Flickr and YouTube: You're a star! I'm a star! We're all STARS!

Now would be the appropriate time to discuss the exhibitionist and voyeur that lives inside us all. But I'm not going to because I think I made that speech somewhere back in the excessively long post about Wikipedia. Ha! Fooled you, didn't I, hmmm?

As I believe I've confessed previously, anytime I encounter a new technology that I like, I go through a period of "enthusiastic use." Some might also refer to this as addiction, abuse, misuse, overuse...

When I first discovered YouTube, this meant that I was occasionally found watching concert videos of Pearl Jam at 2am. While that phase has now passed, I still use YouTube primarily for the same sort of entertainment purposes. I have infrequently used it to find "how-to" videos to assist my resident handy-man in his endeavours to do such things as finding the correct method of removing the uncooperative bathtub drain stopper.

I have never felt the need to create a YouTube account. I have not subscribed to any channels. I'm not a big fan of the video links I'm sometimes sent of people's cats flushing the toilet, their dogs singing "Silent Night," or their kids reciting all the U.S. presidents in reverse chronological order. And I have never felt compelled to upload any of my own videos - those 15 second masterpieces containing riveting footage of my husband sitting on the beach in the fog.

Now, while Flickr looks like an easy enough site to use to edit and share photos, the fact is that I already do that someplace else. I do the editing part on my computer at home using the software that came with my camera. And I do the sharing part by creating photo albums on Facebook. I find this arrangement very convenient as most of the friends and family that would be interested in my photos already use Facebook, and those who don't can still view my photos when I send them a link to the album.

This is in keeping with the New Year's resolution I've just made, despite the fact that it's mid-May: 

To prevent myself from being completely overwhelmed by technology and crawling into a tiny dark crack in the earth where I can ignore it all, I will strive to use the minimum number of technologies, websites, portable electronic devices as possible to do what I need to in order to maintain contact with friends and family, keep up with my job, and not feel like a complete Luddite.