Say It / Blog It in Pictures

The old cliché about the exchange rate of pictures for words has always been a fluctuating market. While some images are worth exactly 1000 words, many are worth much less, but we also now have access to use ones worth quite a bit more.

For bloggers, pictures add 'punch' to your writing via illustration, metaphor or abstraction or may even convey the bulk of a story. Creative commons photos are a treasure trove we will dive into, but you can really stand out by using your own photos! You don't have to be a digital SLR über camera geek; a spontaneous group of bloggers have grouped together sharing their daily 366 photos where most of us are finding a whole new way of looking at the world... often using simple pocket cameras.

But going beyond (can I call it "traditional"?) what we think of as blogging as typing text into a box, you can unlock new realms of creativity by blogging in different containers such as VoiceThread or flickr. And even farther out on the ledge, we will take a play at a Northern Voice version of a web app I made called "Five Card Flickr" to see what kind of stories we can create using only pictures.

Alan Levine

Alan Levine is Vice President NMC Community & CTO for the New Media Consortium (NMC, http://www.nmc.org/), an international consortium of more than 280 universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression.

He first tossed up some HTML in 1993 to a webserver running on a humble Mac SE/30 and has not left since, barking about technology and other things that get under his fur at CogDogBlog- http://cogdogblog.com/

A veteran of Northern Voice 2006 and 2008 he is hoping frequent attendance will earn a Canadian status of "honorary citizen" from the Great Southern Province of Arizona. In 2008, he spoke on "50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story".