Dazed and Confused

Do you know what I find fascinating about my cellphone's built-in camera? The ability to push any image, still or video, immediately up to the web for all to consume. In my case it's pushing them up to my Flickr account. There's no other way to easily do that unless I cross over to my laptop and plug the phone into one of the laptop's USB ports with a micro-USB cable. Then I can bring up Windows explorer (or Linux Nautilus) and navigate the phone's filesystem looking for the image, then go through the rigamarole of using Flickr's browser interface to select and upload the photo.

It's a whole lot easier pushing it directly from the phone to the 'cloud'.

You can accomplish the same task with cameras that use SDHC memory cards by using Eye-Fi's online sharing feature. What makes the cellphone easier than even Eye-Fi is the ability to select, with a simple single touch, a given network out of a fairly extensive list to upload to.

Yes, as an old man, I know I'm very late to this party. But I can certainly appreciate what it means. Especially in this day and age of raw citizen journalism. My cellphone isn't the only phone capable of doing this. And cameras with Eye-Fis are just as powerful, just as dangerous.

Strange days indeed.