Serious props to Thomas Hawk, lead Zooomr Evangelist, for his well thought out post regarding Flickr’s new geotagging facilities. Especially since Zooomr is pretty clearly a competitor and that the geotagging was one (but just one) of their distinguishing features!

The updates from others at Yahoo and Flickr and the comment thread are interesting as well. Sometimes it’s easy to take this kind of open communication for granted when, in reality, it is a relatively rare and precious thing.

Zooomr looks a lot like flickr, though without the potentially quite annoying NIPSA-ing of accounts that have too many “non-photo” images (screenshots, drawings, comics, etc).

And for a limited time bloggers can get a free Pro account just for hosting an image on their blog, like this:

What better way to try it out?

David Muir has posted many more good links about flickr in education. The links include an expansion on one of the examples I used in my Intro to Social Software Using Flickr– Beth Harris’ Art History class– with a pointer to Beth’s blog which does indeed have some marvelous art education videocasts. Highly recommended.

I had one of my best sessions ever on the general ideas and nature of social software during our recent iTeach event. This time around I did the whole session using flickr as the sole exemplar for each of the relevant concepts… an idea that I might have cadged from Alan or D’Arcy. It worked well because people are used to the idea of manipulating photographs in web galleries and software– though they are still digital items, they have a “thingness” that bookmarks do not (I usually teach these concepts with del.icio.us)– and also because the visual nature of flickr keeps people’s attention and more graphically illustrates some of the techniques I was talking about. Attached is the PDF version of the (as of now not quite finished and in need of proofreading) guide I created: Social Software with Flickr (PDF) [heavy, lots of screenshots].

When our new web site rolls out I will make the docbooks source + images and the XHTML versions available.