07.08.08
Piclens and Flickr
I have been enjoying this lesson on Flickr and used the 4th of July holiday to practice improving my 71/2 habits by spending some time playing. WHile doing that I discovered this snazzy browser extension called PicLens. Here’s what Duncan Riley has to say about it on his blog (He explains it much better than I could):
“Firefox plugin PicLens
from Cooliris provides full screen immersive picture browsing of Flickr and other web sites that support Media RSS.
To use PicLens, a user clicks a small translucent icon that appears atop the image of interest once the plugin is installed. The PicLens slideshow interface appears and the user can move from one photo to the next or press play and enjoy the show. A user can intuitively browse images within search results, photo albums, and Media RSS enabled websites.
Support is currently provided for Flickr, Facebook, Friendster, Picasa Web Album and image search results from Google and Yahoo. Site owners can add support to any site with photos by including Media RSS support.
The best way to describe PicLens is that it’s a like the slideshow feature in Picasa or a similar photo viewing tool, but applied to web pages. The full screen rendering does require a decent internet speed when displaying large photographs, but visually the results are stunning. This Firefox plugin is going to find a lot of fans very, very quickly.”
And here’s a video about it from YouTube:
I’m not sure if it makes anything more efficient or not and I don’t know how easy it would be to integrate into a library catalog. But it sure is pretty and I could see how it might be fun to browse book jackets (You can do this on Amazon.com) this way if you’re not searching for anything particular.
Tags: Montana, Library 2.0, Challenge, Flickr, PicLens