Fun with Flickr

Flickr is a very cool photo-hosting website. I have a few pictures uploaded there, and the little mosaic at the bottom of the sidebar is courtesy of them. I found a very interesting article about Flickr mashups. It's kind of complicated to explain what a mashup does, but basically, techie nerds talented people have found lots of fun ways to manipulate the features of Flickr into new tools and games. My favorite is this time-wastr called Fastr (do you notice a pattern here--e's better start looking for new work!).

Users on Flickr can label every photo with limitless tags. For instance, this picture


could be tagged as Marines, medal, eagle, globe, anchor, military, etc. The game shows you nine pictures, one at a time, and you try to guess the tag they have in common. You are pitted against a couple dozen fellow time-wastrs and the quickr you guess the right tag, the more points you get. The competitive side of me got stuck playing for 20 minutes or so until I won three rounds in a row. It's really fun--strangely addictive--and you get to see a lot of neat photos. Which is how I stumbled upon this Flickr album--if you like photography, go there and select "view slide show in new window" for a beautiful little show. It's a contest so all the entries are everyone's self-selected best shots.