Our son likes to check out YouTube for clips on shortcuts and cheats for his video games. Usually what he finds are videos with lousy picture quality--like someone had used the video camera feature on a cell phone to take images from a TV set--and a muddled soundtrack. So that's been my experience with YouTube.
There are, of course, countless other sites that provide online video clips. The link below to "The American River: Kayak It" is from Sacbee.com, and it appeared, along with the print article, earlier this month. Two of the Bee's reporters took a handheld video camera and filmed some of the sights when floating down the American River from Hazel Avenue to near CSUS. The link is to the entire article, and it includes an 8 1/2 minute video. Enjoy!
PS--When the link was successfully uploaded to this blog on the first try, it was another of those "Hey, it really worked!!" moments.
Showing posts with label kayaking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kayaking. Show all posts
Friday, July 24, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Flickr'd
I've spent some time in the past couple of days exploring Flickr. There are all kinds of possibilities for searching, posting, tagging, and commenting photos that others have posted or which one can upload to the site. I really feel that I only scratched the surface of what Flickr offers.
In the fairly brief time I spent with Flickr, including finding the kayaking picture (below) and posting it here, I observed a few things:
1. It's better to search by tags than by full text. When I entered the terms "lake", "tahoe", and "kayaking", I retrieved over 1600 hits in a full-text search; when I used those terms as tags, Flickr retrieved a fraction of that number, which was a lot more manageable.
2. Sometimes I pulled up images that at first completely baffled me as to how they matched my search parameters. "Lake Tahoe kayaking" actually retrieved several photos of young women in a grocery store, including one shot of a woman at the meat counter holding up a package of beef tongue (I'm not kidding!!!) "Lake Tahoe kayaking"?? Huh?? How about "Weird stuff I found at the grocery store"? In exploring further, I discovered that these photos were part of a larger collection, all submitted by the same person, of a vacation to Lake Tahoe, which at one point included some time spent in a kayak. The entire set of pictures included "kayaking" as a tag, so consequently the beef tongue photo ended up as a search result.
3. There are a whole lot of mediocre vacation photos on Flickr.
4. Sometimes tags are misspelled. I found a couple dozen photos tagged as "Laketahoe".
5. The ability to search by a geographic location is a very useful feature. I looked up the tag "Kings Beach", a town on Tahoe's north shore where we've owned a timeshare for many years and spend a week there nearly every summer. This led to a whole assortment of photos taken a different times of the year, and some of them were remarkably beautiful.
I've never used or searched Flickr before, so this phase of 27 Things was a real discovery. I'll definitely come back to the site.
In the fairly brief time I spent with Flickr, including finding the kayaking picture (below) and posting it here, I observed a few things:
1. It's better to search by tags than by full text. When I entered the terms "lake", "tahoe", and "kayaking", I retrieved over 1600 hits in a full-text search; when I used those terms as tags, Flickr retrieved a fraction of that number, which was a lot more manageable.
2. Sometimes I pulled up images that at first completely baffled me as to how they matched my search parameters. "Lake Tahoe kayaking" actually retrieved several photos of young women in a grocery store, including one shot of a woman at the meat counter holding up a package of beef tongue (I'm not kidding!!!) "Lake Tahoe kayaking"?? Huh?? How about "Weird stuff I found at the grocery store"? In exploring further, I discovered that these photos were part of a larger collection, all submitted by the same person, of a vacation to Lake Tahoe, which at one point included some time spent in a kayak. The entire set of pictures included "kayaking" as a tag, so consequently the beef tongue photo ended up as a search result.
3. There are a whole lot of mediocre vacation photos on Flickr.
4. Sometimes tags are misspelled. I found a couple dozen photos tagged as "Laketahoe".
5. The ability to search by a geographic location is a very useful feature. I looked up the tag "Kings Beach", a town on Tahoe's north shore where we've owned a timeshare for many years and spend a week there nearly every summer. This led to a whole assortment of photos taken a different times of the year, and some of them were remarkably beautiful.
I've never used or searched Flickr before, so this phase of 27 Things was a real discovery. I'll definitely come back to the site.
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