Tag Archives: flickr

Protect your digital identity and information on social networks

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , LinkedIn, Orkut, Zorpia, Flicker, twicpic, yfrog and YouTube.etc, are social media sites designed to share information such as who and where you are and what you are doing, photos and video. This is a comical example of how information is shared using social media sites to tell the Digital Story of the Nativity.

Social media sites are a great way to connect to close friends and family, or even re-connect with old classmates and old co-workers. Also it can be a great way to find and connect to new groups with interests common to your own.

With just a few clicks people can access messages, know where their contacts are, what are they doing. All this makes for an entertaining experience network. The speed and immediacy that characterizes them are useful to inform and share content, true, but it can also jeopardize your own job or worse and compromise your privacy and security. Also the content posted on the site stays on the server even after you disable your account and is searchable.

The trouble starts when it becomes an addiction, if people spend too much time discussing everything that happens in their lives without taking the necessary steps to protect what is shared. It is logical to enjoy safely social media sites, which have the ability to control how visible your information and pictures are on the site as well as any search engines who parses that data.

Below is a series of recommendations to protect the identity information in digital networks and it is up to you to decide how visible you want your contact and profile information, videos, photos, and other posts need to be, and take the time to set the appropriate controls within the media site in question. For each one of us it is important to have a good view of what is published and learn to manage and protect our identity.

Although this presentation is from last year some of the information is still relevant

Exposure Level

The search is an important aspect of social networks. It is up to the users if they want to be seen by all members of a network or just want to be seen only by their contacts.

It should make a conscious choice and set the profile, rather than leave it to the default settings, they usually allow some of the profile information such as name and main photo to be found on page and through Internet search engines.

Personal Data
Be cautious about posting and sharing personal information. Do not reveal passwords, keys, date of birth, home address, phone number and place of birth. Do not put your full resume online, if you must, remove it when you find a job. Protect the answers to secret questions that make social networks. The combination of that publicly available information and your public post about hanging out with friends on Saturday night across town could be enough for someone to take advantage of the situation and break into your house.

Information Policy
Generally every page has a link that explains how to use the information by users and gives tips for safe keeping. Note that when entering a network, it is giving license or right to use any information that is on these sites.

Privacy
All sites have a link to a “Privacy” page that explains how your information is used and provides tips on staying safe. Determine how visible the information is that you post on social networks and search engines (profile, photos, videos and posts.) Each page allows you to select privacy settings, read them and adjust by trial the level of control and privacy you want.

Twitter Safety
There is an option that messages, pictures and videos that can only be seen by their followers, for this you must change the default settings of Twitter.
Think twice before posting or even clicking on a post. Consider what could happen if a post becomes widely known and how that may reflect both on you (as the poster) or your family, friend or workplace. i.e. Jason Manford quits The One Show over sex messages

With a little effort and some common sense you can enjoy and safely participate in social media sites. Ultimately though, it’s up to you to manage your digital identity. You must use good judgment about what you post and learn how you protect your personal data and reputation from the digital networks.

Happy Christmas.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

Number 19I wonder how many of you this year have visited a bookmakers and put on a bet for a ‘White Christmas’, not many I would imagine or maybe I’m completely wrong, one thing I do know however is as its more of a sure thing this year I can’t imagine any of them paying out. Well imagine my surprise when I visited a few betting sites just to see if they were taking bets on a ‘White Christmas’, do you know what, they are but at much lower odds! Pretty much an inevitable conclusion to expect one flake I would say, at least for this year.

Practically anywhere in the UK has roughly a 90% chance of seeing snow in the winter, it very rarely falls at Christmas (generally in January and February). However apparently it does occur approximately every 6 years.

