KerryJ's Neotenous Tech

The appeal of Flickr to the general public is immediately evident – it’s a free place to upload and share digital photos with either the world at large or a select group of friends and family. No spam sent to friends and family, a free 20 MB account and the ability to give and receive feedback on photos. For educators, the ability for students to upload photos and receive peer feedback is an obvious plus. But it also offers the ability to find photos for use in presentations and reports via Creative Commons licensing. For older and adult students, Flickr also offers the ability to get a world view on the everyday. Type in mundane words such as family, wedding, house, mother, teacher and revel in the banquet of unique perspectives. You can use Flickr to store photos to display on other web sites — so if you want to save your uploads on one site you can copy and paste the code from a Flickr photo into your HTML and Flickr will serve it up for you. You can also set up Flickr to talk to your blog software. This is a huge advantage if you’re on the road and reliant on publicly accessible computers that don’t allow file uploads — as there are services that allow you to send your mobile phone photos straight to Flickr. Visit the tools section of the Flickr site for more information. You can also blog about photos uploaded by other Flickr members. I’m a bit confused about having the ability to blog about and display another member’s copyrighted work – when in doubt, I would think asking the owner of the image first would be the safest way to go. As an image owner, you can choose how available you wish to make your photos for blogging in your account settings. Because you can edit the layout that Flickr outputs to your blog, I think of it as a time saver for those of us lazy people who don’t want to have to define the vertical and horizontal spacing as well as the alignment fo an image everytime we want a photo at the top of a blog entry. To use Flickr, you must register for a free account. If you are already a member of Yahoo!, you can use your Yahoo! user name and password.

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