1.3 Social media tools for sharing multimedia
There are a number of social media sites for uploading your photos, images, videos or presentations. These provide a web-based store for your material and also allow you to show and share your work if you wish. Sites usually allow ratings or comments if your work is made publicly available.
You can freely search or browse for videos on the video sharing site YouTube [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . However, if you create an account this will enable you to save your favourites as well as upload your own videos. Videos on standard YouTube accounts are less than 15 minutes long.
Flickr is an image and video sharing site, which aims to help organise your digital photos or videos, and you have control over who can see them. Viewers can also comment on them and add tags. The tags then make it easier to find items as they are all searchable. An account is needed to upload content. Publicly available content is also a searchable resource.
SlideShare is a site for sharing presentations and videos. You can find slide presentations on a wide range of topics. The content also has documents, videos and webinars.
YouTube, Flickr and SlideShare are not only good for sharing videos, images and slide presentations but also for storing them so that they are accessible from any computer, or mobile device, with an internet connection. You may have seen that other websites also contain links to YouTube videos.
Keeping your bookmarks, or favourites, in a web-based application like Diigo saves them being tied to one computer and they can also be shared. You might find useful bookmarks on other people’s lists with similar interests.
Copyright applies to online content just as much as it does to print-based materials. If you want to re-use any visual materials, such as photos and images, you will need to check the copyright or licence. We will discuss copyright later on in this session. If you refer to online material or information in your academic work then it needs appropriate citing and referencing too (see Section 8 of Session 5).