Emerging Technologies in STC

I love photos! Do you remember those shirts that say, "______ is/are my life. (fill in the blank)" Well, one of the many words that I would fill the blank in with is, "Photos are my life." If my home caught on fire, my photos would be on the top of the list of items that I would want to save. I think part of the reason why I love photos is because I really think that "A picture is worth a thousand words." Whoever came up with the saying is a genius. With Flickr, it is a site to post photos, thus posting thousands and thousands of words without actually using any letters/text (although you could add captions to the photos). Photos to me add something that words cannot.

When we use Flickr though, we have to keep in mind the class materials/readings/activities of the past. During the week where we had to define a successful wiki site, a number of people had mentioned consistency as being important. Yes consistency and moreover relevancy . . . We wouldn't want to add photos that have nothing to do with the 35W bridge collapse (i.e. hot celebrities at parties or random objects of interests like the million dollar bra). One of our earlier readings a few weeks ago included, "Time is money, and for most projects, the cost of your team's time will be the largest percentage of your expenses." (Brown et al, 2007, p. 107) With that being said, we have to use our time and pick our photos wisely...therefore no photos of million dollar bras please! ;-)

Going from photos on Flickr to the wiki site, Information Architecture is key. We learned about Information Architecture in weeks 4 and 5. Information Architecture "involves art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability...the structural design of shared information environments." (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006, p. 4) "Structuring, organizing, and labeling...It's what information architects do best...Findability is a critical success factor for overall usability." (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006, p. 5) This is all important in regards to photos added to our wiki site because we wouldn't want to add a photo upside down or mislabel a photo or place a photo at the very bottom of the web page hundreds of lines below the last set of text so that the site visitor would have to scroll all the way to the bottom. It may be good finger-on-mouse exercise for the site visitor but very bad information architecture! This week's http://www.webstyleguide.com/graphics/index.html will help us with coming up with good information architecture because, "IN THIS CHAPTER [it will] show you techniques to optimize the look and efficiency of your Web page graphics."

It's good that we're adding photos to our wiki site. As I mentioned earlier, photos add something that words cannot. Imagine if our wiki site was just text. I think that would be oh-so-boring. With photos, we are not only adding graphics, we are adding thousands of unspoken words. With that, I leave you with this picture I got at http://www.clipartguide.com/_pages/0512-0706-1513-2815.html

What does this photo mean to you? I could tell you in a thousand words what this photo means to me, but in short -- To me, this photo means America, and how I love this country and the great people here in this country . . . like you guys and anyone else who makes the most out of life.