booktwo.org

I’ve been wanting to play with Layar, the augmented reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android for a while. So I did. As a test case, I’ve created a layar for Noticings, the utterly awesome photography game created by my friends Tom and Tom.

It lets you see and find Noticings near you (if there are some within a reasonable distance. It works. It’s nice. It’s available in Layar now.

Why did I do this? You still have to ask? Well, I have a hunch that Layar might be one of the possible ways to implement a version of Storypoints, the locative storytelling thing I proposed some time back. I’ve started hacking at that.

All will be revealed at a later date. Until then, play with Layar*, and play Noticings.

* Unfortunately, Layar is not currently available for the iPhone, unless you downloaded it before they pulled the current version from the App Store. It should be back soon. Android users can get it from the market.

As we noted some months ago, George Oates, former designer and more at Flickr, probably the best designed site on the web, moved to the OpenLibrary. And now this exciting move has borne some fascinating fruit: OpenLibrary Machine Tags on Flickr.

Stick with us. Machine tags are machine-readable versions of the ubiquitous tag system that Flickr and now many, many sites use to describe and organise content. So far, they’ve mostly been used to link last.fm music gigs or upcoming events with photos, but they’re expanding slowly.

Machine tags are an incredibly important link in the bookdata chain, as they allow us to harness bookdata across any number of services. Of course, the same caveats apply, as we’re still picking a unique ID essentially out of the ether, but I’m happier that its OpenLibrary doing it rather than Amazon – or trying to do it with ISBNs.

So the uptake is pretty low at the moment (80 at the current count), but I’ve been tagging my books on Flickr – covers, graphic interiors and text – and I’ll be watching to see what uses there are.

I think it’s really important we start moving beyond covers as the defining “image” of a book – so in particular, I hope people start tagging interior photos. I’m also aware of the possible uses at projects like the Book Seer and bkkeepr (as Tom notes), so… well, we’ll wait and see…