At the high school, we wanted to find a way to have the students keep their resources from year to year so they can build their own resource aggregation. Discussions of Diigo emerged and we realized we could use Diigo to build their repository. Below is just one example of a set of annotations my students completed and if you look at the time stamp this single page from a Gmail archive is just a few hours worth of discussions and annotations online in various websites. Check out http://bit.ly/diigoit for my resources, and if you have anymore resources I should include there, let me know!

Just picked up my first droid phone, the DroidX, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more about things I learn on the phone. For now, though, I want to talk briefly about how to import .pub books into the Aldiko app. This took some time to figure out and I couldn’t find a post to help me, so I’m writing it. I did research ereaders when I purchased this phone, and Aldiko is the best, in my opinion.

Initially the directions said to create a folder called eBooks/Import and drop the books into there (connect via USB and use the Finder to navigate). This didn’t work. I copied 10 books I knew worked perfectly, but Aldiko just searched for a second when I clicked “Import” and then said there were no books on my device.

Later when wracking my brain and searching for other ereader apps, I noticed that the file directory now had a new folder on my sdcard called ebooks/import. This was in a different place than the other directory path I created myself (which I placed under the Aldiko/ folder). On chance I moved my books into this new directory, went back into Aldiko and imported again. This time it took a few extra seconds and found the books! Presto!

So here are the directions:

1. Install Aldiko ereader app on your droid device.

*** do step 2 BEFORE step 3! You and I know there are no .epub books on the device… yet. The droid doesn’t.

3. Mount your sdcard on your computer. (Easiest way is via usb).

5. Go back to Aldiko. Repeat step 2. It’ll find the books this time, and then navigate to your Bookshelf and enjoy the books!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by funkandjazz

As the idea of “tagging” files, images, folders, etc… caught on over the last few years, I’ve embraced it for so many reasons. Instead of sticking a file into a folder, that file could not represent so much more. For students, this could be “paper”, “draft1″, “Sci 302″, “subject”, “term written”, “year”, and so on. The concept of tagging allows the user more freedom with how he or she categorizes and organizes electronic work. While this still has far to go in tagging files inside the OS, the cloud is much more favorable to tagging. While social bookmarking, I will tag various website relatively liberally, but my photos are a different story.

I use Flickr to organize my photography and originally my audience was very limited. I remember one day two years ago I went into my Flickr tag cloud and was mortified by how many there were. I tried to merge tags, organize them, and drop some that didn’t seem pertinent. Looking back I was limiting myself.

But things change. I’ve been shooting more for other people: clients, yearbook; conferences; @dailyshoot; and picture of the day. My Flickr followers has exploded over the last year, too. Recently I wanted to add some photos to a presentation I was creating and couldn’t find this photo of a student I wanted. I knew the shot and knew it was on my Flickr. The boy was in my classroom, sitting at a desk, texting. He had red hair. I searched for “mobile”, “cell”, “classroom”, etc… and did not find the photo. Around the same time I was searching for dance shots I’d taken and couldn’t find them.

My tagging philosophy has now changed. Flickr lets you tag any photo with a maximum of 200 tags and I always wondered who would need so many. Well, I don’t use 200 but I sure use more than I use to. Now I tag photos in several ways. I begin with simple tags that include “Month Year”, then “Year” and then “Month”. Those are always standard for me now. If I can remember the month I shot something, I can flip back to everything from that month quickly. I then tag the event: e.g., “First Friday” or “Boys Varsity Volleyball”. Then I get more specific. For the volleyball example I just mentioned, I’d also include tags for “boys” “varsity volleyball” and “volleyball”. I’d tag those with both teams’ names (if I know them). If I shot it for yearbook, I’d tag it as such so the photo editor can go straight to a tag made just for that event. I am also beginning to tag minor things. When was the last time you needed a shot of a woman wearing a bandana? Today I edited a photo that matched that description and included tags to show that. Also, if the majority of the photo is a certain color scheme (like blues), I also tag it with the color name.

I cannot guarantee that in six months or a year, I will remember how my brain thought that single day when I tagged that shot. But I can guarantee that if I liberally tag my photos, one of the tags I will use to try to find that shot will pull it up from my Flickr.

