Week Three - Thing 5 - Exploring Flickr

I could probably get lost for hours on this site. Scratch that. I have already been lost for hours on it. I began by uploading a bunch of my own photos to the site. This felt really good because I feel I have been behind the eight ball as far as uploading and sharing photos. I have certainly tried it before on other sites but something has always gone wrong with it. Using Flickr seems really easy.

I feel a bit strange about everything being public, but I also get annoyed when someone sends me an email that says "view my photos" and when you go to whichever site they used, you need a password to see them. I have a friend who recently sent me a link to his Flickr photos that he took at a party that we had. His photos are public and this makes it SO much easier to access and view them.

As a matter of fact, one of the photos that he took from our roof-deck was picked up by a site called shmap http://www.schmap.com/boston/home/. I had never heard of this site but it is basically for getting information on various places fo traveling - sort of like an online guidebook. It's pretty cool and it sends out what I think are called "spyders" (if anybody knows about this, let me know) to search for photos of various places to add to the site. Anyway, the photo that the schmap site found is here. This is a church by our house. Unfortunately, though it looks lovely in this photo, it was gutted in a fire several years ago.

I especially enjoyed searching around Flickr for librarian photos and seeing how the tags can work within the photo itself (like this one). Unfortunately, though I've tried several times, I cannot get an image to show up on my blog, which is why I'm creating links instead.

Week Three - Thing 6 - Mashups

Woah! I never knew what mashups were before. This opens up a whole new world for me. Not that I will have much occassion to use mashups, but I definitely like to be educated on what is out there. The Montagr site is really fun. I know that my friend's Flickr page has photos of me so I put my name as a search in Montagr but there are way too many little pictures to be able to find my own face. It's neat that you can scroll over everything to see the pictures, though.

The Mappr site is neat, too. It is similar to the Schmap site where you are seeing photos from certain places. The difference is that Mappr solely uses images from Flickr and Schmap gets them from everywhere on the web.

It is just amazing to see all of the different avanuse one can travel down when using the internet and to see the imagination that goes into coming up with these mashup sites.