The Fourth of July should be fun this year at Roy Troutman’s place. Check out the Clustering Cicada fireworks he found.

A Cicada wreath constructed in 2004 by Jenny Pate:

I think it’s awesome! Thanks to Jenny’s husband Bill for sharing.

Anyone else have an example of cicada arts & crafts to share?

Update: the ordering site for this book is now online.

Davy Shian has created a funny and educational comic book about cicadas, called Cicada: Exotic Views. Cicada: Exotic Views features 87 pages of comics and cicada photographs. I found it LOL funny, the illustration style is pretty neat, and the book itself is high-quality, not flimsy like the typical comic book. It is without a doubt an excellent and unique addition to the cicada books available today.

Ebay has been a good resource for cicada specimens and Asian artifacts over the years, but you’ll also find toys, fishing lures and other whimsical cicada-themed items.

My Massachusetts friends are going to experience the Brood XIV emergence this year, as will folks in parts of Maryland. When I think of either state, I think of seafood, and coincidentally some folks say cicadas taste like shrimp, and the nymphs do look like something that crawled from the ocean. So what’s my point: well, I was wondering if anyone has ever tried cicadas with savory Old Bay Seasoning. Hmmm?

I originally posted this article last year, but the information is still good.

A lot has changed since I started this site in 1996, including the web — back then websites where static pages with a couple of images and links, and only geeks like myself knew how to make them.

Now there are lots of web sites where YOU can share your cicada photos and video. Now you can write about your cicada discoveries on a blog, read other cicada blogs, or share cool cicada web sites with the world using bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us. The web is now all about you (and the cicadas you find). The power is in your hands: start sharing your cicadas!

Share Your Cicada Photos:

Flickr: Flickr is a web site where you can post and share your digital photos. You can also connect with other photographers and people with similar interests. It’s a fun site. When you post your cicada photos, don’t forget to tag them with tags like “cicada”, “broodxiv“, “Magicicada”, “17year”, “periodical”, etc. Don’t forget to include geographic information in the descriptions.

Panoramio: Panoramio is a photo sharing site like Flickr, but it places your photos in Google Maps, which is really cool.

As of 2008 Flickr lets you upload videos too.

Share Your Cicada Video:

YouTube: You’ve heard of YouTube, haven’t you? It’s a great site where you can upload your videos and share them with the world. Like Flickr, don’t forget to tag your cicada video with cool tags like “17year”, “cicadas”, “broodxiv”, and include geographic information in the decscription.

As an example, here’s a clip from the Return of the 17-year Cicadas video:

Revver: Is a lot like YouTube, but you can earn money from the advertisements it displays after your video plays. How cool is that? Share some cool cicada video, and make some scratch at the same time.

Others: MySpace videos, Veoh, Metacafe (has a family filter), Google Video (upload longer videos than with YouTube), Dailymotion, Yahoo Video (has SafeSearch) etc. Again the important thing is to look for a service that will allow to to send links to your videos and embed them in web pages.

Blog Your Cicada Stories:

You have a Blog, don’t you? If you don’t, it’s never too late to start! Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Typepad, and of course MySpace. Best of all, they’re free to use! So why not?

Reading & Searching Blogs:

The homepage of this site is a blog — if you notice, it’s composed of multiple posts about cicadas. Blogs aren’t like other websites, because they’re updated frequently and they’re composed of a series of posts. This series of post is known as a feed, which is available as both an xml file and the webpage you’re reading (too technical, I know…). Blog Search Engines are like regular search engines, but they’re adapted specifically to search blogs.
Blog Readers let you subscribe to blog feeds — subscribe to enough feeds and you can build your own virtual newspaper made up of the stories and news you care about (like cicadas).

• Google Reader is a blog feed reader.
• My Yahoo! has blog feed reader.
• Bloglines is a blog feed reader, and my personal favorite.
• News Gator is a blog feed reader.
• My MSN has blog feed reader.
• My AOL has blog feed reader.
• Windows Live has blog feed reader.
• Technorati is a blog search engine.
• Google Blog Search is a blog search engine.

Sharing the sites, video and images you find on the web:

Now, you’ve found a cool cicada website — you want to share it, and you want to remember it.

del.icio.us is my favorite bookmarking site. I can bookmark sites at work and then check them out later on my home computer, or at a friend’s house.

Digg is a super-popular forum where you can share and vote on (digg/bury) links. I read it every day.

StumbleUpon is a cool site and toolbar for your web browser. The toolbar will suggest cool sites for you to try. I’ve “stumbled upon” many cool sites using StumbleUpon.

More to explore: Furl, ma.gnolia, Newsvine, reddit, Simpy, Spurl, Yahoo MyWeb, Google bookmarks, Fark…

You don’t have to use these resources for just cicadas, but I’d be disappointed if you didn’t use them at all.

Odds and Ends:

The Rock is Back: Filmmaker David “The Rock Nelson” is currently working on editing his latest series, “The Killer Cicadas,” and its sequel “Attack of the Giant Cicadas,” for which he caught 500 cicadas and ate some of them.

Nanotech News: Cicadas wings are being used as the inspiration for building better solar technology. (thanks Roy)

Peng Jiang, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, is drawing inspiration from the eyes of moths and the wings of cicadas to create unusual new anti-reflective and water-repellant coatings — coatings that appear to have potential to make solar cells both more efficient and self-cleaning. Windows in cars and homes, computer screens and other consumer products also could improve thanks to the super-transparent coatings.

Russian fishing lure company www.apico-fish.ru used one of Roy Troutman’s cicada photos for a recent ad for cicada themed lures.

‘Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada, not only a corn-crake. Do you know the legend about cicadas?
They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems
they wanted to.’

… from author John Berger.

Thanks to Laura Imbruglia for the quote. Her new album Laura Imbruglia is in heavy rotation in my stereo.

The Discovery Store has a Spark ™ Talking Bug Identifier. I have no idea if I identifies cicadas in general (I imagine it does), or individual species of cicadas. Still it’s cool enough to mention.

Here’s some cicada videos Phoebe found on YouTube:

cicada singing, then crawling:

cicada singing, good side view:

Cicada mystery movement: What are they up to?

And from Japan セミの生態: cicadas mating: