Cole W. Camplese

Back to Flickr

Now that a big group of people I know have been energized by the resurgence of Flickr I am noticing something. Flickr was built well before the rise if the more "modern" social sites and lacks at least a few of the features that we've all come to expect. The one most glaring omission is the lack of a "like" button. Flickr asks us to not like a photo, but instead mark it as a favorite. I never really used that much, reserving it for truly favorite photos. It seemed like that was the case for a lot people. Now that we've bounced back to Flickr I am getting "favs" all the time. It seems to me that the feature sets of Instagram and Facebook has altered the way we use an older platform. It has made Flickr much more social and I like that.

To Flickr?

I just got the following from my friends at flickr ...

Turns out it is time to re-up for another year of flickr pro. But it might not be. I have been a member since February 21, 2004 and used to absolutely love it, but with the rise of instagram, tumblr, and (yes, even) Facebook my use of flickr has really dropped. It used to be a vibrant community where I enjoyed sharing images and connecting with my friends all over the planet. Then that community moved and the web changed. The rise of really good cameras in phones coupled with apps that let you transform ordinary shots into compelling images has challenged what flickr has stood for. At least for me ... one thing about bailing is that I still find flickr an amazing place to consume creative commons images for use in my work -- I hate the idea of not giving back.

The question I have is if it is important to keep photos in a place like that anymore? I like the workflow of an app like instagram where I can shoot, edit, transform, and share quickly across a host of networks -- none that I really own or control however. At the end of the day I don't really have real control of my photos at flickr or the service, but perhaps I've been fooled by the fact I've been paying $25.00 a year since 2004. It could go poof tomorrow just like any of the others. If I had time to really make this happen I would figure out how to get my photos out and into this space, but that isn't going to happen in the next 14 days. Any advice from the Internet?

Another Year of Flickr

I just visited my Flickr profile and was startled to see my Pro account had expired ... yikes! Flickr pro is one of the things I gladly pay for each year. I get more joy and satisfaction out of that social network then maybe all the others I participate in for some reason. I think it is because it shows me sides of people I rarely if ever get to see elsewhere. That makes it five years of Flickr Pro for me.

Social Media Lesson

A couple of weeks ago we held our annual Symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology here at Penn State. It was an amazing event once again -- this time with just shy of 400 faculty and staff choosing to spend a beautiful Saturday with us. Our keynotes rocked, with David Wiley supplying a rallying call towards openness that has helped move our OER conversations forward. At lunch, danah boyd delivered a whirlwind of a talk that people are still buzzing about. One thing in particular was how both David and danah hung out with us not only the night before, but all day on Saturday. Up until this year none of our previous keynotes have stayed and chilled with us -- they even joined us for the post Symposium party afterwards.

Sessions were excellent and the conversations in the hallways was lively. I could go on and on, but nearly all the sessions are now captured over at the Symposium site -- including David's keynote with a slick side by side widescreen presentation that our Digital Commons team came up with (danah is coming soon).

But this post is about something related ... two things are lingering in my mind after the event. The first is how much Twitter was used during the event itself. The tltsym09 hashtag turned into a trending topic early in the morning -- sometime during David's opening keynote. That in and of itself is really cool and very interesting. The Twitter stream of the day is long and it does tell a bit of a story all by itself. But, sometime during the morning I realized that people weren't really blogging the event like they had in the past -- does a Twitter stream provide enough for those not there to grab onto? With the lack of sessions being blogged I am afraid we could be doing the event a disservice. I'd love to hear thoughts on how to take the Twitter stream and do some real sense making on it all.

The other big social media lesson I am taking away from the event has to do with Flickr and community tagging. Early on we decided to use the tltsym09 tag for the event across the social web. We were thrilled to see hundreds of photos flow into the tag aggregation on Flickr. What I wasn't thrilled about was the hijacking of the tag by a cross dresser on his bed in lingerie. It didn't offend me per se, but I know for a fact (from a couple of emails) some folks were mortified and I was asked to "fix" it. Flickr doesn't really allow me to delete tags from other peoples' photos and while the pictures clearly didn't fit into our group, there was nothing about the pictures that would cause Flickr to pull them. Turns out it was simple to just contact the guy and ask nicely -- he removed the tag.

This is one of the reasons people are terrified of openness and the social web -- lack of control. It has caused us to rethink our own use of the social web, so we've created a Flickr account that will be the repository for our pictures, but it doesn't solve the community stuff. I think we need to have a conversation about how we take advantage of the social web in light of the fact that it is as simple as watching the trending tags on Twitter Search and hijacking them to insert your product, pictures, etc into the flow of the emergent conversation. Funny how even after all these years of participating in an increasingly open way, we can continue to learn and adapt our usage to really take advantage of what we are learning.

Any thoughts?

