www.liukuma.net

Sharing photos is a must-to-do these days. Personally I have not been that active on this area even though I am very aware of the means and software that relates to it. I was already familiar with all the photo editing software that this assignment did introduce as well as most of the services provided (Flickr, Google etc.). I use Picasa with my students to store and archive photos.
 
My students also use several other Finnish Flickr-type sites for publishing and for reference and to get feedback , for example these:
 
Aukea.net
    http://aukea.net/

Kuvablogi
    http://kuvablogi.com/

Haavekuva
    http://www.haavekuva.fi
   
Harhakuva
    http://www.harhakuva.org/
What strikes me is that copyright issues are not clearly stated in any of these Finnish sites! The idea with them is just to provide a place for commenting photos. This may be enough for some people, but to me it is just a waste of space. If you put something online and expect something for it, give it free!
 
Here are my contributions:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jjlightning/2409118839/

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Pielisjoki_channel_monument.jpg#Summary
 
I must apologize that I did not have time to shoot brand new photos. I did however have some couple of months old left over shots from an another assignment that I lately had. I decided to provide some information about one of the most famous places of my home town Joensuu, Ilosaari. I choose Ilosaari (The Joy Island) because this small island has such a colourful history, but nowadays very few of the young people are even aware where it is located! This is mainly due the famous rock festival Ilosaari-Rock that is held in July in Joensuu. The location of the festivals is nowhere near the real Ilosaari.
 
I searched for images of Joensuu and gladly found a lot. Flickr had most of them. Two major genres were represented most, landscapes and macros of flowers. All the images I chose to view were public domain. Some very nice scenery from Pielisjoki was found (which made my images look like below amateur shots. Well, next time I will wait for the right light and compose even...). But as expected, when I searched for Ilosaari I only found few shots from the right place. There was huge amount of missleading images from the rock festivals.
 
Wikimedia commons gave better results from a geographical point of view. The searhed word "Ilosaari" did result actual images of ilosaari but alas, only 3 of the total of 4. "Joensuu" did result a total of 15 photographs and 2 graphic images. Photos I did take a closer look were public but the graphics were published with some restrictions.
 
Flickr was easy to use, even PicLens worked with it! If you do not have PicLens for Firefox get it now! Wikimedia did how ever make it possible to add additional information to an image and this way make it more usable. Maybe the users that had provided material to Wikimedia had bothered to do the upload with more accuracy.
 
Thanks for a great assignment again!