Well, my apologies for the long hiatus over the holidays. I'm sure many of you were busy also, so perhaps you'll understand. At any rate, I'm back, and hopefully with something you'll find interesting.
In an earlier post I mentioned snap shot sharing as one of the useful things you can do on the web. One of the best known and easiest locations to do this from is www.flickr.com. Once you have set up a free account there, you can upload and store photos on Flickr. The number you upload is unlimited, but with a free membership only the last 200 will be viewable by anyone. You can designate them as viewable only by people you name or by the whole world (which is the default). You have the choice of retaining copyright to your photos or making them available for anyone's use under the Creative Commons license. (You can check the meaning of a Creative Commons license in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_commons ) . If you establish a paid membership, restrictions on the number of your photos that can be viewed are removed and you get other benefits as well. Among other things, I use Flickr to store the picture of me that appears in this blog.
So much for photos, how about video? Keep in mind that if you are on a dialup link, video isn't practical because the files are too big to upload or download unless you have an amazing amount of patience.
Flickr does not handle video but another free site, WWW.Putfile.Com does. Upload any number of up to 25MB files and they stay for up to six months even if they're never viewed. If they're viewed at least once every six months they stay indefinitely. They have a FAQ here http://www.putfile.com/faq that spells out the terms of service. I spent a couple of hours browsing and it looks like for the most part people are experimenting, learning how to use software to capture, edit and mix video. There is an occasional gem in the mix. Here is an example: http://media.putfile.com/Ball-Player
Hope you enjoyed it; why not browse around the site to see if there is a Gem you can locate.
