I love Flickr! I don't upload my pictures there (mostly because my home connection is ssslllllooooowww and I'm not a particularly good photographist) but browsing the site's excellent pictures is always great fun. There's many a great pic sitting there waiting to be discovered. My current favorites are all of a groovy book sculpture at the Kansas City Public Library. I have a bit of an aversion to the idea that all these books had holes drilled in them in the name of art, but the finished article is quite something....
I wish the Photog. in the last pic there had been wearing Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility.... that, or perhaps electronically edited himself out of the pic. Either way. Impressive stack of books, huh? The gateway to knowledge? Stargate? The donut thing out of Star Trek: City on the Edge of Forever? You decide.
So. Awesome content uploaded daily by people who take great pictures. What else is great about Flickr?
You can organize your pictures into small sets or larger collections. You can set up groups of people who share your interest (see the next post for news of the single-letter group) You can also keep contacts and share your pictures that way.
There are two ways to search the images on Flickr. You can use the full-text descriptions, but the big deal on Flickr is the tags. Check out the popular tags. This is our first (second, if you count Blogger's labels) exposure to the concept of Folksonomy. Contrary to popular belief, current medical research suggests that Folksonomy is not, in fact, toxic to librarians and that it can be fun! The limitations are shown up, though, in the attached screenshot of Ummonshadow's pictures tagged "England." Sure, these are English bugs (aren't they, Grissom?) but is that really what we expected when we searched on that tag? Where's the tea and crumpets? Where's the Queen?
Folksonomies are great for personal retrieval, I guess, but not so useful for the external searcher? What say you?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
