RSS (#4&5)

I discovered that you can set up a feed for images from Flickr - neat. Never thought of that before. My Bloglines feed lists now gives me updates on new photos added to the 'top 20 Northern Lights' group pix. In the process of locating aurora pix for RSS, I found searching by tags in Flickr frustrating. I got a lot of extraneous stuff (mostly multicolored jewelry) searching for various forms of aurora/ northernlights/ auroraborealis etc, even with advanced searching. I actually got better results searching full text - less jewelry, more auroras.
The documentation on Bloglines was useful. I tried the various ways of adding feeds; organized things into folders and generally explored.
Clearly this is the best way for managing updates in many cases...but there are a number of news sources I use which don't have feed options yet, so I still get a fair number of email news updates.

Photo fun: Flickr, Picasa (#6)

In the scalding heat today, I'm remembering a cool scene at the New York Botanical Garden's Chihuly exhibit on another hot day a couple of years ago. The boat floating on the cool water lily pool is full of beautiful glass sculptures, and in other corners of the pool there were reeds and water birds sculpured from green and blue glass.

I've enjoyed exploring Flickr, but I'm more inclined to use Picasa for managing my photos. Both products have lots of neat features. Several friends send links to Picasa every time they get back from a trip; it's great for sharing, with privacy features if you don't want to share with the world.
When I'm searching for photos, I use both products.