Integrating the Flickr photo sharing service
with your blog is a wonderful way to easily add photos to your site.
With a little extra effort you can get Flickr to work for you.
Flickr in your blog
When you want to embed a Flickr-hosted photograph into one of your
blog entries, first start by going to the photo's page in Flickr. Click
on the "All Sizes" button on top (with the magnifying glass icon), and
then pick the size you want for your blog post--small and medium work
well for blog entries.
Underneath the resized picture is a box with Flickr's coding (you have
to be looking at your own account and be logged in to see this). Simply
cut and paste this into your blog entry and the picture will appear
there. If you want your text to wrap around the picture you'll want to
add a little coding to what Flickr gives you. Somewhere inside the
"img" text you need to add wrapping instructions. An easy place is
between the text that reads:
height="180" alt="whatever it says"
...now reads:
height="180" align="left" alt="whatever it says"
Change
left to
right to have your photo align that way.
Your blog in Flickr
Many users don't realize that people sometimes find your Flickr
photos and not your blog. Google indexes Flickr nicely and Flickr's own
search is popular. In the description of your photos you should add a
link back to your own blog. If you have a blog entry concerning that
actual picture, link directly back to that entry.
You'll have to hand-write the HTML link for this (sorry, Flickr doesn't have a link button). It should look something like this:
Description of the photo. For more read, <a href="http://www.site.com/blogentry">What I know about Flickr</a>.
Here's a screen shot of the editing screen for this Flickr entry:
Results
That post about my trip to a legendary South Jersey locale is one of
the most visited pages on my personal blog. A good bit of it comes from
the links in Flickr!
Remember to put a lot of desired keywords into your Flickr title and
all link text. Keywords are those phrases that you think people might
be searching for.
The DiMeo family owns and operates several of the largest blueberry farms in the world, right here in the "blueberry capital of the world": Hammonton, New Jersey. They have an existing website that is hand-edited. We created a second site using WordPress.
On launch it has much of the same content as the other site, but arranged into posts and categorized and tagged for search engine visibility. It also highlights the DiMeo Blueberry Farms' Facebook, Twitter and Youtube outlets. I'll be interested to see how it gets picked up by search engines and how visitors start to use it
Nick Watts is a piano instructor in the 
Beth Kantor's nonprofit blog has an good article asking about the possibilities for real-time web interaction and asks whether it's possible for the web to let someone be in two places at the same time:
For me, the eye-opening moment of real-time collaboration came last winter when I was planning a conference with two friends. The three of us knew each other pretty well and we had all met each other one-on-one but we had never been in the same room together (this wouldn't happen until the first evening of the conference we were co-leading!). A month to go we scheduled a conference call to hash out details.
I got on Skype from my New Jersey home and called Robin on her Bay Area landline and Wess on his cellphone in Los Angeles. The mixed telephony was fun enough, but the amazing part came when we brought our computers into the conversation. Within minutes we had opened up a shared Google Doc file and started cutting and pasting agenda items. Someone made a reference to a video, found it on Youtube and sent it to the other two by Twitter. Wess had a secondary wiki going, we were bookmarking resources on Delicious and sending links by instant messenger.
This is qualitatively different from the two-places-at-once scenario that Beth Kantor was imagining because we were using real-time web tools to be more present with one another. Our attention was more focused on the work at hand.
I'm more skeptical about nonprofits engaging in the live tweeting phenomenon--fast-pace, real-time updates on Twitter and other "micro-blogging" services. These tend to be so much useless noise. How useful can we be if our attention is so divided?
Last week a nonprofit I follow used Twitter to cover a press conference. I'm sorry to say that the flood of tweets amounted to a lot of useless trivia. So what that the politician you invited actually showed up in the room? That he actually walked to the podium? That he actually started talking? That he ticked through your talking points? These are all things we knew would happen when the press conference was announced. There was no NEWs in this and no take-away that could get me more involved.
What would have been useful were links to background issues, a five-things-you-do list, and a five minute wrap-up video released within an hour of the event's end. They could have been coordinated in such a way to ramp up the real time buzz: if they had posted an Twitter update every half hour or so w/one selected highlight and a link to a live Ustream.tv link I probably would have checked it out. The difference is that I would have chosen to have my workday interrupted by all of this extra activity. In the online economy, attention is the currency and any unusual activity is a kind of mugging.
When I talk to clients, I invariably tell that "social media" is inherently social, which is to say that it's about people communicating. The excitement we bring to our everyday communication and the judgment we show in shaping the message is much more important than the Web 2.0 tool de jour.