• the amount of crap a six person family collects over 40 years astounds;
• reviewing 40 years of memories is an amazing thing.

My father watches as I sit among photos. “Isn’t there a way to just digitize these,” he finally asks, “and give everyone a way to browse through them?”

I’ll sidestep many things to get to an answer. Among them, scanning and digitizing, external hard drives for back up, naming conventions, tagging strategies, creating physical books, privacy issues and a variety of Web services that make much of that possible.

We’ll look at those particulars another day. Today, as I sit among photos, I offer two services that help you share. The first, I think, is mostly unknown. It’s called Issuu and we can use it to create a flippy book  that behaves more or less like what you see here.

Issuu is basically a PDF reader on steroids. That is, if you upload a PDF to the service, it converts it to Flash and creates something along the lines of what you see above. If you mouse over the center of the of image you’ll be presented with a “full screen” option. This will give you a better sense of what Issuu can do and how it behaves.

I’m testing it out here with photos from a project I once did called Subway.

Overall layout is handled with Apple’s iPhoto. Basically, if you have a Mac you can create “books” with your photos, so I did. Then I “printed” the book as a PDF, uploaded it and what you see above is the result. Pretty cool.

While having a Mac is very nice you don’t need anything of the sort to accomplish this. PowerPoint lets you create a nicely designed photo show. So too Open Office and Neo Office, free and open source alternatives to the Microsoft suite of office applications. The key is exporting your final creation as a PDF. Issuu takes care of the rest.

The service works on a freemium business model, meaning that you can create what you want for free if you don’t mind ad support. Creating ad free documents will cost you about $19 a month.

By comparison, here’s what Flickr does with the same content.

The comparison here is a little bit apples and robots though because Flickr only shows images we’ve uploaded. The service doesn’t allow for a predetermined, PDF layout.

This isn’t a bad thing. Instead, it’s simply a neutral observation that unlike Issuu, Flickr slide shows deal strictly with the photos that are uploaded to it.

When choosing between such services, decide how much work you’re willing to do on our own, and how much you’d like done for you.

Results will reflect back upon you either way. Fortunately, both solutions score high on any objective awesome scale and families tend to be generous critics.

This fall I’ll be teaching at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. This will be very different from what I’ve done the past few years at the Graduate School of Journalism and I’m excited about the opportunity.

For starters, the semester-long course lets me deep think about a variety of issues. In particular, how NGO’s can leverage the Internets, how commercial and governmental restrictions are limiting the Tubes and how the Interweb really functions as a small world network; and what that might mean for all of us who communicate through it.

I’m calling the course Tubes, Code and Content and will be both creating and curating content around it over the next few months. Some of it is below. It’s thoughts and podcasts heavily influenced by the BBC and NPR with some FLOSS thrown in for good measure. I’ll make sure these are better organized as we move into the future but the audio files below include the themes I believe important in this day and age.

• Lawrence Lessig on Culture
• One Laptop Overview
• Clay Shirky on Social Netkworks
• Africa Connectivity
• Africa and Google Maps
• Africa and Microsoft vs Open Source Solutions
• Tibet: Someone’s hacking their computers
• Chinese Web censorship.
• France creates laws to ban sharing information
• France Law comes into being

I’m currently considering different platforms to present the course on. Current candidates include Drupal, Elgg, BuddyPress/WPMU and Pligg.

I don’t choose lightly. I believe the platform choice is as important as the actual content that ends up on it. That is, what students can actually do on the platform is as important as what content they can actually contribute to the project. Or put another way, functionality, collaboration and content creation are all one and the same.

When and as I create the course Web site, these presentations will all be modified. Hopefully, they’ll be modified with what we as a collective are continuously creating and producing.

That said, I’d like to hear what you’re thinking about and who you’re listening to as you consider your ideas about how the internet can best be used as a distribution platform and communications medium.

Either way, or anyway, we can do better than what has previously or currently occurred. Let’s connect and try. And let’s communicate and demonstrate a better path forward.