Sunday, October 17, 2010

Flickr or Facebook...?

I find it quite peculiar that Flickr is included in a list of "23 Things Information Professionals Need To Know." In fact, after looking the site, I am even more perplexed as to why this is important. Sure, Flickr has some cool features and lots of metadata [tags] to describe the images you post. I also like that it is another type of online community that allows users to interact with each other in ways not imaginable before. But who uses Flickr instead of Facebook? In a library setting, wouldn't the library want to create a Facebook page? Libraries are dying. And Flickr is not going to meet your users where they are. At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that a user isn't going to bother typing in your Flickr site to see your library's photos if they can type in your library's name with a few keywords on Facebook. As information professionals, we need to know that things like Flickr exist, and, perhaps, expect to teach our patrons how to use them. However, the usefulness of sites like these in a library setting remains to be seen. Of course, to play devil's advocate, what happens if a user doesn't have a Facebook page? In that case, Flickr would tremendously useful. [Note: The probability of this situation is HIGHLY unlikely.] Hmm...

However, my rant is done. I did find a nice image of Vladimir Horowitz playing the piano. I suspect this to be from one of his Carnegie Hall recitals...


What an amazing musician.

No comments:

Post a Comment