For our midterm, Yasmin and I began prototyping a way for inmates to quickly and easily audioblog, using Asterisk. Shawn Van Every provided sagacious advice and his own special brand of humor along the way.

http://itp.nyu.edu/~mtf245/freedom/freedom.php

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For this week Matt and I decided to work with blip.tv and their api. We created a blog - http://elayat.blogspot.com/ - which blip would automatically cross-post to whenever something is posted to the blip show page. The idea is that users can upload images or video from their phones to yelayats@gmail.com relating to the daily theme, and then vote on the best posts.

A user can also choose to register a username instead of posting anonymously. To register, simply send a text message to 'yelayats@gmail.com' with the keyword register followed by a name of your choosing. For example, register yasmin, associated my phonenumber with the username 'yasmin', so my posts are from yasmin instead of anonymous mobile user.

Users can post images or video to the blog by sending an email to yelayats@gmail.com with their phone. The text body of the message acts as the description for the blog post. It will be posted right away, if it's a video, we upload using the blip api, if it's an image we simply email the blog. The titles of the post are the authors of the post. Users can also vote for the best entries.

We are having a problem with the concept because Matt want sto make it all about Obama, of course. Don't get me wrong, I love Obama, but I don't know what kind of content people would send from their phones. I also wanted to do a ridiculous daily theme, but that also needs to further developed. Ideas?

So now, if you take a photo and send it to give1take1@gmail.com with a tag in the message body, it will return a photo matching your tag keywords, OR if no match is found, a random photo is selected for good measure.

Issues
1. Sometimes a mail is sent (or a few), and the popper ignores them. Then randomly it'll start parsing incoming mails again. We're not sure if this is a problem of overloading or what. ***UPDATE*** It was an issue with our gmail POP settings and the crontab. The gmail POP only checks for one moment on, but doesn't check for older mails, and our crontab was scheduled for every 5 minutes - so it would miss the emails. Now it checks every minute, and it gets the emails.

2. Tmobile mail sends more junk images than was included in the current version of parseMailScript, and some were already included as 'bad-attachments', but were ignored by the parser due to case-sensitivity. So we had to update this function with all the extra junk Tmobile attachments, and allow for case-insensitivity.

The application is a Mobile photo exchange, where random photos are being sent to active users. Take a picture with your phone and send it to give1take1@gmail.com. You'll recieve a new photo from another user in your inbox.

This project is using a database to store the photos and messages. The mail popper is in perl, since we had an older version of the parseMailScript with a major bug (will migrate it soon). Using a php script, we check to make sure that each user doesn't recieve the same photo twice.

I - expand access to knowledge, ideas and experience about the use of mobile technology;
II - reduce learning costs for civil society organizations;
III -accelerate the use of effective tactics in campaigns; and
IV - provide a comprehensive platform for data on mobile projects and mobile use around the world.

The Mobile Active network is a global one which allows different types of groups, non-profits, and individuals to exchange knowledge about how to use cellphones to initiate demonstrations, make social changes, human rights abuse reporting, and so forth.

I read some great stories I read about their campaings. The first is a story in the Democratic Republic of Congo where children's rights abuses were being reported from remote towns using SMS messages .