Week Three - Thing 5 - Exploring Flickr

I could probably get lost for hours on this site. Scratch that. I have already been lost for hours on it. I began by uploading a bunch of my own photos to the site. This felt really good because I feel I have been behind the eight ball as far as uploading and sharing photos. I have certainly tried it before on other sites but something has always gone wrong with it. Using Flickr seems really easy.

I feel a bit strange about everything being public, but I also get annoyed when someone sends me an email that says "view my photos" and when you go to whichever site they used, you need a password to see them. I have a friend who recently sent me a link to his Flickr photos that he took at a party that we had. His photos are public and this makes it SO much easier to access and view them.

As a matter of fact, one of the photos that he took from our roof-deck was picked up by a site called shmap http://www.schmap.com/boston/home/. I had never heard of this site but it is basically for getting information on various places fo traveling - sort of like an online guidebook. It's pretty cool and it sends out what I think are called "spyders" (if anybody knows about this, let me know) to search for photos of various places to add to the site. Anyway, the photo that the schmap site found is here. This is a church by our house. Unfortunately, though it looks lovely in this photo, it was gutted in a fire several years ago.

I especially enjoyed searching around Flickr for librarian photos and seeing how the tags can work within the photo itself (like this one). Unfortunately, though I've tried several times, I cannot get an image to show up on my blog, which is why I'm creating links instead.

Week Three - Thing 6 - Mashups

Woah! I never knew what mashups were before. This opens up a whole new world for me. Not that I will have much occassion to use mashups, but I definitely like to be educated on what is out there. The Montagr site is really fun. I know that my friend's Flickr page has photos of me so I put my name as a search in Montagr but there are way too many little pictures to be able to find my own face. It's neat that you can scroll over everything to see the pictures, though.

The Mappr site is neat, too. It is similar to the Schmap site where you are seeing photos from certain places. The difference is that Mappr solely uses images from Flickr and Schmap gets them from everywhere on the web.

It is just amazing to see all of the different avanuse one can travel down when using the internet and to see the imagination that goes into coming up with these mashup sites.

Week Three - Thing 7 - Something I've Learned

I learned a new techie term this weekend. I wanted to load some photos onto my laptop from our camera but I have only ever loaded thewm onto my desktop computer and the software that I needed was not loaded onto my laptop. Anyway, I went to the Pentax site to download the software and there was a link for software and something called "firmware," which I had never heard. The site said that software is what you download to use on your computer to allow your camera to download images, etc. Firmware is something you download onto your camera that might update its settings, like the way that it records date and time, for instance. I'm not sure if it is called firmware for all portablwe devices, but I think it's cool that I learned something new!

Week Four - Thing 8 - RSS Feeds

Ok, I have set up my RSS feeds. To be perfectly honest, I have no need for RSS feeds in my life - personal or professional. I think, as it is, we are all bombarded by information from all angles every day. So why would I subscribe to another thing that I have to sign up for, sign into, and spend time reading? I see how these would be helpful, especially if you had a job as a reporter for a newspaper or some other job where you need to be on top of information from multiple sources quickly. In my job, somebody comes in with a question and I search for the answer right there and then. Does it help to be on top of current trends and information? Of course. However, I already find myself saying, several times a day, "I was just reading about..." without needing to be hooked into an RSS feed.
Something that really bothered me is the fact that I signed up for a friend's political blog, and anywhere he has video embedded shows up in the RSS feed as a continual list of pornographic language. What's up with that? It makes me ask what kind of filtering there is on these RSS feed sites. If I asked students to sign up for these, will they see something similar?

Week Four - Thing 9 - Blog Finders

I used the Google Blog finder. I never knew there was such a thing! I think this is great. I often am faced with a question from someone who would like to know what others in a certain field (usually different teaching disciplines, but not always) are thinking about. With the Blog search I can go on and find a few blogs and read a little about any subject to get various opinions. It's weird, it is almost like having a round table discussion about any subject at the drop of a hat. I found with some blogs you sometimes are faced with some fanatics or people who feel really passionately one way or the other, depending on what subject you are searching for. I suppose people who bother to keep up with a blog are the ones who DO feel passionately about their subject matter. Anyway, if you can kind of sift through and glue all comments together for a more well-rounded perspective, it can be really helpful.