Thing 3: Photo Sharing

Since I'm so familiar with Flickr, I decided to challenge myself a bit and take a better look at Picasa, both the online photo album service and the desktop software.  I've had the desktop software installed for a long time, though I haven't used it as much as I could.

Two features that I love are the collage making option and the face recognition feature. The collages are simple to create (once you remember where the option is!) and are a great way to make visuals for presentations. Or just pretty collages of spring flowers. :)

The face recognition stuff is kind of amazing to me. It's so darned smart about picking up who's in your photos, even when someone's face has changed a lot over time. I had to laugh when it even picked out a face that was in a photo hanging on the wall in a photo that I'd taken in someone's living room!

Picasa has terrific options for organizing photos, adding tags to index them and editing tools. Naturally, being a Google tool, it has an option to upload photos to Blogger, which is how I posted the collage above. But even better, for us Flickr addicts, you can send photos to Flickr as well. This article explains how.

I also took another look at the online photo storage service also and scouted around to find the features that  are similar to familiar Flickr features. I won't be switching my loyalties from Flickr though, I have too much time and energy invested in building a community of friends and colleagues there.

Adding a flickr photo from a URL

If you're having  trouble adding flickr photos to your blogs, check out these screencasts:

• Add flickr photos to Blogger
• Add flickr photos to WordPress.com

More RSS, sort of.

Zite knows me!

Thanks to a post by one of our participants (SkillCollection) I learned about a new iPad app called Zite. While not really an RSS app, it is a content aggregator. I gave it a try and told it what my twitter name is and gave it  access to my Google Reader account. In a flash it created a personalized 'magazine' with articles it thought I might be interested in. What was most impressive was the topic categories it picked up on - see the photo. Pretty spot-on for me.

I further customized it by adding sections on gardening, photography, macintoshes, wine, food, and more. As I read articles and give them the thumbs up or down, Zite will get to know me better and get better at recommending articles. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Flipboard

Though it takes a slightly different approach, another amazing iPad app that serves a similar purpose is Flipboard. It connects with social media tools like twitter and Facebook and turns your stream of status updates and shared links into magazine-like pages of content. What I like most is being able to add a folder of RSS feeds from Google Reader and have a specialized magazine on just the topic of that folder. 

I think Zite may be useful for discovering new blogs, news sites and such. While Flipboard is a good way to sort through all the sources you're already aware of.  I'll be using both of them for a while to compare. 

Thing 2: RSS

I know this has been a challenging topic for many, but everyone who has written a post so far seems to have made good progress understanding what RSS is. Some folks just don't want to subscribe to any blogs and that's fine, maybe somewhere down the line they'll find a blog they want to get updates from and the RSS lessons will come back to them.

So what have I learned this week? Mainly that Netvibes can be pretty flaky with getting updates to some feeds. And that the toolbar button isn't the best way to add feeds to a Netvibes page. I still think it's a good tool for sharing a public page of information, but I won't be using it for my own RSS aggregator. Google Reader is just too efficient for me to bail on it.

I love that I can connect with other people via Google Reader and that we can share interesting posts with each other. This really helps filter the ton of content that I try to sift through. Some people are really efficient about going through their lists of feeds and sharing the most interesting posts. I'm not so good at that and  feel a bit guilty when I depend on their hard work, so I do try to share interesting posts as often as I can. Building a strong community of people who are interested in the same topics is key to making this work.