Organized in the Cloud

As I reflect on my time at the Project Bamboo workshop held at Princeton University last week I am left with a few thoughts. While not as stunning to me as was my Berkman at 10 reflections, the Project Bamboo workshop did leave me with my head swimming with activity. The Project Bamboo workshops focus specifically on the needs of the Humanities community and bringing to light challenges and potential solutions to these newly (or not so newly) discovered issues. Challenges such as research method support, research management systems, tagging, discovery, describing objects that otherwise seem indescribable, and so much more were teased out by the 100 or so participants. During the first day I was struck with something as I spent time in the first table activity -- in a modern sense, we tend to organize materials in the cloud better than we do locally. There was context to this discussion that I won't get into, but it started me down a path that I am interested in exploring more.

Here is a tangible example of what I mean ... on my iMac at home I have probably in the neighborhood of 7,000 local photos of travel, my children, friends, landscapes, and all the other things we take pictures of. Several hundred of them do have some form of meta data assocaited with them -- most are simply tagged with four or five stars, while a few I have renamed or even organized into albums. But at the end of the day there are thousands that are simply disorganized (other than date and other EXIF meta data that comes pre-packaged upon import).

Now, compare that with my Flickr space ... as of today, there are 1,813 photos on Flickr that are tagged, have been given titles, and even several hundred with descriptions. This may seem normal, but I see something sort of strange in it. My personal repository at home is largely disorganized (perhaps miscellaneous) and yet I trust my true organizational structure to a third party in the cloud. It really has me wondering about how one goes about synchronizing the offline universe of local storage with the more structured cloud concept. Where is the application that does that for me?

This is a simple example, but it also makes me think about the literally hundreds of documents I have on Google Docs that are neatly organized with tags compared to the thousands I have on hard drives throughout my home. Why do we do this? I asked my friend and colleague, Bryan Alexander, and he told me as we got on the elevator, "everyone likes to dress up in public." I've thought about that comment and I think there is something to it -- and I know when Bryan reads that he'll say it was an in the moment comment, but it seems to hold true. So what do we think in a collective sense? Does anyone have thoughts they want to explore with me?

What to Write About? Flickr Video?

It has been a week since I've written and I am still struggling with what to share ... I find myself in a bit of a post Symposium holding pattern with things. I can't seem to pull it together. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that here at PSU we are in SRDP time. The SRDP is the staff review and development plan that is done with all staff every year. So I have been spending tons of time reviewing people's plans and trying to be very thoughtful in sharing feedback and providing organizational direction for my direct reports. Let me just say that while it is a critical task, it is both time consuming and takes most of my mental energy to complete.

I do want to mention how interested I am in the Flickr Video announcement from the other day. I am very interested in it because of its limitations to tell you the truth -- I am very curious if the 90 second time limit will push people to be more thoughtful with their video posts ... much like Twitter pushes us to express our feelings in 140 characters bursts, will the 90 second limit unlock a whole new way to think about video expression? I did a quick video yesterday and things seemed to work very well -- other than me on video. I really want to ask my students about it later today and class and get their sense, but I am thinking there are some really interesting things that we can dream up to get people to think hard about how to share a fully baked concept in 90 seconds or less.

Speaking of class, I am still having a blast with it and have been really happy with how things are progressing. I am going to really miss teaching over the summer and may not have a chance to get back in the classroom for quite some time. This has been a very good experience and I have learned a ton about so many things.

This blog is now running WP 2.5 which is a good thing ... took a little time to get everything back up and running after the update, but it has been worth it. That's it.

My Flickr Decisions

After last week's thoughts on Flickr -- the privacy of my children, not the silliness that ensued over merging of accounts -- I decided it was time to take my children's images out of the public domain. I didn't delete anything, I simply used Flickr's batch tools to change permissions on nearly 500 pictures. All of a sudden it dawned on me as I was wading through hundreds of photos of my kids that I've made decisions for them that has been completely irresponsible and selfish. What I find interesting about this is the chain of potential ah-ha moments the post seemed to make. Friends of mine, online and off, have made similar decisions ... not all of them have been so open about closing the Flickr doors, but the decisions have been made nonetheless. Through the magic of Technorati I came across a great post by Josie over at SocialTech in which she takes the time to draw out some very good points ... I am now thinking about how I can use this experience to help shape decisions in other social spaces and with other friends of mine.

It has started me down the path of asking more about my personal/professional/online/offline life decisions ... what are the kinds of things that go too far? Clearly I can make these decisions for myself, but I am learning to recognize there are big differences between me Twittering my every move and doing the same about my kids. Funny though as I say that, I am tempted to Twitter something to the effect of, "The little lady wants to play Wii Bowling with mii." So, are things like that OK? Clearly I am still wrestling with where these lines are. By participating in a social environment like Twitter am I placing myself or my family at risk? These questions will continue to expand as the whole social spaces thing continues to grow. I participate in a lot of them and I have to learn how to think a little more careful about that participation.

My Flickr decision has made start to see this whole notion of identity and privacy through new lenses ... I actually feel a little "freed" (is that a word?) from the pressure of placing it all out there online. I know that it sounds ridiculous, but the further out you get, the more you feel like you have to participate. What do you all think?