Flick me! (Module 4)

Flickr... For many people, the drive for public appreciation and recognition can change their perspective, especially on the significant issues of privacy. It is a fine line to draw on how much information to actually place on the internet, and the ease of which this information can be taken for personal use can cause much concern.

For instance, from an educational perspective, we could not use Flickr to save or share photo's, which is essentially what the application's function is. It is designed to host and share albums of photos. Given, those albums can be made private, but then it simply becomes organised cloud storage, and not really a place for sharing images (as is its intention). Now, if that album was private, or open only to those that had the passcode for it, then it could be useful - but we still have to ask: Who is the audience and what do they plan to do with those pictures? As the reality is, those pictures are easily downloaded and used in other mediums, or even posted to not-so-secure albums in another persons account, Facebook or similar. Case in point: My wife is part of a forum. One day, a person joined and started chatting. A while went by and pictures, Facebook accounts, and websites were setup with the persons name and photo's pf her children. After about 4 months, it was discovered (and is now under investigation) that this person had actually been following and stealing photos and stories from another persons blog, Facebook account and forum postings on a similar site, and "living" through this person... So, who's looking at your pictures?

In regards to copyright, we the author has to consider that any person could potentially steal and use out photo's for their own use. Either we are happy for this to occur, and we license our work under the Creative Commons License system, or we watermark our images.

Creative Commons is a fantastic organisation that allows material a certain license for sharing under certain conditions. Much of the PHP and Javascript code I write is licensed under the same system - I dont mind who uses it, but it must be credited correctly. This is called Attribution. There are other levels, but the emphasis is on collaboration and ensuring credit is given where it is due.

Overall, I think there is a use for Flickr, it simply has to be managed and we have to make sure that anything we upload, we are happy for others to use.

Anyway, below is a photo I will upload to my Flickr account.