I’m sure we all remember last year’s Christmas, 2009 and the start of 2010. The gritters had been out too early after the councils had not anticipated a big freeze, certainly nothing like we had seen previously since 1986. (I was 12 years old then and remember fondly the skiddy patches that would last for weeks). Britain was covered with thick lying snow which easterly winds had brought over the previous week. Travel over much of Britain was badly affected by ice and snow on the roads, and made more slippery by partial daytime thaw followed by overnight refreezing. It was the first white Christmas anywhere in the United Kingdom since 2004.

The second big freeze of this winter, due to start this week, is likely to last for as long as a month, putting the country on course for a winter which could be even colder than the notoriously treacherous 1962-63. This year however has been the coldest start to a winter for 100 years; bitterly cold winds from the ­Arctic will without doubt bring a blanket of snow to Scotland, the North, London and the South-east on December 25th. Wales, the South-west and central England will probably be a winter mix of sleet with snow on higher ground. So there you have it almost proof that this year will be a really cold, white Christmas. So wrap up, stay safe and warm and have a Merry Christmas.

No more kissing under the mistletoe!!

I have heard this warning before in the last few years from conservationists but it appears now to be a more serious issue; the future supply of traditional English mistletoe is under threat. Why I hear you say; mistletoe thrives in established apple orchards and if you follow conservation then you will know that our apple orchards have been in serious decline for the past 60 years, this has great impact on our traditional mistletoe.

Mistletoe is a parasitic plant that grows attached to and within the branches of a tree or shrub, mainly apple trees but it will also grow within birch, hawthorn, lime and poplar. If left the mistletoe will eventually kill its host so it has to be managed, regular cutting will protect the host tree as well as ensuring a crop of mistletoe each Christmas time. Most mistletoe seeds are spread by birds; they eat the seeds and then spread them throughout the tree branches in their droppings. Mistletoe was often considered a pest that killed trees and devalued natural habitats, but was recently acknowledged as an ecological keystone species, an organism that has an excessively persistent influence over its community. A broad array of animals depend on mistletoe for food, consuming the leaves and young shoots, transferring pollen between plants, and dispersing the sticky seeds.

All is not lost however, The National Trust want you to help by buying home-grown mistletoe in the run-up to Christmas, which means asking where the mistletoe is sourced from when you buy it. Allot of our traditions we have lost over the years and it would be a crying shame if mistletoe disappeared as well.

There is so much more to mistletoe than its “romantic role”, buying mistletoe helps traditional British cider apple orchards thrive by removing mistletoe from the trees, so you are doing 2 things, helping a tradition to continue which in turn helps apple trees to flourish and let’s not forget it keeps us kissing!!

Go Success

Go was launched roughly three years ago and the overall aim was to make everything more accessible and easier for students. Specifically access to their Mail, File Storage, Discussion, Community, Library and Blackboard.

I would say over all Go has been a fabulous success, we have developed it a great deal over the past three years, improving it in ways more specific to certain groups of students. For example Health, Business School and Performing Arts students can all log into Go and see a taylor made area that allows them to submit assignments, get module updates and notifications about their course. Who’d of thought from this very first version we’d end up with something so dynamic.

The ‘news‘ area is split into four sections: general, support, learning and social. It serves to inform both staff and students of up and coming events; serious and fun alike and health and safety issues. It’s regulary updated to keep interest and to get out as much information as possible, too as many users as possible.

There are ‘panels‘ that can be moved around the page or removed completley, it’s up to you! In particular the ‘student learning‘ panel and the ‘student support‘ panel, they provide important information such as Term Dates and Exam Timetables.

Learning Services have created a video called ‘Learning Services 2010: Introduction to the Go Portal‘, it takes you through Go step by step: http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/study/accommodation/video/learning-services-2010-introduction-to-the-go-portal. It’s a very useful way to introduce you to Go, so if you are a student or a member of staff and you haven’t used Go, what are you waiting for!

Flickr’s photo page Ajax trick

Flickr recently started previewing their new photo pages. They’re quite nice but it does something that’s been driving me mad and I can’t work out how it’s doing it. It only happens in Google Chrome 5 and I’ve only seen it in a few places.

