Using Flickr mashups

Here is a mosaic, a mashup of Flickr and bighugelabs.com. This is from a photoset of historic photos taken by photographer Margo Montgomery that were donated by the photographer to the Santa Cruz Public Library system and will appear in the Local History Photographs Collection on the new redesigned website, but for now they can be found, with an introduction and statement of what they are and what they are not, at http://senna.sjsu.edu/dfaires/vwillis/SCPLearthquakephotosonflickr.html.

From there you can go to the Flickr photoset or to the profile page which is another version of the statement. This mashup is one of the things you can do with Flickr and other 3rd party sites. There are a lot of things Flickr does very well and very easily, and there are some that they do not do well. For example, in order to distance this set from being an official SCPL site, and to distance the library as a place where only verified factual information is offered, as opposed to a social software corporate site, where all comments seem to have equal value and validity, I needed to create an html page, since the only other option for an opening page was the "profile," which is not like a homepage, since it is not the first thing you see when you go to someone's Flickr photos.

Le Grand Content video

A great use for Powerpoint!

My account on flickr

My account was easy to set up. Flickr allows you to tag your photos, and so I gave mine as many tags as I thought were appropriate to aggregate them with like other photos. Flickr allows you to make your photos public or private, and allows you to set different levels of access for different sets of photographs. You can form your own sets and label the sets. I formed three different sets from the 7 photos I uploaded.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

My responses to the podcast

For me, the easiest two probably are #7.5 and #7; I like to play around with stuff and I like to teach what I know. I have always found that you learn somthing better when you teach it, because you have to explain it and answer questions; often, these questions or somebody else's different way of learning something cause the teacher to learn something new.

For me, the hardest is #3. I tend to view problems or obstacles as a crisis, rather than an opportunity to learn something. I always feel like I should have known better than to have this crisis in the first place. If there are no adverse consequences to anybody else, or to me (such as losing a job or getting in trouble at work, or getting a bad grade), this is usually where I give up. This, of course, plays into #4, which is "seeing yourself as an effective learner." I often feel as though I am too old to learn new stuff, even though I am in school. This hangup can be quite an obstacle.

So now that I have a blog, which I plan to make public, so that we can all share this learning and discovering process, I will post about the first two things on the tracker.

About the blog for the progam itself:
I have also subscribed to this blog and to Helene Blowers' blog. Her most recent entry is about her visit to Santa Cruz. As she promised, we can find the links to the notes from her presentation and also the links to the two short videos. I have not yet set up an account in bloglines. I am using Google Reader, since I like the way my RSS feeds fit on my iGoogle page, along with my gmail, GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, and many other widgets.

Another blog

For someone who has called blogs an exercise in narcissism, I certainly have a few. I am on the Provocative Rebuild Santa Cruz blog, and I have another Blogger blog that I began to try to organize corkball games in a more efficient manner than calling all the players each week, but only one player responded to my invitation and actually signed up. I also have a Wordpress blog, hosted on SJSU's server, for my library school course in Library 2.0, which was harder to set up but offers more flexibility. There were more templates, or "skins," to choose from, and if you download all of the Wordpress files and upload them on to a server, you can change the HTML and the CSS to really customize the look of your blog. I have not done much with the CSS except to move stuff about in my "about" page and to change tthe font-color in the header, but you can check out some of the blogs in my "blogroll," the blogs of my creative, tech-savvy colleagues, to see what can be done. My blog is econolibrarian.