#anz23mthings Week 2 I heart @Flickr

 

Well I guess the heading says it all!  I love snapping things either on my camera or my iPhone.  I take all sorts of things: leaves, skies, architecture, street art, cats (particularly my Xena), clouds, flowers, holidays. You can follow me on Instagram as Polyxena2 but don't expect much interaction from me. I joined Instagram but unlike Kim I didn't really get into it and I don't use it very much.  My fave is Flickr.

Like lots of other  things, I started using Flickr as part of the original 23 Things that I did in 2007.  And well, I guess as time has gone on it has become one of my favourite social media and cloud storage tools. I load my photos there almost daily (either directly or via the Flickr or other apps), I belong to many groups, and I participate in a number of challenges.  This year I am part of the Friday Photos group where we are given a weekly theme and post three photos by the following Friday. I take part in Kathryn Greenhill's Happy365 group and I administer the 2013 Photo a Day Group as well as the Victorian Public Library Buildings group and the Victorian Hotels group. I also participate in the general #FlickrFriday group which has a themed one photo a week focus.

Aside from my own account, Hecuba's Story, I manage the Collingwood Historical Society's Flickr account and face the weekly challenge of trying to find local photos which fit the Friday Photos theme.That involves lots of thinking out of left field, but so much fun. It is quite a different thing for an historical society to do but we find we are getting engagement and information enquiries and discussion there and engaging with people who are different from our face to face members. And it is a great way for us to document today which is, of course, tomorrow's history.

Specifically for this Week 2 task, I took a photo of my new British Museum umbrella with my iPhone Flickr app.  I cropped it, added an effects filter, added tags, a set, and groups and uploaded it to Flickr.  As part of the upload the photo was also fed out to my Twitter and Tumblr accounts. The Flickr app which was upgraded not so long ago is now very good - it had been awful.  So now I am happy to use it.

I also took a screen shot on my iPhone of my doing the uploading of the umbrella photo.  That was in my iPhone photos so I opened my Flickstackr app and used that to upload it to Flickr.  Flickstackr is my favourite Flickr app and I use it a lot to load and edit and comment on photos.  It has the full Aviary editing functionality and is a great little app.

To get both of these photos into this blogpost, I used the iPhone Blogger app to upload them as I was trying to focus on mobile apps, though I could have used other ways. Flickr and my iPhone provide me with such a range of versatile ways of getting my photos to the world as well as editing and storing them.  Yes, I heart Flickr.

#anz23mthings Week 1 A Twitter Dilemma

I've been a Twitter user, both on my desktop and on mobiles, for years and I have used both Twitter and a range of third party clients, some now defunct and some still operating. As some of you know, my Twitter handle is @polyxena and you can read about the significance of that in this blogpost.

Twitter is an integral part of my life - or is it?  Now I am in the midst of a real dilemma about my use of it.  This post is about my history of using Twitter as well as my current dilemma.

I thought I joined Twitter as part of the original 23 things that I did with Victorian public libraries in 2007.  But as an historian I wanted to check that out, and I discovered that I didn't!  When I looked back through this blog, I found out that I had decided when I was doing Thing #19  that Twitter wasn't for me and that I wasn't going to join up!   I looked at Facebook and MySpace instead.  However, after the 23 Things were completed I continued on with the Web 2.1 which Helene Blowers' library was running.  And guess what?  Along came Thing #35 Mini or microblogging and I relooked at Twitter and joined up then on 5 January 2008.  You can read what my views on it then were here.  Yes, I was pretty cynical about its value for me or for my workplace.

However, as I started to use it my views changed radically. Once I had built up a body of followers and people I followed, I realized the amazing benefit of Twitter to me in a number of areas of interest. I currently follow 1,594 others and have 748 followers.  On a whole these cover a wide range of my interests though it is true to say that librarians are probably over-represented and some other areas of my interest have not yet been re-educated.

I had been a voracious user of RSS feeds and got most of my general news, public opinion and professional reading that way. But as time moved on I realized I didn't need (or wasn't using) RSS feeds for this and was only occasionally reading them.  I was doing most of my professional reading through a Twitter filter and I typically started each day with an early morning coffee in bed and with Twitter where I got the latest news (normally before I heard it on the radio) and got my professional reading fix.

We had had a Twitter account (in fact more than one but that is another story) at the City of Boroondara Library Service from about the time I and a number of other staff members joined and we used it mainly to advertise events or to link to our blogposts or Facebook but also to post or RT items of interest.  However, we had quite a number of staff on Twitter and one thing I found it very useful for was to put out pleas for emergency staff on the weekend when someone rang in sick!  Posting on Twitter sure beat ringing around and rousing people from their weekend sleep. We also found it a great tool for communicating about system outages.  Often on weekends, if systems and the VOIP connected phones were down, that was how staff communicated with me and I could set recovery into play.



