Thing #5a - Bloglines

I've been using Bloglines for a long time now. (Can it be years?) Over time I've really pared down the number of sites that I have the notify turned on for, because its too daunting to see that there are hundreds of new posts every morning in the little bloglines balloon at the bottom of my screen. As I said in an earlier post I'm looking for some new feeds to reinvigorate my interest in keeping up with the blogosphere, so this exercise of seeing what other participants here have in their blogrolls and the next exercise of searching for some new feeds is helping with that. I do still like to have journal tables of contents sent to me in email, though, because I check email so much more often than I check bloglines. Also, today when I subscribed to the feeds of two of our participants as per the instructions I noticed that what I could read in bloglines was a post or two behind what I see when I go directly to the participants blogs. That makes me wonder if the email option is better for things that need to be timely.

Thing #4 - Flickr

Here is a Creative Commons photo of the Capitola pier taken by Simon Bisson. I like the stormy sky.

Its been very gratifying to see such a large number of Creative Commons photos available on Flickr. I wish they would make it easier to find the photographer's real name for giving credit, though. Its easy to get their Flickr username but more clicks to get their real names, and sometimes real names aren't even available. Still, I'm grateful that they are using CC licenses.

My brother and his girlfriend just had a baby in May, and they are putting all their photos on Flickr, but are not using CC licenses so I'm not going to post a photo of my cute nephew until I ask permission.

I love the Flickr Spell application -- that I will definitely use again when I want an eye-catching graphic heading (all CC licenses, too!). But I really don't see any applications for library stuff here. I would post library photos of an event on a library web page before I'd post to Flickr, and I would rather use photos of our own libraries than of other libraries. But I guess if I was looking for examples of other library buildings that I liked and I needed to make a presentation for someone on that topic it would be a good source of material. But thats not something I do.