Thing #2 (again), Flickr Mashups

Well, I tried four Flickr mashups this week.

It involved first finding out what a mashup is. In this case, what a mashup is is a program that takes Flickr and does something else with the pictures and tags. I look at it as like an overhead with a transparency on the bottom called Flickr and one lying over it which is the mashup. It creates something new.

1) Retrievr: What you do here is draw a picture (or supply the website with a picture, which I didn't do) and Retrievr tries to find pictures to match what you drew. I think this is more fun that useful. I got lots of pictures with the color scheme that I drew in. I got lots of pretty results. But I didn't get lots of pertinent results. You also can't draw fine lines which I think is a drawback.

2) Spell with Flickr: I didn't spend too much time with this one. You enter a word and the mashup takes each letter and inserts a picture of the letter from Flickr. Fun for kidnappers, I call it.

3) Tagnautica: You enter a word/tag, and the program creates a circle of tags and pictures related to your tag. So "Hello Kitty" resulted in related tags like pink and toy and a bunch more. It was mesmerizing. I had so much fun doing this until I found out you can't click on the resulting tags and find more pictures with that tag.

4) Captionr!: I thought this one would be so much fun and I was disappointed. The pictures I chose always got turned sideways on the screen even though they were right side up in Flickr. Then when I tried to put in the caption, I couldn't turn the bubble to orient the same way as the picture. I just couldn't figure it out, so I gave up.

Thing #2 Flickr

I signed up for a Flickr account today and joined some groups. Signing up was way easy. So was joining the groups. (They have groups for everything!) I think the purpose is so I can post to the discussions and so I can post pictures to the group.

I think I will borrow my husband's digital camera and take some pictures and upload them. Just to see what it's like.

What I really enjoyed was looking at the tags and exploring pictures people took that way.

Next I need to look at mashups. I did a google search to find out what are mashups and I found a site which lists the 10 best Flickr mashups. What it looks like from the article is that programmers create some sort of toy or useful program for Flickr.

To Begin

I am a librarian learning Web 2.0 programs, by participating in a program called 23 Things. My first assignment is to set up a blog and post something.

Setting up this blog was quite easy. I have a gmail account and with that and a little more info, I was in! I also have a Live Journal account. If you go to library_lynn.livejournal.com you'll see books I've read and reviewed over a few years.

My second assignment is to explore Flickr.