Thing #5: Explore Flickr

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr to catapult the idea of “sharing” into a full blown online community. Within the last few years, Flickr has become the fastest growing photo sharing site on the web and is known as one of the first websites to use keyword “tags” to create associations and connections between photos and users of the site.

Read 7 Things You Should Know About Flickr

As you know (or should know) not all Google Images are copyright-friendly. You do not have the rights to use all visuals found there. That is also true with Flickr photos in the overall collection.

However, the folks at Flickr have arranged separate collections based on the copyright-friendly Creative Commons rules. The photos found here can be downloaded and used by you, a visitor to the site.

For this discovery exercise:
1.Take a good look at Flickr and discover what this site has to offer.
Find out how tags work, what groups are, and all the neat things that people and other libraries are using Flickr for.

2. Visit the Flickr Creative Commons site and explore what kinds of photos you could you use for your library or classroom. Do a search using a keyword or two from your subject or curriculum.
Save a photo to your hard drive (in My Pictures is best). Add that photo to your #5 blog posting that interests you.
Note: Do not use the Search box found on the top right side--it takes you to the general collection where not all photos are copyright friendly. Here is some help in downloading photos from the site.

3. Write about what you found. Be sure and put Thing 5 as part of your post title.

Reminder: Separate post for each Thing. Please do not combine Things.

Thing #17: Rollyo

Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust?

With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines - we call them Searchrolls - and explore, save, and personalize those created by others. Rollyo puts the power of search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines - with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we'll create a custom search engine for you.

Not quite ready to roll? We've created a starter kit of Searchrolls you can personalize. What else can Rollyo do?

Share Your Searchrolls

You can explore and save searchrolls created by the community of Rollyo users and share your knowledge on a particular set of topics. You can even edit Searchrolls created by others. More than a thousand new Searchrolls are created every day!


Search Your Top News Sites and Blogs
Rollyo searches for the latest news articles and blog posts, giving you up-to-the-minute search results from the news sources you know and trust when it comes to a particular topic or area of interest.

RollBar
The RollBar Bookmarklet allows you to drag your entire Rollyo experience onto your browser. Search any site, use your Searchrolls wherever you are, add sites to your rolls on the fly, even create new rolls from the site that you're on.

Roll a Firefox™
Search Engine Firefox™ users can quickly create custom Searchrolls and add them to their browser toolbar in one click. You can include one site that you search all the time or a topical list of up to 25 sites. Any Rollyo Searchroll can be added to Firefox™ with one click.

High Rollers
Rollyo welcomes several high profile, High Rollers: Debra Messing, Arianna Huffington, Rosario Dawson, Brian Greene, Diane Von Furstenberg, our friends at PBS Frontline and many top bloggers have all rolled custom search engines. You can be a High Roller too if your searchroll becomes popular with the Rollyo community. Think of it as our version of Star Search.

Single Site Search
If you're always going back to the same site over and over again like Dictionary.com, Amazon or Ebay, you can create a searchroll that includes just that single site so all your searches are in one place.

Web Search
You can always expand any search to include the whole Web.
With Rollyo you can search one site, the whole web, and everything in between.

Tools
We are constantly adding new tools to make Rollyo more useful. A few of these include a Firefox™ Plugin, a custom searchbox for your site, our RollBar, and a simple way to import your bookmarks so you can use them to quickly create a variety of searchrolls. You can check out our excellent buzz and there's plenty more that you'll discover as you start using Rollyo. But ultimately Rollyo is really about a very simple idea: Quickly and easily getting you the results you want from the sites you trust. Ready?

Discovery Activity: Create your own customize search and write about it in your blog and post a link to it. See if this video (created by a L2P Player) will help you.