Thing 10 - Social networking

Facebook and Myspace are a great way to loose hours of your life and privacy, i have accounts on both but i limit the information i put on those sites about myself as i feel I have a good web presence with out there help, i also don't support the Terms of Use with Facebook as they reserve the right to keep any data (dialogue, picture, video etc) deleted by a user from there page. I also just don't have the time to spend on these sites. I do how ever see there uses and appeal, to be able to connect with people you may have met for a short time and lost contact with, friends from schools past and present and also long lost family members if you have any. Over all i think there a good idea just not for me personally.

Thing 09 - Explore Slideshare

Slideshare looks to be a great site for sharing power point slide shows for input from either the general public, friends, family or even work mates. I found a few funny presentations and a couple interesting ones as well, I think this would be a great tool in the class room when working in groups on a presentation it could be a way of viewing the main work in one place with out ending up with 30 copies of the same presentation, you could also comment and share ideas with work mates. I think it would have been i deal for a few of my assignments last year and i will defiantly keep it in mind for future presentation work. It could also be of great use for showing informative slide shows for family members over seas as you can now quite easily embed a small video in a power point slide. With the comments section it could end up being a great communication tool as well as its educational and professional uses.

Thing 08 - Investigate YouTube

YouTube can consume hours of time from home made rockets to people just being silly there's thousands of great and informative videos on there, I now find myself not only doing a Google search for information when attempting new IT procedures but also now a YouTube search for video guides or any relevant information 9 out of 10 times i find exactly what i needed. You tube has become a great asset for the web 2.0 experience not only can you visit you tube and spend hours watching content on there site but now you can also get Browser add ins to download any YouTube videos you may like. I also regularly use the YouTube embed or link tool that makes inserting videos into web pages easy, below is an old IT college Stunt that looks great.



Hate to be someone trying to sleep in those dorm rooms :s ..

Thing 07 - Play with Flickr

Flicker is a great photo sharing website that allows for not only the sharing of photos but also to backup photos to keep them safe from loss or general wear and tear.  It also helps to share your pictures with the world of course you can keep personal pictures private but if there's a funny picture that you think others would like you can make that picture public, others can then view and comment on the picture.  You can also check the statistics of the pictures you have on flicker these include number of views, how many people have marked it as a favourite and possibly more.  Groups are a way Flickr describes its sharing categories you can create a private group with family members give them a message board to comment on and many more features.

Tags are used in Flickr as they are in most areas of the Internet they can help the search ability of a file in this case a photo. Meta Data is Data that relates to other data and this is what I believe the tags used on Flickr do. It helps for not only others to find photos but also helps the user find old photos from his collection. For example if looking for a photo that you cant remember the name of and you remember it was taken in June at Melbourne, If you had Tagged the photo with these tags and more you could easily find your desired picture by searching for either Melbourne or June. In short Tags are a filter mechanism for searching.

I think Flickr is a great way for the average person to kill two birds with one stone, backup all those digital pictures Off Site (Keeping backups located not geographically near each other) and also to facilitate the sharing of photos from family members or even to the general public.