Thing 9

For Thing 9, I looked at both Slideshare and BigHugeLabs.

Slideshare is a neat way to share slideshows without emailing files or downloading files to your computer. I run our children's Lego club at the library, and each month I show a slideshow of images I've found that fit the month's theme. It's a real pain emailing the file to myself each month and then opening it on the (slow-as-molasses-in-January) laptop in our meeting room. How simple it would be to just email a link instead of a file! I may just have to try out Slideshare for Lego club at the end of this month. I would assume that clicking on a link and watching the show on the web would be faster than downloading the actual show. Slideshare would be particularly useful for the workplace when sharing slideshows with coworkers or those colleagues who are in different branches, towns or even states! It would be nice to not have to worry about whether everyone who you want to view a slideshow has the required program downloaded to their computers. With Slideshare, there is no downloading, so it allows everyone to view a show. Nice and simple. Just the way it should be.

The fun photo editing features on BigHugeLabs were fun to explore and play around with. This site would be good for personal use for manipulating and adding features, borders, colors, text, etc. to photos. I liked the different options available, such as popart, magazine cover and frames. What a lot of fun, creative options together on one site. Even though these might be fun for personal use, they could also serve a purpose in the workplace. Photos from programs or from around the library could be manipulated with frames or overlays and turned into new creative images for marketing programs or library features and materials. There are lots of possibilities for using the programs on BigHugeLabs that would actually come in handy for the library. The only downside to using this site would be having sufficient time to play around with and explore the different options for altering the photos. But if someone had the time and patience to work with it, there could be some really nice images created for marketing purposes using this site.

I will have to explore the databases at a later time as my Internet connection seems spotty today.