Week 4: RSS, Newsreaders & Twitter

Google reader seems to be a very good tool to orgnise personal RSS feeds (that is the purpose of it, right?). Very simple to use if you have a google account already.

Twitter is another quick communication tool. I think the concept here is to keep things short and simple. Easy to sign up and broadcast :D.

All of them can be used as a comm channel between libraries and customers (especially young and technology equipped customers :-))

http://twitter.com/BenACL

Week 3: Explore Flickr & Mashup & Picnik

To share photos with friends and families, I use Picasa a lot, the only reason is it is a part of google. Flickr, I heard it often but started to try just now :-). Honestly, it is amazing to discover so many features of Flickr (e.g. photo view stats, orgnizer, share control, set photo copyrights, add notes and comments etc.) and uploading is very easy as well. The bulit-in photo editting feature is working good. It is a winer :-)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/48269947@N06/4420861766/

Flickr mashup is a fun way to build web apps/desktop tools by using Flickr API. I had a look of the Flickr mashup 'Garden' and found the desktop tool Bulkr was interesting (http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/72157622874451890/). This is a basic tool to help us download interested photos from Flickr in batches and I think it could be one of the most useful :-).

Please see a mashup poster http://www.flickr.com/photos/48269947@N06/4420138555/

Picnik:

an interesting online photo editting application. Photo on the left has been cropped, resized, sharpened and used black-white filter.