Week 3 - Flickr

This week I explored flickr. I already have a personal flickr account and I use it to upload photos and look at my friends photos on-line. It's another good way to catch up with what your friends are doing especially when they are overseas. Tags are a really great feature in flickr because if you want to look for a picture of something specific you can search items tagged with "whatever you're looking for" and you'll get a whole bunch of photos of that thing.

I didn't know about the third party flickr applications though so I signed up to the Big Huge Labs application and used it to make a border collie photo booth effect image (pasted below). It's great how they have a bunch of effects that you can apply to your photo.




This is a movie poster I made using a flickr third party application.



Mashups applications seem really great too in the way that they borrow content or ideas from another site to generate something new.


Online photo editing tools

Unfortunately I was unable to check out picnik on my computer at work because flash player is not installed. I checked out Splashup and Pixenate though and Splashup seemed to have similar tools to photoshop, which I use a lot on my computer anyway. I edited a photo in Pixenate. (see below) These tools will be great to suggest to customers who want to remove red eye from their photos or manipulate them a little.



Generators

I checked the image generators, they seemed like a fun way to make a card or a poster. I made an image using Letter James below. And I used a text generator I found on The Generator Blog to make an old school dj name :)

Old School DJ Name Generator - NamePistol.com

Week 2 - Social Networking

This week I checked out facebook, bebo and myspace. I am in a band so I already use a myspace page for this. I did go through and have a look at some of my favourite bands on myspace and have posted some images below from them. It's really great to be able to check out a bands music on myspace before you go out and buy their album or see their show. It's also a good way to keep in touch with friends and family because you can post pictures and videos on your myspace page. The lack of privacy associated with it bothers me a little but you can set up your page so that only your friends can see your profile which is good.



This is a picture from Jolie Holland's myspace page. She is one of my favourite musicians.

I am on facebook as well and I find this is a good way to keep in touch with friends and family overseas. It would also be a good way to advertise library events because you can set up an events page on facebook and then invite other members of facebook to your event.

I also had a look at bebo as well and checked out the acl bebo page. It seemed similar to myspace in a way except that it doesn't have a facility for playing bands music. I like how the blog part of bebo was on the main profile page similar to the comments section on myspace. Again the privacy aspect of bebo bothered me a bit.

Web 2.0 Week one - setting up a blog

I already had this blog from previous work on the web 2.0 programme so I didn't have to set it up again or set up a gmail account again. I did check out some of the different layout and theme templates available through blogspot and changed my current one. I found that there were some interesting themes but that it was also cool that you can customise the layout and patterns, colours etc of your blog. I have recently started up a teen book club at my library and I think it would be great if we could have a teen blog for our club. That way if anyone happened to miss a book club session they could keep up with what was happening by going on the blog.