the short time I have in each location also welcome! Please leave comments, find me on flickr, or email me at the address in the contact section of my personal site.

For reference, the other participants (and blogs) in order are:

Devin Balentina of www.thenokiaguide.com
Jay (a.k.a. Jose_R.A.M) of www.mynokiablog.com
Ms Jen of www.blackphoebe.com
Myself, Ryan Gallagher of cameratoss.blogspot.com

You can track all of our progress and look at the photos we snap through the nseries.com interface which includes mapping that looks like this:

mapping/tracking interface (by clickykbd)

... or through a widget (which you are free to install anywhere), which I'll migrate into my sidebar shortly.

Migrated to sidebar along with travel calendar

There is quite a bit more to share on this topic as my departure date approaches, but this post is quite long enough already. Stay tuned. Ryan signing off.

me! (mediocore rushed bio however) (by clickykbd)

PS, I find it immensely amusing that I can count the number of self portraits I've taken on less than 10 fingers... and one of them (not spectacular) ends up plastered all over nokia's website. An experiment this is indeed! Wish me luck.

4 comments:

Ms. Jen said...

At the very least it will be a whole lot of fun.

See you in Vienna!

;o)

Anonymous said...

Incredible, Ryan. You're the final participant, like Charlie in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, except that you're not the twelve year old son of an impoverished family and you probably won't meet any white-haired, orange-skinned, singing human sub-species or watch a girl swell up into a massive blueberry in the middle of an enormous, secret candy factory.

Other than that though, you're pretty much just like Charlie.

Have fun!!

Maya

Anonymous said...

You have Mail Ryan ;) ..
I live about 60kms westside of Vienna, so i can have a Look if we can meet each other ;)

I'm Michael, one of the Moderators of the Symbian Freak Forums ..

Lookin forward to your Reply
Michael

Anonymous said...

all pictures are very beautiful, I really like this pictures