Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

Lately, I’ve been using flickr, twitter, and mailman as tools for my favorite cause. So far I’ve seen some neat results from using these that I don’t see a lot of others doing.  I will document some of the ways that I have been using these, and hopefully others will follow suit.

Firstly, flickr. Flickr is a web platform owned by yahoo that allows users to share photos in various resolutions, enables search-ability and a pretty strong social aspect of collaboration. I’m using flickr to cache all of the images that come out of deployments for OLPC. Our account is full of pictures of kids with laptops. As it should be! Many people that I meet don’t even realize that OLPC has laptops out in the field, let alone 400,000. While we can quote numbers, values and facts all that we want. It is images of actual children with our laptop that can win hearts and minds.

So I collect fight to collect these photos from people who work in deployment countries, those who work for us and the rest of the amazing community of volunteers. As I collect them, I throw them up on flickr. Flickr gives me the ability to embed images in my blog (as above) or the OLPC wiki.

I like the idea of embedding flickr images in our wiki instead of [[Image:]] tags. Flickr is a much better mechanism for commenting, tagging and searching for photos. Given the currently unorganized state of our wiki, linking people off site is probably a better way of finding what they want.

Next up: Twitter