flickr
UKYouthOnline up and running
It’s been a great start to the day at UKYouthOnline. You can follow the twitter back channel (no snarkiness spotted yet, must be a record) at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ukyouthonline and I’m uploading a few photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ukyouthonline
Do join in by leaving messages wherever you can!
Happy birthday to me
It’s my birthday today, I am now in my 30th year. 29 years old! Hopefully this won’t mean lots of pontificating over the next 12 months about what I have achieved, and what I am going to do with myself in the future.
Anyway, I had some lovely gifts, including a top selection of dead tree web 2.0 reading material:
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| The Future of the Internet Johnathan Zittrain |
Everything is Miscellaneous David Weinberger |
Groundswell Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff |
Plenty to get my teeth into there.
I also got lots of lovely birthday well-wishes via Twitter and Facebook – so thanks to everyone for that. Best of all though was this from Paul Caplan via Flickr:
The real value of Flickr
Having an iPhone has really liberated me in term of the way that I use Flickr. This would be true of any phone with decent internet connectivity, and indeed there are plenty of handsets out there with better camera functionality than the iPhone. But the ability to easily take a picture and upload it to Flickr via email in a matter of seconds is fantastic – like this, which I took in Chipping Norton yesterday:
This has led me to have a bit of a wonder about Flickr and where the value of it lies. One thing Flickr does brilliantly is to create a community of photographers, from amateurs through to seasoned professionals, who discuss one another’s photos and chat about lenses, resolutions and whatnot.
But Flickr has another community too – people out on the streets with cameraphones, who don’t really care about the angles of the shots they are taking, wh just want to capture the moment and share it online. Such users can easily find themselves at the forefront of important events, thrust into the role of citizen journalist.
These two communities exist side-by-side rather well, despite the fact that they are using the same service for quite different purposes. Which is more important to Flickr, I wonder – and which to society?
Going local update
Thought I might post an update on my efforts at establishing a social media group in Kettering, Northants. Having been subscribed to various feeds searching for Kettering based content, which mainly produced details of various car boot sales in the area, I might finally be getting somewhere.
A couple of guys have been posting some great photos to Flickr, which have been tagged as Kettering, and with a bit of digging, it’s definitely the one near me, rather than in the States!
This is a clear issue – the tag ‘kettering’ is too vague, and maybe something like ketteringuk or ketteringnorthants needs to be used to ensure it’s unique. Of course, this sort of thing can’t be promoted until people start coming together.
So, I have sent a flickr mail to these guys seeing if they are interested in maybe a pub meet or a photo walk. Hopefully they won’t think I am being too forward 😉