Consider Flickr - A Powerful Tool for Images

Flickr, possibly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world, is a great Web 2.0 tool for photos and digital images. I started using it about a month ago, and I am completely hooked. My personal photo collection on Flickr has over a thousand photos. The beauty of this tool is that it allows you to do more than upload photos to the web for storage and viewing. The organizational power of Flickr is impressive. You can arrange your photos into named sets and connect any appropriate photos to user groups within Flickr. The groups can be your own creation, or you can join existing groups.

But, the true power of Flickr comes from the ability to "tag" photos. A tag (sometimes known to Web folks as a meta-tag) is a descriptive word that identifies a photo. For example, a photo of the exterior of Erlanger's Baroness Campus could be tagged as "erlanger," "chattanooga" "hospital," "healthcare", "hamiltoncounty," and "trauma." Within Flickr, a search by these words will take you to the photo.

Flickr also is a social network. Through the groups feature, or by specifically inviting participants to join as a Flickr contact, you will see their photos as well as them seeing yours. You send each potential contact an email with a link to Flickr. If they are not interested, they can safely ignore the invitation.

Flickr also is very smart in terms of digital image rights and privacy. Any image can be identified as "public," that is, anyone can see it, or as "private," with only friends and family allowed. Further, the intellectual property rights of your photos can be completely controlled through legal restrictions and permissions set up through Creative Commons. If you want people to use your photos, but only with attribution, that is one option.

Recently, Flickr expanded its free service to allow users to upload up to 100 MB per month. That is a lot of images. Paid subscription users have no limits on how many pictures they upload and no space limit either - this for $25 per year.

For Flickr details, go to: http://www.flickr.com

I set up at Flickr site for the UT College of Medicine Chattanooga at Erlanger, if you want to view the photo collection, go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/utcomerlanger/

del.icio.us is Just That

del.icio.us is a powerful tool. It is a social bookmarking website that lets one store bookmarks online and thus access the same bookmarks from any computer. With del.icio.us, you use tags to manage bookmarks (sometime called favorites).

The main features include the ability to:

• Store links to favorite websites and add tags to make them searchable and easy to arrange in groups.

• Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community of users.

• Explore new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

Once again, this is a Web 2.0 application that uses "tags" to help keep things organized. When you see that "cloud" of your tags, the tag terms that have the greatest frequency appear in larger type. A simple click on any tag shows all of your bookmarks that you have tagged with that term. You can also see all the other bookmarks from all del.icio.us users.

Another interesting feature is the "Tagometer" that lets visitors can click on a "widget" that keeps up with on who bookmarked your Web page, when they did it, and how they tagged it.
I think that groups who are evaluating Web sites or otherwise sharing information about Web sites will really benefit from the network functions in del.icio.us as well.

Welcome!

This Blog is an attempt to bring current information about using technology to further the educational goals of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and Erlanger Health System.

The launch of the Blog will be December 7, 2006. Larry Miller, Director of Continuing Medical Education for UTCOM/Erlanger, will make a presentation on Web 2.0 at 8:15 AM in the Probasco Auditorium (Ground floor of the Erlanger Medical Mall).

A Web-enabled version of this talk will be available soon, so check back for details.

If you are interested in contributing to this Blog, contact Larry Miller at larry.miller@erlanger.org or call 423-778-3821.