Cybersurf

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf – the very first edition of double oh seven. I am your Cyberhost – Steven Lang with some tip on how to navigate through the YOU generation.

Just over a year ago – in December 2005 – Cybersurf did a review of the Maropeng, Sterkfontein Caves and Cradle of Humankind sites. Broadly speaking we said yes, they we not bad for starters – but needed some work.

Last weekend I decided to take my family to the caves, but couldn’t quite remember how to get there so I checked out the site on the net. At the Sterkfontein hyphen caves dot co dot za site there is some basic information about the caves and about Dr Robert Broom. There are some not very impressive photographs, nothing about the shiny new museum, and a tiny little map showing ants how to get there.

The map is really the problem – how do you expect visitors to flock to the caves – if you can’t get there?

The Maropeng site is more modern looking and it does have a downloadable PDF map that also shows you how to get to Sterkfontein.

The Sterkfontein museum facility is great, the staff are friendly and our tour guide Wez-Lee was entertaining and informative.

Of course once you get home, you want to share your digital pictures with friends and family.

There are many web sites that allow you to post pictures on the web for free. They allow you to share your pictures with aunty in Australia, Nanna in New York and Uncle in Akron.

However, there are two really big players that enjoy a huge market share. PICASA is directly linked to the Empire of Google and FLICKR – spelt without an “E” is hooked up with Yahoo.

Both are very good, both require you to download some software, and both allow you to post directly to your Blog - but then that is where the similarity stops

I have been using FLICKR for about two years now, and only just began using PICASA this year. I fully intend using both until one of them shows itself to be convincingly superior to the other.

If you download your phone camera pictures to your PC and want to quickly upload to the internet, then I believe it is easier to use FLICKR. You can simply go to your windows explorer, right-click on the relevant file and then upload directly.

When you initially download the PICASA software it spends quite a long time cataloguing all pictures on your machine. I believe it goes for all files that end in the usual graphic extensions such as BMP, JPG and GIF.

This might seem a little intrusive, but it does find lots of pictures that you had completely forgotten about it some old files.

The interface allows some basic manipulation of your images and you can compiles albums which you can either keep on your machine or post to the internet for a Web Album.

And so we wrap up today’s edition of Cybersurf. I will put the script and some links up on the Cybersurf Blog which you will find at Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com. One more time Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com.

Tune in next week for more on the best of the web.