Finding Photos on Flickr

For those who are not familiar with it, Flickr is a way for users to share their photos online. Users can make them public or private depending on how they want to share them. The great part about Flickr is that users can tag their photos so they are searchable similar to bookmarks with del.icio.us.

One additional thing is that Flickr supports RSS feeds for these tags. This means that you can do search for a particular tag, then subscribe to the RSS feed for that tag and everytime someone uploads a photo and tags it with your search, it will come right to your RSS aggregator.

Here is an example:

Say you want to setup an RSS feed for photos with the tag "Gettysburg" in them

• Got to this url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/gettysburg/
• Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you will see a link that says "Subscribe to stuff tagged with gettysburg" -- Add this link to your RSS Aggregator and that's it!
• If you want to change the tag, simply replace the word Gettysburg in the above URL with any tag such as Antietam, CivilWar, battlefield, etc.

A few comments on this feature:

• You can get some great photos to show in your classroom.
  
• There are some incredible shots done by professional photographers
• You can locate some original photos by Civil War era photographers such as O'Sullivan and Brady.
• Some of the photos may even be in the Creative Commons
• Beware! You may also get photos of people vacationing in Gettysburg.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Until next time...

Finding Resources with Del.icio.us

For those of you who don't know, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where people can store links to their favorite websites and access them from anywhere rather than being tied to a single computer.

One of the cool things about del.icio.us is being able to search for websites that others have bookmarked with del.icio.us. This website works with what is known as tags. These tags are words that people use to categorize their bookmarks. For example, you could have several websites related to the Battle of Antietam and when you bookmark them with del.icio.us you might give them the tag Antietam. Then the next time you want all of your bookmarked sites on Antietam you simply click on the Antietam tag within your del.icio.us.

Here is a link to the CommonCraft Show called Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Another interesting thing about social bookmarking is that you can subscribe to these tags via an RSS feed. For example, you can do a del.icio.us tag search for Gettysburg by entering the URL, http://del.icio.us/tag/gettysburg into your web browser. Once the results appear, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see an icon that says RSS feed for this page. If you click on this link (or right-click copy link location) you can add this RSS feed to your Bloglines or Google Reader account. Then, every time someone tags a website with the word Gettysburg, it will appear in your RSS aggregator.

You can also check out The Connected Classroom wiki on Social Bookmarking and RSS Feeds.

Try it out and let me know what you think.