F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren (beta)

In reviewing submission guidelines for some conferences, I am struck by some obvious advice: the title needs to be catchy. And who among us hasn’t at times written a poor title for what was probably a good presentation?

But even good advice is sometimes overlooked, or goes unheeded. That became clear to me after the last 12:10 Lunch and Learn about new ways to access and use images in presentations, the title didn’t live up to the topic. Several of those who chose not to attend, later told me said “we know how to put an image in powerpoint”. Opps. Bad title.

The October 12:10 conspiracy was to help discover and explore item 11 on the 12/10 list: exploring Flickr. And along with that we explored that the old difficult way of finding images to use in presentations has some free and better alternatives.

So as a brief recap, here are some of the key points.

The old way — of buying stock image disks, looking through pages of stock photo albums and directories, and considering whether the use of an image constituted a violation of copyright law have evolved.

The new way includes the use of tools like flickr™ (www.flickr.com) or Picassa™ and searching for images on nearly any topic or theme.

These resources make use the images shared by millions of people and the idea of tagging - a friendly folksy way of labeling content. This blog makes use of tagging and the resulting tag cloud on the right of this page. Tag clouds are intuitive for many people.

Flickr also makes it possible to only search photos licensed under Creative Commons, a new way to look at the sharing and restriction of use of intellectual property. Now, authors, publishers, researchers, scholars have a way to allow some use of their work without involving detailed licensing agreements, or disputes over ownership.

November’s 12:10 will be a very brief introduction to using audio online and in presentations.  I still have half a month to come up with a good title.