Week 4 - Photos & Images

7. Explore Flickr and learn about this popular image hosting site.

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr to catapult the idea of “sharing” into a full blown online community. Within the past year, Flickr has become the fastest growing photo sharing site on the web and is known as one of the first websites to use keyword “tags” to create associations and connections between photos and users of the site.

For this exercise, you are asked to take a good look at Flickr and discover what this site has to offer. Find out how tags work, what groups are, and all the neat things that people and other libraries are using Flickr for.

Resources:

• Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)
• Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
• Flickr: Popular tags
• Interesting- Last 7 days
• Flickr Services (3rd party applications & mashups) and let’s not forget to look at some other libraries on Flickr

Create a Free account in Flickr and use your own or your libraries digital camera to capture a few pictures of something of interest. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images “UCOL” and mark it public.

8. Have some Flickr fun and discover some Flickr mashups & 3rd party sites.

Like many web 2.0 sites, Flickr has encouraged other people to build their own online applications using images found on the site. Through the use of APIs (application programming interfaces), many people have created third party tools and mashups* that use Flickr images. Here is just a sampling of a few …

• Mappr - allows you to take Flickr images and paste them on a map
• Flickr Color Pickr - lets you find public photos in Flickr that match a specific color.
• Montagr – create a photo mosaic from photos found on Flickr.
• Discover more mashups, web apps, and Flickr tools.
• Explore some of the fun Flickr mashups and 3rd party tools that are out there.

One of the best is FD Toys’ Trading Card Maker. And there’s a ton of librarians out there that have created their own Librarian Trading Card.

So have some fun discovering and exploring some neat little apps. And if you're up to the challenge while you’re at it, why not create a trading card of your own.

* Mashup Note: Wikipedia offers some great articles that explain mashups. Basically they are hybrid web applications that take features from one application (like Flickr) and mash it up with another (like a map). In this example, you get Mappr.

9. Create a post in your blog about the photos you have taken and the Flickr experience.

Be sure to include the image in your post. Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for doing this: through Flickr's blogging tool or using Blogger's photo upload

Add at least one comment to another participant's blog. That's what online communities are all about - connecting and communication.