More flickr fun: mashups and whatnot

For Learning 2.0 week 3 (which was last week!)

Perhaps I'm just feeling cynical because today is my birthday and I have begun the inexorable downhill slide to 40, but most flickr mashups just don't give me the warm fuzzies. Some of them are pretty entertaining, like FlickrSudoku, Spell with Flickr, and the Color Pickr, but most of the hundreds listed on the Flickr Mashups page I have a hard time finding a use for.

To me, the most useful flickr mashup sites are still the classics--the ones written by John "Flagrant Disregard" Watson. He is one of those hard-to-find tech-geek guys who are great writers with a lot of heart. This comes through in his blog, his flickr stream, and in the care with which he creates his "flickr toys." The ones I use again and again are the Mosaic Maker, Scout, and Flickr DNA, but I have also used the Badge Maker, the Magazine Cover generator, the Motivational Poster generator, the Hockneyizer (mine), Captioner, Billboard maker, and the Profile Widget. I also notice he has a lolcat generator!

New (to me) Flickr mashups I tried out for this assignment:

Stained Glass Collage
Originally uploaded by cindiann

Yawn. I think that photographers who don't use as tight a crop as I typically do might find this useful. I don't. Perhaps I just chose poorly. I don't really consider this a mashup, because it's only possible to create collages of your own photos, that you have to upload to the stainedglasscollage website. If I could enter a tag and have it create a collage from the most interesting (Creative Commons-licensed, of course!) photos matching that tag, this would be more, useful to me. C-

My Flickrgraph
Originally uploaded by cindiann

So. This is a graph from flickrgraph showing me, a few of my friends and several friends-of-friends. OK. What now? It never loads the buddy icons in place of those gray smileys, and it seems to choose which contacts to display completely at random, choosing to ignore the contacts I hold most dear (i.e., friends). Perhaps it can't see that information? Bah humbug. B+


I also looked into the Flickr in SecondLife "mashup," which allows one to display flickr images based on a tag or user name that you feed to an object in SecondLife, but I couldn't figure it out, and I'm not going to hang out in SL for the creator to log in so I can ask him about it.