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Photophlow: Flickr’s Live Community

Around Christmas time I received an invite to Photophlow and had such a fun time chatting with other Flickr users there that I really wanted to blog about it. I was swamped back then and am finally getting around to it. Terrible, I know.

So what is Photophlow? The short version is that it is a way to connect with other Flickr users in real time and chat, but Photophlow has some amazing features that are pretty impressive. When you log in you’re taken to the anteroom - a place where you can configure your account and access rooms.

Group Rooms: Aside from the Main Room and a private room connected to your user, you also have access to rooms for each Flickr group you belong to (created automatically), active rooms that belong to your Flickr contacts, and the most active rooms on the server.

Inside a group room

Browse Flickr Photos: In each room you can browse the photos of each Flickr user in the room with you.Clicking a photo posts it to the room for everyone to see. You can also browse manually if the room is busy and you don’t want to disturb others, or browse privately which is like a “covert” mode.

Inside the Main Room

Send Comments, Tweets, and Tumbls: While viewing a photo in a room you can send a comment on it back to Flickr, Send a link and blurb to Twitter, send it to your Tumblr blog or do all three at the same time - very slick. Definitely something to check out if you love photos, have a photography class, or like chatting it up.

Viewing photo details with links to comment, and tweet

OpenSocial and VLE Possibilities

With Google’s announcements of OpenSocial and Android there is little doubt they have positioned themselves in a key role in online communities for the near future. There is a lot to contemplate in that sentence alone, but I’d like to focus on the potential for students and the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment).

In my mind, a successful VLE places the student at the center of the model - not the institution, and certainly not the technology. Sounds great, but what would that look like in practice? The short answer is - I don’t know, but I have some thoughts.

Let’s assume first, that putting the student at the center of a VLE model requires it to be a solution that is very customizable so that it can be personalized to an individual. This would enable the student to plug into online communities, either for a class or a personal interest, as well as unplug when necessary - in a similar way we talk about the “small pieces loosely joined” idea. It would also be useful if the environment were able to capture a student’s work throughout the course of their education (and possibly beyond).

Well, it seems like OpenSocial may be one solution that enables interoperability between social networks so that participants in Community A can share their “assets” with an account they have in Community B with minimal effort, because both communities are running on top of a similar platform (OpenSocial). Conceivably, this means participating and sharing just got easier, and all one would have to do is author a webapp/VLE on top of OpenSocial to take advantage of other communities using the platform.

Beyond the potential for a webapp solution are the possibilities for extendable browsers like Firefox and Flock to serve as community/asset management tools. Out of the box Flock is ready to integrate with your Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts - just to name a few. In fact, right now I think its greatest shortcoming is that it can’t integrate with all online communities just as easily. My feeling is that the advent of OpenSocial may make this very possible, and a browser like that would be a very powerful tool for connecting students and learning.

Cross-posted from Rhetorica

Dandelife Lookin’ for Some Love

If you think Dandelife is cool, then you should consider buying one of their t-shirts. The blogging platform/social network, set apart by its use of graphical timelines and convenient widgety things like a connector to Flickr, apparently has been a labor of love - and we all know how they can be.

That’s why Kelly Abbot is asking that you buy one of Dandelife’s t-shirts. Not because you want to walk around all day getting hugs from strangers, but because it is like one big green t-shirt-shaped hug from a community that started with a great idea. If that is too cheesy for you, you can just read the real story behind the “Free Hugs”.

If you haven’t tried Dandilife, it actually has some really great features that make it an engaging way to tell the story of your hum-drum daily life with pictures, a timeline view, a story view, and a widget with which to share your timeline in another blog. Definitely all good things, but even better are the other ways to use it… like Shauna Schullo’s class that chronicled the history of distance education as one of their assignments using Dandelife. This is their timeline below:

So back to the t-shirts - they’re just helping keep a good thing going.

Super Happy Funtime Friday

There isn't much to say about this week other than, "OMG can I please stop being busy for a little bit?" I think the answer is yes, and I'm counting on it seeing as how we have a holiday right around the corner. Even with stuff happening all around there are a few notable things for Funtime Friday:

Google’s Webmaster Central - Lately I've been feeling a little out of touch with how things work in behind the search engine scenes. It's just one of those necessary evil things one has to constantly keep up on. In an attempt to get off my a**, I've started going through the Google webmaster tools and have been spending a little extra time reading SEO articles - as much as I can stand anyway. SEO… SES… so many acronyms make me sleepy.

Getting Real - 37signals' book about the philosophies that have enabled them to accomplish what they have in so little time. You can buy the book PDF or read the entire thing for free online.

viki.works has released a second set of round social-web icons. I'm not so sure I’m a fan of the roundness or the largeness of these icons, but they are a welcome change of pace from the minuscule sets that are all over the web.

thinglink - a web site that allows you to upload images of things you make, add details about those things, and tag them with a unique identifier. They have updated their site with some new functionality and a facelift. Why is this cool? Well, aside from the obvious tagging coolness, it is a great way to connect more information about an object - what it's made of, the history behind it, or even the inspiration. I baked a cake once and connected the recipe to it on thinglink. The image wasn’t so hot, but the cake was yummy.

Walk2Web - Internet Degrees of Separation

Walk2Web is an incredibly addictive (though not time efficient) web-based surfing tool that allows you visually browse the internet using links that connect one website to the next. As if that wasn't engaging enough, it is also possible to create a user account that can contribute to the rating, tagging, and commenting on any site you happen upon. There are also icons to send pages to digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Hatena.

*Note that there is a text reader that is enabled by default on the system that will read page titles aloud when you click on a link. If your speakers are cranked it is quite a surprise.

Raving in Kaneva

OMG, the residents of Kaneva are raving lunatics - literally. I signed up for an account and revisited my profile to find 21 strangers had raved me. I think I missed something in that world and need to go back and explore further than the mall.

Twingly

Twingly is a screensaver that serves as a visualization of the global traffic in the blogosphere… and very addictive to watch. Normally, I run the open source Electric Sheep screen saver, which is very pretty, but I’m switching over on my main machine to run Twingly. (More at Primelabs)

Note:  does require that you run a current version of .NET, so setup may be a process depending on how up to date you keep your system. [via]