Thingz #6--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.