Dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world.
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.
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!
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.
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 description.
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.
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?
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).
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:
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.
Minuscule’s Cicada do Brazil is a cute CG cartoon starring cicadas. Cicada experts will note that the life cycle of cicadas is in no way accurately depicted, but is it "just a cartoon". Thanks to Phoebe for bringing the video to our attention.
[The video was taken down by YouTube.]
More Minuscule TV.
A few of you might have noticed the film crew following me around the Cicada Mania festival. They filmed me at the festival, as well as back in Jersey — a once in a life time (or maybe once in 17 years) experience. The news cast aired yesterday in Japan, but you might be able to see it on a show called “Morning Eye” in North America.
Here is the final news story:
Roy Troutman, Gerry Bunker and Joe Green also appear in the video.
Composite photo by Joyce Dinello, La Grange Park, IL. Contact Joyce at joycedinello@sbcglobal.net.
