Bend the Internet to Your Will - Part Two

If you’re going to have to deal with something, it’s gonna be multimedia. Three years ago it was a pain to email pictures and movies to your loved ones and collegues. Now, with the creation of many new web companies, that is now in the past– where it belongs.

So, instead of emailing out three pictures at a time to a dozen relatives or employees, just send them the link to your:

Flickr (image hoster and organizational tool)

One of the first and best web 2.0 companies out there, Flickr was purchased in 2005 by Yahoo and continues to offer the same two plans: Free and Pro. The free account is very good, but there are several limitations. The Pro account is only $25 USD a year so just spring for the extra, it’s definitely worth it. A comparison of the two can be found here.

I’ve used Flickr for several different things from personal to business, and the organizational system is genius. Tagging allows you to attach keywords to photos so that you can locate it easily. For example the picture below is tagged with:

rogers pass

july

2007

summer

hiking

camping

This allows me to easily find photos from “Rogers Pass”, or photos I took in “2007″, or “July”. This tagging power can be utilized to organize inventory like this guy.

I did quality assurance for one company and literally snapped thousands of photos. Flickr was a godsend since it allowed me to put out a weekly one page report with a couple of photos to demonstrate that week’s progress, but I also included a flickr photo address so that the client could see every single photo taken. (Jason Sanders, 2007)

Here are four types of keywords I use when tagging an image. It keeps things simple and easy to remember.

Month (”July“)
Time (”day“)
Activity (”paving“)
Location (”main st.)

There are so many more things to do with Flickr, this section hasn’t even scratched the surface. Factors such as the API interface, the community, the slide show feature… Trust me, these will be explained more in depth in the near future.

Vimeo
In the media world YouTube is getting all the glory, but truth is, it kinda sucks, and isn’t the best place for businesses to post their corporate videos or company related media or even if you’re just looking for some sort of privacy. I have to say that Vimeo is fairly good for a professional or private person. It has varying levels of privacy, a clean minimalist interface, the quality of the videos is better than YouTube because they utilize Flash 8, and finally, they allow the user to download your video file in it’s original format.

This last option is great, it makes up for the fact that Vimeo has a 250 MB limit per week (which if you compress properly is probably more then enough). Your coworkers, clients, friends, family can all take the moving pictures with them! Of course there are other sites such as blip.tv and veoh that do similar things, but I have to say that the overall design of Vimeo lends itself to a more mature, professional environment.

Slideshare

Though Flickr has a slideshow feature that works very well, if you truly want to show off your presentations, try out this site. It’s main purpose is just to share PowerPoints, but there is a great option called Slidecasting available. Basically it’s a slideshow combined with an mp3 (a song, narration, or audio recording of your presentation). First you upload your PowerPoint or Keynote ‘deck’ along with a recording of your presentation and voila! Your performance and art is internetted. Now I haven’t used this feature extensively, but Guy Kawasaki tried it out with success.

I look at this as a wonderful way to teach new employees. It’s a cheap, easy way to create training ‘videos’ on a small nonexistent budget with just a microphone and your PowerPoint skills. They can easily learn at home, just by emailing them the link to the presentation. It’s also great for sharing your information with clients, potential or otherwise, and/or the general internet population.