Week 6 - Photo Sharing

Hmm, not bad! I signed up for a Flickr account sometime in 2006 but never really used it. I've used it to look for freely available stuff for design work and wound up there a lot via other people's blog posts (one of the things that really seemed to make some of my fave blogs work was the topical photo accompanying every post - now that's started to include YouTube and other videos too). So I've finally started uploading some of my own stuff in this exercise and its nice how easy it is!! Had some problems with Facebook but Flickr works great, and has some nice tools to let me use my iPhone as well as my laptop/desktop.

So how could this be used in the library? Well, for starters it could really improve our existing system for organizing and finding photos. We have a shared drive, and have some talented photographers and a pretty large back archive of images but the "organize by folder and image title" is a little weak. Whether we shared with the outside world or not the ability to tag things and use some of the incredible finding/organizing/playing with tools that people have created would be great. If we do share our stuff with the outside world that could help in terms of promotion or driving people to our library potentially (i.e. they stumble across us, are impressed by our inherent fabulousness and want to bask in the warm glow of it whether in person or online :-)

I'm involved with a number of websites, for our library and other professional groups, and the idea of putting them in a shared space like Flickr as well as on our site(s) makes lots of sense. You can create nice things like photo badges or rotating image elements, change things up frequently, etc. Like del.icio.us, it can also be a research or comparison tool, giving you ideas by looking at what people with similar interests/in similar markets are doing.

In terms of places like Facebook, while I had some technical glitches there I see that as serving one of the same functions as with blogs - giving more of a human face to an otherwise less cohesive or "real" community. Lots of online communities come to life with nothing more than ASCII text, but often it takes a human connection to push some people over a certain line in terms of trust, committment, whatever. If you don't have the opportunity to meet in person and cement that bond then photos can help alot, esp. if they are of the "fleshmeets" that others have had an opportunity to attend (whether informal or professional in nature). So while much of it can seem trivial it actually serves a very important social function (being a part-time professional humbug I've come to be convinced of the value of this, and smile and act nice when I see less than wonderful manifestations of this phenomenon :-)