The marvellous Olympic compound-eye camera.

Particularly interested to read that Football Data Co want to stop live twitter updates at football matches:

They’ve forced developer Ollie Parsley to to remove club logos from his site and shut down part of his FootyTweets service, which used Twitter to provide live match updates for a variety of clubs. You can’t just start publishing live match reports – it’s a service that can cost more than £15,000 per year, depending on how you distribute the reports and how often.

I care not a jot for sport – except the odd TV snooker match. But this interests me because it hints at a thought experiment of mine.

I’m convinced that either the next World Cup or the 2012 Olympics will be a citizen journalism watershed. Specifically with regard to video – the most valuable of the revenue-generating sports media outputs.

Here’s a question: how many spectators with video phones would you need in order to, with some clever software, reconstruct event coverage such that the quality rivalled that produced by professional broadcasters with their amazingly high-end optic cameras?

If it helps imagine all the camera phones as individual cells in a huge compound eye. Like a fly’s.

And, if you’re sceptical about the software side of things, see Microsoft’s photosynth..

I’m convinced there’s a straight numerical answer to that question – and I hope we’ll find out. Maybe the World Cup is a bit soon, but 2012 feels far enough away to give this a shot.

Would you hand in your video phone at the turnstile? Because I don’t see otherwise how this can be stopped.