Things 18 and 19

Now, having said what I said in my last post, Thing 18 has made me wonder again about whether there could be a useful side to Flickr! I can definitely see the benefits of having access to so many images. I had fun looking around for an image to put into my blog, and chose these two of my old workplace, The Queen's College in Oxford, taken by bez_uk.





I haven't saved it to my computer as instructed, but played around with the 'Share this' options provided by Flickr. I'm still a bit confused about how to attribute a photo - is saying bez_uk took it enough? Maybe I should add a link to him on Flickr? And I notice in Emma's blog post, she's got a link to the Creative Commons licence. Aah, after a bit of digging I found this:


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

Right, I think that's enough? Now onto YouTube.

Other than my Dad occasionally recommending videos to me, which I've never followed up, I've never had anyone tell me anything about YouTube. So, I've dug out my MP3 player headphones, and here goes.

 Well, I had some fun watching some videos - I watched two on the BL's video stream, and and interesting round-up of the year by Warwick's Vice-Chancellor. As with Flickr, I can see this is a great tool for people in their personal lives to have some fun. It's certainly made me want to have a bit more of an explore once I am out of work time. I found it was very distracting - after watching one video, there were links down the side to more that I wanted to watch! I think I could have easily wasted the day on it. As for its use for organisations, and libraries in particular, I'm again still to be convinced. I guess it's nice for ex-Warwick students to catch up with activities on campus, but I can't really see anyone searching for Library related content.

But then, maybe if the Library creates and actively promotes a certain video, say with instructions on how to use the self-check machines, this could be a good use for the site. I did a search for University of Warwick Library, and saw that there were some tutorials for using the catalogue. I think if promoted well, this could be a really good resource. Not being a student, I have no idea how well known about these videos are. The 30 views for 'How to access MyLibrary' suggest not very.

I'm glad to have finally visited and had a go at Flickr and YouTube. I'm sure I shall be re-visiting them again in the future.

Thing 17

Well this is another week I've been looking forward to. I've never used Flickr, and until recently had never looked at YouTube. I'd just never had the time or inclination to work out how they worked. So this was a good opportunity to have a play around.

It was easy to register with Flickr with my Google credentials. And uploading photos seemed quite straightforward. I can see why Flickr could be a really useful tool for friends or family who want to share photos. I'm not convinced by whether libraries can make much use of it though - it was interesting to browse the BL's photo stream, but I certainly wouldn't take the time to revisit it again to see what new photos they had uploaded. I wonder how useful it actually is for an organisation to be able to post lots of photos on-line.

I can't see myself using Flickr, either in my professional or personal life. I don't take a lot of photos, and those that I do I doubt anyone would be interested in! If I want to share photos I would probably put them on Facebook, or just put them on a CD to send to someone. So, Flickr has yet to convince me...