Photo Sharing and Photo Blogging (Plogging) Overview:
Image sharing allows
users to easily upload digital images to the web and organize them in albums,
groups or clusters according to their preferences. Image hosting services also
include different features, from sharing photos with friends to printing and
getting prints delivered by mail. Many image hosting services provide a basic
version of the service for free, and a payed-for, full featured version.
Some photo hosting
services, such as Flickr (one of the most popular), have been designed
specifically with a community approach. Photos are tagged with relevant
keywords, creating a community tag cloud and photo clusters. Users can also
join or create photo groups to share photos with specific content or technique. Other photo hosting services such as
Photobucket or Imageshack provide mostly an easy way to upload images and link
them directly from blogs, forums and other websites.
Popular sites
include: Photobucket.com, imageshack.us,
flickr.com, picasa.com
Photo blogs are
websites in which pictures “tell the story” in chronological order. Photo blogs
use a blogging platform to publish photos. Other platforms have been created
specifically for publishing photo blogs such as Birch, FolderBlog and
PixelPost. Photo blogs use RSS so their visitors can subscribe to new postings.
Many users open a blog and keep their images in a hosting site: most of the
traffic generated on image hosting services such as photobucket.com is
generated from MySpace.
Video Sharing Overview:
Web video refers to video in digital format, transmitted over the
Internet. The increasing availability of bandwidth, high speed Internet
connectivity, the improvement of methods for compressing and transmitting video
files and the ubiquity of digital video cameras have contributed to an
explosion of this media over the last years.
Part of the popularity of web video is due to video hosting services
such as YouTube, Blip.tv and others. These services allow users to upload short videos without worrying about
compression formats, compatibility with different players or server bandwidth.
They also offer features such as the possibility to embed video in web pages,
rate and comment videos, subscribe to video channels or send “video replies”.
Web video is often produced at low cost, using consumer digital cameras,
webcams or mobile devices, and edited with user-friendly software. TV and media
clips are also digitalized and posted on the web, raising questions about
copyright violations and privacy concerns.
Web video has become an essential element of social networks, not only the ones dedicated exclusively to video (Youtube, Google video), but also more general services such as MySpace and Facebook. It is because of the community links and the easy sharing mechanisms that a video can reach high visibility and become “viral”, shared rapidly over the Internet and achieving notoriety.
Popular sites include: Blip.tv, YouTube.com, Google Video
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