This Wednesday Ben Jeavons and I (of pingVision) and Mollee Bauer (the owner/founder of pregnancy.org) will be doing a case study/showcase presentation at Drupalcon DC.  I’ve been working on our presentation in Keynote over the weekend based on our collective notes.

One of the challenges of combining the notes of three people into a single presentation is creating something with one voice that comes across as coherent.  One of the ways I work to create a single voice is through images. When I’m putting together a slides I have a few rules.

1. Don’t write every word you are going to say on the slides!  It will bore your audience to tears.  Short points that emphasize your commentary will suffice.
2. Use your slides to keep momentum up.  They should be punchy and interesting.  A little bit of humour is helpful.
3. Try and have roughly 50% of your slides contain images.  They will help generate interest.

I take at least one photo a day and send it to Flickr. Often this one photo is from my cell phone and documents a moment in my morning commute, stopped at a stop light, grabbing a coffee at my local drive through, or perhaps parked at work. I use a Treo 650 that has data enabled on it, but any mobile with a camera (and the ability to email will work).

The first step is to set up a Flickr account (if you don't have one already). A basic account is free, a Pro account costs $24.95. The difference is that a free account limits the number of viewable pictures to 200 and allows limited bandwidth for transfers and the Pro account allows you unlimited viewable pictures ridiculous amounts of transfer bandwidth.

I have quite an extended family in the UK which means we visited and stayed with different uncles and aunts while there. This didn't eliminate the need for hotels, but did lessen the number of nights we stayed in them.

We generally find our hotels online using services like Expedia or CheaperThanHotels to find places to stay. Great deals can be had at London Hotels, Edinburgh Hotels, and Glasgow Hotels, especially if you are willing to risk waiting until the last minute. We like to find places that are central, close to public transit, and (if possible) have a kitchen or kitchenette. Three of the four places we stayed in the UK for our vacation this month had those amenities. A kitchen reduces the amount of time you spend eating at restaurants, which are--in the UK--very expensive. This doesn't mean we don't end up eating out at all. We had a terrific meal, for example, at Ignite, a fabulous Indian Restaurant in Edinburgh.

We traveled by rail back to London yesterday. It was a very pleasant trip on one of the first class carriages. We traveled down the eastern coast and were privy to some terrific views of the ocean and the land close to the ocean. It was quite beautiful until we passed Newcastle after which it was pretty much a normal view of the UK--gentle rolling hills between each of the towns.

I took advantage of the trip to digitize all of our video so far and start the process of encoding it for REVVER. I even managed to use the train's wireless Internet connection to upload a few of them. The wireless was a really nice freebie touch to the first class experience, but the connection was somewhat flakey--for example uploading photos to Flickr was absolutely hopeless. I'll need to catch up when we get back to Colorado although I may try to upload a few later this evening.

Thanks to a good broadband connection the last two nights thanks to uncles and aunts, I am pretty much caught up on our UK photos for the first six days. Unfortunately, the flickr uploadr tool has been giving me grief on and off and so it seems like my photos in the flickr stream are not in proper order and I may have some duplicates. Please forgive anything that seems strange in that regard.

A Photo Recap So Far

Day 1

We did nearly nothing--but did experience the largest fish and chips ever.

There are big changes in my future. I've spent the last nine months or so championing the use of Web 2.0 technologies in promoting the nonprofit community in general with an emphasis on the arts. A big part of this has focused on the convergence of different technologies in mashups. These have included:

1. Drupal
2. Flickr
3. Revver
4. YouTube
5. Twitter
6. SecondLife

I see myself as a trainer, writer, technologist, zealot, and missionary. I take part in Nonprofits in Secondlife and have been posting to Techsoup's forums. I like to share knowledge.

I'm happy to say that the change in my life has me moving from my position at WESTAF in Denver to pingVision in Boulder. pingVision is a creative design studio that specialises in Drupal site design, DVD authoring, and graphic design.

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Taxonomy is the scientific practice of categorizing things.  For example, taxonomy is use to classify organisms.  The Dewey Decimal System was created in the 1800's and is a taxonomy.  The Library of Congress has a taxonomy.
When you get right down to it, a taxonomy is a preset tagging system.  In Dewey, if a book is on Technology it falls within "600".  In the Library of congress, the same volume would fall within "T".  These tags create:

• structure
• hierarchy
• standards

They also tend to be:

• specific to one use
• non-adaptive

Folk Taxonomy or Folxonomy allows users to create tags which means that you can have a virtually infinite set.  Systems that use folxonomy include Drupal, Joomla, Flickr, YouTube, Revver, and Google Video. 

My next few posts will deal with tagging on different social networking sites and will be crossposted from NonProfits in Second Life. This first tutorial will focus on Flickr.

In all the social networking sites that you might post to, there is something in common--tagging. Simply put, tags are little pieces of data that let people know what your information--whether it be an image, a video, or text--is about. For example, you could tag a picture of the castle in Warwick, UK on Flickr with "Warwick castle UK England" and when someone searched on these criteria would have the following results returned:

I take at least one photo a day and send it to Flickr.  Often that picture is taken from my cell phone, a Treo 650, and soon after sent to flickr via a special email address set up to accept photos and plop them into my photo stream.  Flickr then automatically adds my preset tags making them findable.  It is pretty slick and works very well with an Internet enabled phone.
The problem is that you end up being relegated to using whatever camera you have in your phone and while some phones with cameras take stellar pictures, you have very little control over the settings in the camera.  You sacrifice control for convenience/instant gratification.

I've posted about the need for a good backup regimen. But what happens when everything goes so wrong that it ends up being a $38 Billion blunder?

How can the live data and all backups end up being hosed?

Well it happened in Juneau, Alaska to the Department of Revenue. The blunder cost $220,000 to fix and took six straight weeks of data entry by 70 people.

So, if it can happen to a State Agency, it can happen to you. BACKUP your hard drive regularly. Get your precious photos on CD, DVD, and/or on Flickr.