Aside from the professional reading, I also built up a great personal learning network on Twitter with librarians from all over the world, but predominantly in Australia as they are in my time zone.  This meant that there was always somewhere to go to float an idea, get some data, cry for help or engage in all sorts of discussions (yes even about cat photos and Cats).  Twitter provided me with amazing professional support from across all the sector and provided a supportive environment to test ideas. Many of these people I have never met, though through local Tweetups (see one heading this post with @flexnib and @restructuregirl at Tulks), various serendipities, and overseas travel I have met some of these people in real life.  VALA conferences in Melbourne were always a great meeting place. But the reality is that it doesn't matter if I have met these people.  I have many, many friends that I have had as online friends for decades, and these Twitter friends are similar.

An astute reader of this post may have realized that there has been a bit of past tense usage. And therein lies my dilemma. Late last year I retired from my position at the City of Boroondara Library Service and not unsurprisingly I have been pursuing other interests.  I realize that my Twitter life has now changed.  With my early morning coffee, I am much more likely to go to Flickr first to check out on what has been going on in the rest of the world overnight, or to my email. I also find that I am using Facebook more than I did when I was working. Once Twitter (or Echophon) would have been the first thing I went to.

Does this mean that Twitter is no longer an integral part of my life? I didn't think Twitter was just about libraries for me, or my personal learning about libraries, but now I wonder.   I don't know and I would be interested in getting people's comments on this.  I will continue to monitor this and see how I go.  Maybe I need to embark on re-educating some other areas of my interest. Surely Twitter must be important to everyone?

#blog12daysxmas 2013 challenges

So 2012 is done and dusted. What technology challenges am I giving myself for 2013?  I have blogged elsewhere about my reading challenge targets - they might be p-books or they will often be e-books.  But what else?  Well, those of you who know me know that Flickr challenges are a constant in my life.

This year I have signed up for three specific Flickr challenges. The Flickr Friday Photo Challenge managed by my friends @ sarahgb in Wales and @csmramsden in Melbourne is a follow on from the 2012 challenge.  This is a themed photo challenge with three photos taken per week. I have enjoyed doing it in 2012 and it has been great to meet people all over who are doing this. Last year I undertook this challenge for the City of Boroondara Library Service and for Collingwood Historical Society in addition to my own personal commitment. This was quite a commitment but I loved it. Unfortunately the City of Boroondara Library Service has not continued this commitment but I will continue doing it for the Collingwood Historical Society along with colleagues in that group. If any of you are interested, please join us in the group.

My second group, Flickr 2013 PAD, is also a follow on from 2012 and from 2011 when we did Photo A Day. This is a group that @sarahgb managed but she has handed on the mantle to me manage this year! I hope I can meet the challenge! I have done a photo a day since 2011 and I must say it has become rather a way of life!  We have lots doing it this year so have a look and join us if you like.  This group started out amongst librarians in the UK with a couple of us from the antipodes but has broadened out a bit as time had gone by and now we are quite international.

My final Flickr challenge is a new one.  The Happy365 group established by @sirexkat asks us to post a photo a day about something that makes us feel happy.  There are a number of us doing both the 2013PAD and the Happy365 so there is some overlap.  But the Happy365 is an interesting one as it challenges us to take a happy photo. So far (in week one) it has been fascinating to see the scope of people's possibilities and to realize how many of those things make me happy too! Great kudos to Kathryn for coming up with this one!

#blog12daysxmas Day 9 videos from Flickr

 

I was very pleased to have finished my 366 photographs for the Flickr Photo a Day 2012 Challenge.  But as I stated a couple of posts ago I am very keen to create a video of the 366 photos like I did in 2012 with the late lamented Pummelvision.  So, rather than moaning about it any longer, yesterday I decided that I would explore possibilities.

After a bit of research I ended up with what seemed to be three contenders.The first was Animoto which I have used in the past in its free version which was going to be far too short for 366 images. Animoto in its free form was actually Thing Number 39 years ago and that is how I came across it.

There are also Plus and Pro paid versions and so I thought that that maybe the Plus version for $5 a month or $30 a year would be the goer.  I pottered around in the site for a while checking the functionality and made another freebie of my Loupe.com collages which I successfully uploaded to Youtube.  You can see it here.


Of course, then I looked into the fine print of the technical detail and discovered that the maximum number of images was 300!  Boo! That was not going to be very good for a year of 366 days (or even 365).

The second was Windows Live Movie Maker. I didn't get very far with this one, though I think fiddling with it seemed to change my Firefox settings and resulted in no video access. That is a whole other story.  The reason I didn't pursue it was that it only accesses photos on your PC or camera and not from other sites such as Flickr as I wanted. This may be a great tool but it is not what I want.

The third one was another paid site, Stupeflix. It also looked hopeful so I started making a video by loading up photos from Flickr. Although I could find no information anywhere on the site about the maximum number of images, my initial load stopped at 50 and although I was able to load more incrementally it could not deal with 366.

So does anyone have any other bright ideas?  Am I missing the obvious?  It seems to me that the solution is to do divide the year into two and do two videos using the Animoto Plus account.  At least my Flickr Friday Photos 2012 will only be a maximum of 159 photos!