Take a look at this screen capture of Flickr’s new lightbox view. Note how the URL updates each time I click through to a new view. Nothing surprising there until you realise it’s not doing a full refresh of the page and is actually an Ajax call back to the server. (You may want to hit the full screen button, bottom right.)

Contrast that with what happens in Firefox – it’s still doing Ajax calls to make flicking between photos quick but the URL changes after the fragment

This technique is pretty common – Facebook have been using it for a couple of years and we even use it to give tabbed pages history on our site. It’s necessary because JavaScript isn’t allowed to set the full page URL without a page refresh, or at least that’s what I thought!

Google Maps has been doing the same as Flickr for a couple of months but I’ve still no idea how! Anyone care to read the Chromium source code or dig around Flickr’s JavaScript to see if there’s something different?

Update: also works in Safari, thanks Ross.

Flickring candles

Sep 15 (9) by theloushe.If you’re planning on taking a few snaps this Christmas with that new camera/phone, here’s a little bit of fun you can have with them…

Flickr is probably the best known on line photo managment and sharing site.  It’s free to sign up for an account, and you can start uploading digital photos within minutes.  There are limits for the free account (Only the 200 most recent uploads are shown, with limits on how much can be uploaded per month) but upgrading to the Pro account is only US$24.00 annually.  Whilst primarily for photos, since April 2008 video uloads of not more than 90 seconds are allowed.

Besides being able to upload photos, tagging plays a big part in bringing related photographs and their owners closer together.   Early subscribers also began to use tagging to geolocate their photographs, using longitude and latitude values.  Flickr has made geotagging much easier by offering a “add to your map” link which uses a draggable map to automatically generate your geotags without having to know the longitude and latitude of the location.

Suggestify

A very mature  api has seen some useful third party applications.  Suggestify (currently in Alpha release), uses geotags and flickr‘s api to enable subscribers to suggest the geolocation of a photograph not owned by themselves. 

suggestify

Suggestify then “tries” to post a comment on that photo with a link to the Suggestify site where the suggestion is stored. The owner can either opt out or accept and the photo is geotagged.

Daily Shoot

If you twitter (oh yes), try following @dailyshoot.  dailyshoot posts a daily assignment which is easy enough for anybody to have a go at.  There is a flickr group for assignments – an easy way to view other entries.

Noticings

Noticings is a game based on flicker, geotagging and spotting stuff first. If you notice something out of the ordinary, snap away, upload to flickr, geotag it and then tag with “noticings”. Points are awarded on a number of criteria:

noticings

Noticings keeps a record of your scores so that you can see how you’re getting on. It also has a superfluas twitter account: @noticings. The Flickr code team are particularly excited about this one.

Anybody know any better ones?

Copyright Liberation

Throughout the recent redesign of our departmental sites, we’ve used an array of images from Flickr, under Creative Commons licenses. This meant making additions to our copyright page that complied with the conditions.

We aimed to:

  • Display a thumbnail of the image and a link back to its original Flickr page
  • Credit the authour under the Attribution condition, and link to their profile page
  • Display all the CC conditions connected to the particular photograph

We decided to extract the data using the Flickr API, so that the information is accurate, and we can check if any of the conditions have been changed over time.

What is Creative Commons?

According to Wikipedia CC is a “non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.”

It enables authors to relinquish the default “All Rights Reserved” copyright status of their work, but retain some rights; for example whether an image is used for commercial purposes; or is further adapted using Photoshop. People are motivated by a sense of creative community and openness.

Why use them on our site

We do use stock images when we need to communicate something visually, using absolute clarity. However, there are issues of cost and limitations of use, which make them impractical; also we know that our clients are media savvy, and turned off by some of the hackneyed symbolism used in stock photography.

By using images from Flickr, we have access to authentic pictures taken from personal experience.

