Web Sites Get Social

Creativity can also be a social exercise online--and for more than just chat and e-mail, with which Duo viewers are familiar by now. For instance, there are some great sites out there for people wanting to combine efforts on a project. Two sites catch the Duo's eyes this week, one already quite popular and one fairly new but based on an idea that a lot of people have heard of.

Flickr lets you upload photos to your own personal Web page on the site, either from your computer or from your camera phone. Then you can organize and tag those photos, so anyone looking for photos of a similar type--say, Ignatz Family Reunion--can find them. (If you want them to. Privacy settings let you keep the wraps on anything you don't feel like sharing with the world.)

Angela loves this site for event photos. Tags are whatever you want them to be, so a person could make theirs as obvious as "burning man 2005" or really weird. And it's great for camera phones with a Net hookup--send photos from your phone to the personal address provided by the site, and you won't have to bother with cabling up and transferring, or with getting an account from your mobile service provider. Even better, basic accounts are free. Flickr is getting to be a big deal, and there are imitators. In fact, after the show was taped, Angela found herself spending quality time with a similar site, called YouTube, that's geared toward digital video.

Meanwhile, JotSpot lets you build a wiki, which is a kind of Web page that anybody can edit right there on the site. (A lot of folks are familiar with the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, which is written--and edited and rewritten--online and entirely by volunteers.) On JotSpot, one person builds the wiki, then invites some folks to log in. It's a simple, fast way to get a bunch of participants literally on the same page.

A basic JotSpot wiki--that's five users and five pages--is free. Once you set up an account, you invite people to visit the Web page, which acts a lot like a word-processing file. You type, you save, it's on the Web. Want to link something? Do it in CamelCase (which looks LikeThat). Want to change something? Change it--including someone else's words, though the page owner can track changes and see who's done what. Since the wiki owner gets to choose who can contribute, it's kind of on them to keep the riffraff out. Though the owner can see who's done what, so ... you know. (Moral: Know your riffraff.) To learn more about wikis, including how to set one up yourself, search Wikipedia for--what else?--wiki.