For years I’ve worried about storage and losing files. I’ve been online continually since 1992 now and have way too many files. Everything anymore to me are zeros and ones, and a few years ago I moved to Google tools for most everything. I am a Google whore, just short of flying to a Google teacher day (missed December’s deadline). The one tool I’ve never hooked onto for Google is their photo repository, Picasa. It just never made sense to me, and by then I’d been enmeshed in Flickr for two years (please please buy Flickr from Yahoo, Google!). Everything else has been Google for me.

In 2005 my daughter, Claire, was born and I videotaped my parents meeting her at the airport for the first time. I exported that video to an external hard drive that proceeded to crash and burn. I lost the video. I lost everything. You cannot replicate that sort of thing. I needed the cloud. I recently talked to a photographer friend who suggested that Flickr is my cloud repository for photos, but I need something for all sorts of files. I checked out DropBox, but didn’t like the pay scale. I considered Mozy or something like that, but still, not what I needed.

And then today. Tonight, I saw the follow Tweet. “Google Lets Users Store More Files Online – NYTimes.com http://bit.ly/6isWSp” from Traci Gardner . I immediately clicked on it and was thrilled. The title reads “Google Lets Users Store More Files Online”. Google’s mythological GDrive that’s been floating around the ‘nets since 2006 is coming true. For free, 1g has been added to your Google account now to upload any type of file with a maximum of 250mb per file (sorry videographers). This storage, your Picasa storage, and Gmail storage will equal close to 10G for free. You want more? I know I do! It’s $0.25 a gig annually. That means for $40 a year I can back up my entire hard drive, and for me that rocks!

It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn cool. You access everything through Google Docs, which for me is just ok. I’d like to see a file structure similar to a gui in Windows or OSX, but that’s because that’s the design with which we’re all familiar. I’d like to be able to set some files (or even folders) to nonsearchable (i.e. I know they are there, but they don’t show up in my everyday file searches… like archives that I need to keep. For example, grade sheets I will never need unless a student contests something).

DropBox seems to be a biggie right now, and wouldn’t it be cool for the Google API to offer something similar between GDocs and your desktop (I can see the arguments against this right now with the cloud, netbooks, tablet PCs, mobiles, etc… why bother with files locally?) My thought here is I want to sync my new GDisk directly to external hard drives (yes, I keep THREE now as backups). Talk about redundantly important. I don’t think we need (internal) computer hard drives that match or are larger than our personal cloud storage or external hard drive backups, but why can’t the netbook/laptop/tablet act as a funnel between the cloud and external backup drives? I bet they can! (Disclaimer: I am not a coder, but I bet one can comment below and tell me if: 1) this is a pipe dream or 2) this is already being done (provide me a link!)

A few other notes I saw when researching the GDisk include a YouTube sync that includes, for example, a button “Do you like this video? Save it to your GDisk now!” Google doesn’t necessarily need to make another copy of the file, but it can give you, the user, access to that same file. The same with uploading music. If the song already exists, give us access to that file rather than wasting some of our storage space by uploading another copy of that file? One user on the Google blog even mentioned, and I paraphrase, “If I upload my whole iTunes library, then I’ll have my personal streaming music anywhere I have internet!”.

And I leave you with “I want my GDisk!” (sung in Sting’s Voice from 1981.)

Your thoughts? Leave a comment!

I’ve always worried about losing data mostly since my backup drive died when Claire was an infant, and I lost the video footage of my parents meeting her for the first time. I now back up doubly. I have another drive that is stuff that just won’t fit on my hard drive, then another that’s a drive for just media. Each year I shoot a ton of images, and I fill up my hard drive on the MBP by fall.

But suddenly the other day I realized that really I don’t need to worry about images as much. See, I use Flickr. I’ve been using Flickr for a few years, and guess what? It’s my photo back up. I can download the original shot anytime I want from Flickr. In all actuality unless Flickr dies, I have a full backup in the cloud. Don’t I? Alan wonders what that’s like with Yahoo’s financial woes, but neither of us think Flickr is going anywhere. Good thing, too.