Have You Taken Any Pictures?
July 16, 2008Have you taken any good pictures of the conference or of the city since you’ve been in D.C.? Got a great picture of the Lincoln Memorial? Maybe some pictures of some of the speakers?
If so, we want them! No, no…we don’t actually want them all – we just want you to share them with other conference participants. If you have taken any pictures and care to share them with your colleagues, head over to Flickr and upload your photos. Use your personal account if you already have one; if you don’t already have one, create a new account and upload them to your account. All that we ask is that you tag your photos with the term “socialmediagovernment” – by doing this, you’ll ensure that your pictures will get picked up by the Flickr RSS feed that I’ve inserted at the bottom right of this blog. This feed is tied this particular tag and not to an individual account. This allows EVERYONE to upload their own photos using their own account and still share related photos.
If you’re interested, here’s a link to all of the photos from this year’s conference, and here’s my own personal Flickr site.
Social Media for Government 
Flickr as suspected is just one of the many social media sites that we here in the Federal Government are blocked from accessing. Certainly, this is with good cause as file content on the WEB could be malicious or unrated to say the least. However, I have within a few short minutes of attempting to do so, found examples within our communications departments of YouTube like sites where well controlled, high cost, video productions are stored for access at any time but getting a video put up is certainly not as easy as we’ve seen it can be. There is even a glorified e-mail notification for new content and code for an RSS feed that I do not know how to make use of. The examples I’ve found will need to evolve greatly to provide the functionality I’ve now been exposed to.