Flicker Mashups and Tools

I spent a great deal of time trying to pick good examples of Flickr mashups and tools for the project blog. Some of the ones I tried I could not get to work correctly. I liked the "Spell with Flickr" thing, so I used it, but it took me a long time to figure out how to actually save the image of the words spelled out with images. (I ended up doing a screen print, (Ctl-Print Screen) and then had to paste it someplace, so I opened up PowerPoint and pasted it into an empty slide, and then saved the image. Then I had to use a photo editor to crop it and resize it. So it wasn't simple.

I find most of the Flickr things to be kind of dumb, and they don't appeal to me. But then I'm not really that big on pictures anyway. I do realize that some people are more "visual" than others and that images can be a very strong way to communicate.

I tried an application called fotocrib and used it to alter my picture on my profile.

Blogging from Flickr

Beula
Originally uploaded by Patricia Thompson2007

This is a picture of one of the foster puppies I had back in April. I am posting this blog entry from within Flickr to see how it works.

Here I am!

I've started this blog as part of the Learning 2.0 program at Sewanee. OK, I've had a little practice since I developed the blog for the program. However, I did it for the first time just a few short weeks ago.

I started getting interested in what was going on with libraries and Web 2.0 just in the past few months. Up until then, I thought blogs were things that teenagers and 20-somethings did to post what they did every day, and wondered why anyone would care, and decided that I didn't have time for that. I knew that some people blogged about politics, and that didn't interest me either. But lately, I have found that there are all kinds of blogs on nearly every topic imaginable, and I began reading some librarian blogs. Since they all quote each other, I soon found a few more, and then I found some directories of blogs, and then I set them up on my RSS reader (which we will cover in Learning 2.0 in week 4.)

I also found a blog written by Tim Goodman, the Television Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. I started reading him because he wrote articles about episodes of the Sopranos. Not only does he write interesting analyses of the shows, there are lots of users who follow him and write comments. Of course, I didn't find all this until last month, and as you may know, last night was the final episode of the show. I'm going to miss it. Any other Sopranos fans out there? What did you think of last night's "finale?"

Well, getting back to work issues, in reading the things I was finding in these librarian blogs, I learned a great deal about new tools and how people are using them to share information, and I think it's important that we as information technology professionals need to be aware of them. There is a lot more out there than email. In fact, I keep hearing that students don't even read their email any more. So how do we communicate with them? We need to find out!