Friday 16 October 2015

Thing 18: Communicating Through Photographs

Flickr and Instagram

Of all the Web 2.0 tools, Flicker and Instagram have the most immediate appeal to me.   Who doesn’t like looking at photographs especially when some of the photographs are as interesting and professional as anything you might see in a coffee table art book?

Flickr has an awesome catalogue of pictures and is doing something really important by hosting so many images.  It will be an amazing record of our planet and how our lives are lived.

For a long time, I had Instagram pegged as the go to app of the terminally vain and vacuous or for young kids, mainly girls, who were experimenting with their image but I have seen the light.
So yes while, Beyonce and Kim Kardashian might be fighting it out to have the most Instagram followers by virtue of how much skin they are willing to expose, there are lots of really interesting Instagram feeds out there to balance the scale.

I like the layout of Instagram a lot.  It is really clean and uncluttered looking.  It lets the pictures speak for themselves.   And the comments in the side are fairly contained and not too distracting. 
Instagram is a great way to document a library event.  The visual always appeals to people and it’s a great way of communicating and showcasing what the library has to offer.
As long as the photographs are good and visually interesting, it looks great.  Instagram also allows you to use lots of text with the post if that was something that was needed.   People are even writing short stories around their Instagram pictures. 

My library does not have an Instagram account yet but definitely something to think about for the future as it seems to be one of the social media tools whose influence is growing.   


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