OK I said I’d talk a little about some Web 2.0 tools, such as Flickr.
Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a web site where you can sign up and then save, store and edit photos online. It’s free, although you can upgrade to a professional account for $25 a year. That gives you more space for pictures and allows you to upload video.
Photos right off a digital camera are HUGE! So if you resize photos and them upload them to Flickr you won’t go through a ton of space. If you upload and resize, you can go through more.
So here are some of the things you can do with Flickr:
• Upload pictures
• Edit them
• Organize them into group
• Open up groups to other Flickr users (So maybe everyone in your family joins your group and you all post your holiday pictures online.)
• Tag your pictures with keywords to make then easy to find
• Share tags with a lot of people and you can create a de facto group. So if everyone at the concert tags their Flickr photos with thewho08 and you search for thewho08, you will see everyone’s photos.
• Allow everyone to see them, or allow only a pre-selected group
• Comment on pictures or have others comment on your pictures
• Order prints
• Create a Flickr badge that you can put on your web site so that every time you post new pictures they will show up on your web site. (I did a previous Byte on that: http://tinyurl.com/6lzj6n)
• Upload pictures from your email or cell phone
It’s very user-friendly so I won’t go into the how-to – but I’ve used Flickr for a couple of years now and have been very happy. I’ve talked a few clients into using it too. My favorite application is uploading pictures from the annual event and linking from the web site to it. I no longer resize and as a group we no longer waste time trying to get names – people post comments and help us out. It’s been a huge time saver.
This week I spoke with Jan Hepola at a Hospitality Minnesota conference. We talked about different ways Web 2.0 applications could help promote hotels, resorts and campgrounds. Here are some of the ideas we mentioned:
If I had a business and wanted a cheap and easy web site – this is what I’d do…
I’d buy a domain name through Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com). A domain name is about $9/year and Go Daddy offers lots of features.
I’d start a blog on WordPress (www.wordpress.com). You don’t need to know html. You can customize the pages quite a bit, adding your logo and choosing from many features.
I’d point the domain name to the blog. You can do this on WordPress. It will cost $10.
Here’s a web site that’s built through a blog: http://mnruralpartners.wordpress.com (We haven’t added the custom domain name yet.) As you can see, it looks like a web site – because really a blog is a kind of web site.
Here’s what I like about a blog as a web site
Blogs are cheap
Blogs do well with search engines
Blogs are easy to maintain without knowing html or having special software
Blogs let you add other Web 2.0 tools easily such as video or PPT slides uploaded to SlideShare
You can easily set up a feature where visitors can sign up to get alters when you update your site – through an RSS feed or email.
What’s not to like? I wrote a Byte on how to start a blog last winter: http://byteoftheweek.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/starting-a-new-blog/. Sometimes I set up blogs for clients; it’s cheaper than having me set up a web site. Then they update the site themselves. Sometimes I set up blogs and I update them too – but that’s a different story. Today I’m talk about a cheap DIY solution.
I am pleased to unveil the new Lake Carlos Area Association web site. Lake Carlos is located near Alexandria, Minnesota. What’s nice is that the Association members had a ton of great pictures to use, which made is easy to give a good glimpse of the area.
The goal of the site is to keep the members informed of community information and promote the Association to new members.
A couple weeks ago I went to a workshop on Second Life (http://secondlife.com/). It’s “an online, 3D virtual world imagined and created by its residents.” It’s kind of like a video game. To play you have to create an avatar (online persona). To move around in Second Life you have your avatar walk or fly to different places. You run into other people/avatars and interact with them by typing or talking depending on what you and they have for technology.
It’s not like a video game in that there are no winners and there’s no prescribed action. You don’t try to get a frog across a road or shoot asteroids. Lots of schools and businesses (OK primarily tech businesses) have islands in Second Life. An idea is what they call a server or kind of like a web site. So you have to find these islands and can then visit. So there’s a newbie island or maybe you decide to check out NPR’s Science Friday Island.
I took a video of our stroll in Second Life, which I’ll post below. I just thought it might be interesting for folks to get a glimpse of Second Life without having to create an avatar.
So am I buying stock in a Second Life Island? Not yet. We tried to do a search to find and visit the Louvre – we couldn’t and this was a room full of librarians. I’ve heard that it take a couple of hours to create an avatar and even longer to really get the hang of hanging out. I’ve met folks who I respect who really like it. I’d love for my kids to visit the Genome Island in high school – in fact it’s the education applications that I find most interesting. But what I saw did not inspire me to block off a day or so to get into it.
So you sign up for the service. Then you use their search to find products and you collect credit that you can turn into money. The credit range seems to vary from 2-30 percent, depending on the product and vendors I imagine. You can’t get the credit for 60 days, which makes sense and covers them from people buying and returning stuff.
I don’t buy a lot online so I don’t know if I’m going to get much of a chance to test it out. I know that Microsoft’s search engine has not achieved the market share it wanted and having purchased ads on it, I can tell you it didn’t have great appeal to advertisers. So something had to happen.
Maybe this will take off, maybe not – but there you go if you buy a lot online, here’s a chance to make/save some money.
We had a great time watching the debates with my family. Everybody came away with a different opinion and everybody questioned at least one statement. So I thought I’d look up some political fact checkers before the next debate. I hope you find them helpful too:
FactCheck.org (http://www.factcheck.org/) monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases.
PolitiFact (http://www.politifact.com) has a truth-o-meter that gauges accuracy of comments made by politicians researched by reports and researchers at the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly
