flickr mashups

as i've mentioned before, surfing the waters of web 2.0 mash-ups can be an exercise in "why am i doing this?"  many of the applications that are being put foward through mash-ups, tagging and search capabilities are simply useless.  but here are three flickr mash-ups that are just too cool to ignore.

color pickr and metascope

krazydad is one of those brilliant and creative minds.  he combines his programming ability with advanced mathematics and web 2.0 capabilites to produce some beautiful applications that simply blow you away. colr pickr lets you choose a color - any color in the spectrum - and then it searches flickr's publicly available photos for photos whose dominant color is the one you picked and renders a dozen or so for you to choose from!  most of the time in less than a second. one click and you are at the photo's page on flickr.  metascope is also mindboggling in its simplicity and beauty. The two images you see are images i saved while playing with megacope.  the one on the left was formed with images of snowflakes and the one on the right was created with images of frank lloyd write stained-glass windows.  while probably technically not totally web 2.0, i love it.   krazydad has even saved a couple dozen images from metascope as screensavers you can download for free.  my favorite is made up of m c escher drawings! 

flash and flickr

but occassionally you bump into a application like flickr related tag browser v1.1.  i've already concluded that this application is going to be my favorite time waster for the foreseeable future.

it's impossible for it to be simpler.   enter a word and it not only brings up all the photos in flickr that have that word as a tag, it also provides links to 40 or so related collections based upon tags that also appeared with the tag you entered.  try anything.  typing in my hometown (Sandusky) produced 1863 photos.  not too bad for a town of 20,000 people!