Running From the Camera

by Kelly on October 16th, 2007

I’m in the process of organizing all my pictures into albums. I think I will be in the process of doing this forever because I have so many pictures and they are completely disorganized by year and event. As I’m looking through all my old pictures I realize how many I have of me posed, smiling for the camera. Some pictures I can’t even tell where I was except for who was with me. I especially like the pictures of me hugging all my friends smiling for the camera, faintly in the background I see the Builtmore Estate, clearly a side note of this trip with my friends. Even on my trip to Italy I’m surprised by how few pictures I have of landmarks that I saw, and instead I am smiling ear to ear sitting at dinner with my best friend…side note of the picture, our leftover food. At least I will remember that I had fun on all these trips, right? Alot of families also take pictures using the auto function of the camera and the pictures end up looking a little candid. The blogger didn’t even bother turning around for the picutre in Runningfromcamera.blogspot.com. The focus of the blog is for the blogger to turn on the self-timer for 2 seconds, push the button, and try to get as far away from the camera as he can. The pictures turn out pretty clearly and are pretty interesting. The shot that I posted is from Singel, Amsterdam, but he has a lot of locations posted on his blog. Maybe I should start running from my camera so that I will focus more on my destinations and less on smiling in every picture.

Good Reads

by Kelly on October 4th, 2007

Social networking sites seem to be taking over for a youthful audience that eagerly awaits the next new feature or application. Although Myspace and Facebook have a wide variety of users, just as quickly as users flock to the new application they are also distracted by other new social networking websites. I stumbled onto Good Reads while looking up a book on amazon. Like all social networking sites, Good Reads allows you to invite friends, screen potential friends, keep tabs on friends, and create a personalized profile to show everyone that you are very hip and cool. While other sites are not particularly thematic or the themes seem like an after thought, Good Reads is very specific that the site helps you learn about books. Readers list and review books that they have read and organize their books into groups. You can browse the books your friends have read and make suggestions on books that may interest another reader. Books are ranked on a 5 point scale so that users can find out how people felt about a particular book. The sign up process doesn’t take long at all and as I was browsing the website reading reviews it was easy to click on a book that it would take me directly to amazon to buy.