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Thing #5 Flickr

August 4, 2008 First, watch this video:


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. 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 discovery 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.

Discovery Resources:

• Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)
• Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
• Flickr: Popular tags Interesting- Last 7 days
• Steve Campion's "Learn More" series: Flickr
• Flickr & Libraries at TTW

Click on this diagram to see the full size image or click here to go to the image at Flickr.

Discovery Exercise:

In this discovery exercise, you have two options…

a. Take a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image that you want to blog about. Be sure to include either a link to the image or, if you create a Flickr account, you can use Flickr's blogging tool to add the image in your post. Another option you have for including images in your post is to use by using the Wordpress photo upload tool built into your blogs. Take a look at this post at Tame the Web where I used Flickr's "Blog This" button to add an image to my site. Read the post as well if you'd like to know more about Flickr and photo releases.

-- OR --

b. If you're up to an easy challenge ... create a Free account in Flickr and use a digital camera (or a camera phone) to capture a few pictures of something in your library or in your life. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images "SLJ20" and mark it public. Then create a post in your blog about your photo and 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 by using the Wordpress photo upload tool built into your blogs. So go ahead, explore the site and have some Flickr photo fun.

Enjoy!

PS: A quick word about photo posting etiquette - When posting identifiable photos of other people (especially minors) is it advisable to get the person's permission before posting their photo in a publicly accessible place like Flickr. Never upload pictures that weren't taken by you (unless you have the photographer's consent) and always give credit when you include photos taken by someone else in your blog.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Posted by Michael Stephens on August 4, 2008 | Comments (3)