Meet Diego Salinas, a budding historian.
Last Thursday, at just past 4 p.m., Salinas sat at his computer in the technical support department of Ampira, a Manhattan Web hosting company, when the power went out. He peered out the window of his 15th floor office and saw other bewildered faces staring back at him.
He soon joined the anxious fray that spilled onto the streets to walk home, in Salinas's case, 6.5 miles to Brooklyn, after the worst power failure in history. Sixty million people in the Midwest, the northeastern part of the United States and certain parts of Canada all were without electricity.
Realizing he was living a historic moment, Salinas took out his camera phone, snapped photos of people walking home and uploaded the pictures to a website hosted by textamerica. While most people, including Salinas, could not make cell phone calls that afternoon, they found that Web applications, which operate on different channels on the cellular network, worked normally.
"I managed to capture five or six pictures before the battery on my phone died," Salinas said. "I will always remember that particular day. It's a historic event that has never happened before. If anyone else wants to look back in time -- my friends and family -- I will always have those five or six pictures to mark it down for them."
Not only did Salinas document history, he also jumped into an emerging trend in the United States: the use of camera phones to create "moblogs." Coined by combining "mobile" with "blog," these are websites where anyone can post pictures taken with mobile phones.
While camera phones are nothing new in Asia, which is known for its sleek and stylish mobile phones, Americans are still testing them out. The market to send and receive pictures through camera phones will grow to $440 million in 2008 from $10.3 million today, according to a report released Monday by research company Zelos Group.
Camera phones have "become popular in the United States in the last six months," said Travis Larson, spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. "This may be the first major news event in which camera phones helped deliver the story. And they've done so in real time."
Actually, this isn't the first time camera-phone owners made headlines. Early this month, a 15-year-old boy in New Jersey foiled an attempted abduction by snapping a picture of his assailant. Police arrested the accused kidnapper later that day.
By Friday afternoon, when power was still out in some areas, at least a dozen people managed to post 65 photos on the same website that included Salinas's photographs. About 185 weblogs linked to that website, said Shawn Honnick, vice president of business development for textamerica, the company that set up the moblog.
Salinas and other camera phone users, including John Wehr and Joseph Leff posted moblogs about the blackout as well.
"Most of what you will see out there is people's pets, people taking a picture of themselves, their cars," Honnick said of moblogs. "It is a novelty at this point. This blackout moblog is our first step in that direction … getting people to focus on events and ideas."
But even people who think Honnick is onto something would say the blackout moblogs are amateurish at best. Because the resolution of most camera phones isn't even a megapixel, most pictures appear blurry. The subject matter is not very exciting, either: unidentified people walking down the street, close-ups of rotten food, a candle and even television screens showing news programs featuring the blackout.
"This is a sign of things to come more so than a watershed event," said Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. "The (moblog) coverage didn't give me much better than what I could get on television."
Rheingold, however, predicts that once camera phones are comparable in resolution to stand-alone digital cameras and can stream video, moblogs will start to get interesting.
"Of course, what you do get the day after a major event in blogs that you are not going to get on the networks are very extensive first-person descriptions of what their day was like," he said. "You would have thousands of eyewitness accounts."
As for the amateur photographers doing the posting, they have proof they lived history, Salinas said.
"All of my friends (who saw the pictures) wrote and wanted to know all about it," Salinas said. "They couldn't believe something like that could happen. They said, 'I'm glad you took the pictures.'"
"It was the wonderment of it all. They could live through my eyes."
