I’m sure this is completely unsurprising but here is this week’s Common Craft video. If I were getting paid for this I’d probably have to give them a cut…..
This week is about the social nature of online picture-sharing. Again, there are many services out there that people use — two you hear a lot about are Flickr and Picasa (more – Photobucket, Webshots). Both allow you to upload pictures and then share them others for free (you can also pay for “premium accounts” that give you much more storage and other functionality). I use mine to post adorable pictures of my nieces or to collect a set of pictures for Christie’s family (I went with Christie) to see her adopted daughter Joo Mee while we were still in Korea. You guys aready saw some honeymoon pictures (there are some wedding ones too)!
Flickr is certainly a well-known and is easily the biggest photosharing site out there. The social dimension of this massive collection of phots is kind of staggering. Do a search on a word like “bear” and the richness of results you get. Search a word that represents a hobby or interest of yours. Did you get surprising or interesting results?
The Library of Congress made a big splash this year when they uploaded more than 3000 photos to Flickr. They already had an online catalog of photos so why was this so exciting? For one thing, because of Flickr’s social networking nature, the public could participate. They invited people to contribute “tags” (kind of like “subject headings” for books) and comments — with the hope that LOC could learn more about these photos for their records. In just two days there were 650,000 views of photos, all 3,100 photos had been viewed and 420 pictures had comments. People loved it and what a rich collection of photos most of us would never have the chance to see in person….
Project Launch
Project Follow-up
Library of Congress Flickr page
Three ways this is a “social animal” that makes it more than just storing your photos online.
- You can share with others! You can open your pictures up to the world or just your friends and family. I love being able to share photos online. And in a time where families are often geographically distant, it sure does make it easy to share!
- Comments — one of the way you see the social nature of this collection is the comments. 160 people left comments on this picture of gummy bears!
- Tags, or “what’s the photo about?” – Pay attention to the “tags” in the common craft video and when you’re poking around Flickr. This is an important Web 2.0 feature we’re just now getting to. It’s not unlike a book’s “subject headings” (Frank and Kathy could tell us more about those) but it’s also radically different. That could be an essay assignment – “compare the similarities and differences of subject headings vs. tags”……nah. But buy a librarian a cup of coffee or a beer if you really want to know.
But there are many other applications as well. To get the 411, see Educause’s two page “7 things you should know about Flickr“ description of what Flickr is all about and its educational applications.
Your task(s):
- Easy — search the vast Flickr collection or the smaller Library of Congress collection for pictures you find interesting. Post one to your blog.
- Extra credit — start your own Flickr/Picasa (or other) account and upload some photos to share. Put a link on your blog for us to peek at!
- More Extra credit — play around with the edit features they offer. Flickr partnered with Picnic this year which means that on Flickr I can crop and resize photos, add text, borders or other fun graphics (I was going to make this our Christmas card).
