E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

The Flickr Gunners – Is It Time to Try Out Other Alternatives?

People who have been reading from my weblogs for some time now would probably know how fond I am of Flickr, the online Web 2.0 photo sharing service that got me hooked from the very first time I bumped into it. In May it would be one year since I signed up for a Pro account (Thanks James!) and while I am certainly going to renew the membership I just couldn’t help thinking what would be the options out there for potential alternatives. And wouldn’t you know it, Michael Arrington, from Techcrunch, just wrote a nice overview of some of the different alternatives out there in The Flickr Gunners.

By the looks of it, it seems that the only alternative from those mentioned over there that I would be interested in would be Zoomr, specially since it originates from the same group of folks behind Meetro, with Kristopher Tate. However, I wouldn’t want to leave my Flickr account behind. And while I think I would be able to populate both accounts with pictures I have been taking over the last couple of years I am not sure if it would be a good idea to split up the potential audience of folks looking into those pictures.

I mean, I have been sharing pictures stored in my Flickr account as an interesting exercise to encourage community building by sharing something more than just work related stuff. In fact, some of those pictures I have been sharing all along so far have been incredibly useful icebreakers whenever I got started working with different distributed teams or just simply adding some diversity on my contributions to the communities I belong to. Yes, indeed, constantly working on my social capital skills. And Flickr has been great so far at doing just that, causing me hardly any effort but bringing me lots of different benefits and a good number of new connections I have been able to make during the course of that year that I have been using it.

So when I got to read The Flickr Gunners I was wondering if at this point in time I was ready to try out something new or just stick with that Flickr’s “specialness” that Michael mentions over there. I am not really sure. I may give it a try and start using Zoomr (I already got an account for it) but so far it looks like Flickr is the winner, at least, on this end. However, if other folks who I have been connecting with are flocking away into other offerings I may be forced as well to make the move. Either way, I better start getting ready with the alternatives and see if they would be any good enough or if they wouldn’t, in which case I would stick to Flickr for another year and see how it goes from there.

While I am thinking about all this I am just wondering what the level of disruption would be when trying to move to other alternatives. Would it be better to just migrate all the content over or just leave it behind and start again from scratch? What do you think? So far I feel very tempted to start from scratch with whatever the alternative, perhaps Zoomr, but if it doesn’t work out all right will I lose some of that social capital already invested ? Would I be able to recover ? Would things be the same again as before ? If not at what price? Ahhh … Choices! Choices!

(I will try to figure it out during the weekend and see what happens …)

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Zoomr, Techcrunch, Photo Sharing

A Waterfall – Part Deux

If you would remember last week I shared a round of pictures about a place up in the mountains here in Gran Canaria where after some heavy rain it would create a stunning waterfall for everyone passing by with the car to enjoy it, since it is just very close to the main road. Last week I created a weblog post on this very same subject and although the waterfall didn’t have much water running I mentioned later on this week I would be sharing another weblog post where I would be showing the same waterfall with some incredible pictures of water running all over the place after having had some heavy rain a few weeks back.

Thus here is the followup weblog post so that you would be able to check out what it would look like with lots of water running along the mountain and what is even better check out also some of the surroundings where you will be able to see lots of different almond trees and certainly lots of vegetation that will probably remind you of being elsewhere. This time around I have shared a whole bunch of these pictures in my Flickr account as well, but, as a teaser, here you have got three of my favourites that I have uploaded so far, so that you get to see why I said that particular location is mind-blowing.

Oh, and if you would want to explore further the differences between the before and the after check out the Waterfall tag I created for the whole round of pictures. You will be able to see how much it changes from one day to the other, specially in the overall surroundings.

Finally, here is another pretty slick tool related to Flickr that will keep you busy for a little while. It is Flickr Related Tag Browser and you can find it over here. The way it would work is you would enter a particular tag you may be interested in and right away it will start grabbing smaller thumbnails of pictures tagged with that particular word(s) and within seconds you would have access to a couple of dozens of pictures for your enjoyment. And all that with a zoom effect so that you get to check the picture(s) and with a direct link to the picture(s) if you would want to see the original. Nice ! Very nice! Certainly another Flickr tool to add to the growing list.

Technorati Tags: Gran Canaria, Waterfall, Flickr, Flickr Related Tag Browser