Thank you for sharing that. The lack of synchronization between the videos made watching them slightly bewildering, but as a demonstration of a concept, it is exciting and motivating.

We're quickly approaching a point where everyone has a device capable of recording and transmitting text, images, audio, video, and location with him or her at all times, and we're therefore entering an era where every public event is documented, in multiple media, from multiple angles. This has interesting ramifications for how the concept of privacy will evolve, and it is a milestone in history. Not just the chronological record, but the field of research that focuses upon it.

Our lifetimes will contain the shift from struggling with scarcity in the search for primary sources to a problem of overabundance. Academic research on visual media search algorithms has a bright future.

Meanwhile, photos text-tagged, dated, and geotagged on Flickr need to be pulled together with videos with similar metadata on YouTube by new, creative tools. These and other content sharing sites need to evolve to become content repositories, offering not only APIs, but also their contents as discreet objects with rich metadata to be filtered and combined by other services.

This relies upon the mobile devices that feed these sites and services providing high quality metadata with content. The devices should gather as much as possible automatically--capture parameters, precise location, precise time, etc.--and make it easy and efficient for users to add further information. With mesh networking, devices could work cooperatively, and anonymously, to suggest tags, Del.icio.us-style: "Recent, local tags include: Maemo Summit, Fremantle, lightning talk..."

If devices in a local mesh can work together to determine each device's location better than any of them could individually, then the metadata accompanying media captured during a highly attended event may allow 3D recreations of that event to be built automatically.

As augmented reality becomes widespread, the sharing comes full circle. Visit a location, view it through your mobile device, and see the history of that spot. Pick a moment in time as the start for "playback", and have the video and images from an event then overlaid on the now. Hear the sounds. Read the tweets. Experience all around you a concert, a speech, a protest, a celebration you didn't attend or one you wish to relive.