A Good Example

On the History Department homepage there is an image of President Obama: we could have bought a small web-ready image from an established agency for around £50; but we wouldn’t have been allowed to adapt the image to fit our layout, and we’d have to remove it after an allotted time period. Furthermore the image is likely to have been formal and static.

By using an image by Flickr user Matt Wright, taken from the crowd at a Democrats rally, we have a dramatic image that we can adapt to our layout under the conditions of the license.

About Flickr API

Flickr offer one of the most comprehensive application programming interfaces (API) of any web service allowing anyone with a bit of knowledge to develop on top of their services to offer extra functionality or integrate with your own systems.  We’re not however using the main API.  Instead we’re making use of a new service offered by Flickr parent company Yahoo! – YQL or Yahoo! Query Language.  This service offers an SQL-like syntax to query the web.  For example to find out information about a photo, you could use the query:

select * from flickr.photos.info where photo_id='471634239'

That gets requested from a web service along with the return format – either XML or JSON – and they send back the resultset. No API keys are required making implementation a piece of cake. We’re doing it server side allowing us to cache the response to improve performance but YQL can also be implemented on the client using just JavaScript.

YQL isn’t just limited to extracting data from Flickr – many other Yahoo! properties are available and it can even be used to extract microformats and other data from any web page. Along with Yahoo! Pipes and Google Spreadsheets, it’s become a vital tool for anyone creating mashups of data.

Tag me

Tags are being used by more and more websites. They’re everywhere. Look at the top of this post, its been tagged (by me). Look to the sidebar, a tag cloud (more about these later). Chances are if you use any social networking site or web 2.0 site, you’ll have used, seen and interacted with tags.

Our new-look corporate site, extensively uses tagging, specifically in News, Events, Imaging and the eProspectus, but what’s a tag used for? A tag is metadata, a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information. So tags can be added to any page in a web document and associated with any other pages prieviously tagged with the same tag.

The tags themselves are usually single words, informally and personally chosen. If you’ve signed up for accounts with Flickr, Picasa, delicious, Magnolia or YouTube, to name but a few, you’ve probably added your own tags by now. So is tagging just a way to show similarities between your documents? Not really, tagging data on these sites provides a simple navigation through to your own content, but also hooks into other members’ data by turning tags into links, which aggregate documents similarly tagged.

Tag Clouds

Tag Cloud

Popular tags can be visually represented through tag clouds, also known as a weighted list, with the most popular tags shown larger and bolder. Again the tags are links which drill down to similar content. You could even base an rss feed on a tag to alert visitors to new content so tagged.

Microformats

Microformats logoBy adding rel=”tag” into the links, the link also becomes a microformat. Microformats are a standard way to represent things in HTML, by adding rel-tag we’re standardising the link as a tag. Making the link a microformat allows the reader to find similarly tagged content from a wider source than just the current site. Firefox users can install a fantastic add-on called Operator. Operator recognises microformats on the page and in the case of tags, offers the reader entry points to content similarly tagged on other websites. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be anything similar available for Internet Explorer, yet.

Machine Tags

On the horizon, we have Machine tagging or Triple tagging. Machine tags use a specific syntax to define extra information about the tag, making it more meaningful for interpretation by computer programs. Triple tags comprise three parts: a namespace, a predicate and a value. For example, ehu:news=607This kind of tagging isn’t currently used on the Edge Hill site, but it’s built-in ready to go. Anyone interested can see an implementation on Adactio, any Flickr images, tagged ( where n is representative of his blog post) will be included automatically.adactio:post=n

Adopting Tags

By adopting tags, or creating tags so unique, ensures that all things tagged are related. For example, all news, event and images relating to this year’s Solstice Seminars could be tagged: solstice08. The tag is so unique, items tagged with it would be unlikely to be included out of context. Such unique tags can be promoted like a product, by requesting conference attendees to tag their own online content, on websites and slides etc.

Tagging Best Practices

If you’re about to embark on a journey of tagging for your own sites, it can feel a little daunting. There are, however, some best practices you can use to get started: