When the Curtains are Drawn, and the Fire Flickr's

Flickr is a tool that I've played with occasionally (once in school and once under my own momentum), but never could quite get in the habit of using frequently. This is mostly because I don't take a lot of photos; my wife is a much better photographer than I am, and I tend to just go with the pictures she takes. Also, most of my friends tend to use Picasa Web Albums for putting their pictures on the web instead, a Google tool that Blogger uses for image management, incidentally.

Nevertheless, I've always been intrigued by user tagging and folksonomies. Despite the dangers inherent in mob-rule classification, it tends to lead to some interesting results. So, I've repurposed some shots I took at Central Library and previously put on Flickr to share:



The outside of the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria.





The I Street entrance to the Central Library.





The entrance to the Carnegie section of the Central Library, which now leads to the Galleria meeting rooms.





This is the view towards J Street from the windows in my office. Pretty neat, I think.





This is the horse-hitch ring you will find outside the front of Central Library if you look carefully, a relic of bygone times.





This is the view into the Library Galleria from another set of windows in my office. Every time I look out this window, I imagine flying in little figure-eights through those sculptures. And that sounds a lot weirder when it's not just in my head. Hmm.

As for Flickr mashups, I remember seeing the cards generated by the Trading Card Maker somewhere before, and always thought they were cool. And here's where my inner nerd takes the stage for a second... ready? They're not trading cards. They are CCG (collecticble card game) cards, that are very distinctly modelled on Magic: The Gathering. And I think that's awesome. Yes, I still have boxes of my old Magic cards somewhere, so I get an extra kick out of Librarian cards that can block patrons with trample, tap target database artifacts, or get +1/+1 for each tapped caffeine card. I might just have to make one of those.

Anyway, one particularly cool third party site which works with Flickr that I have seen before is MOO, a printing company based in London that can create professional products with photos pulled directly from your Flickr photostream. Of particular note are the mini-cards, which I have seen used both for business cards and for general whimsy; I also like the stickers and the holiday cards.

I'm always pretty keen on things like MOO that take the user empowerment and self-publishing paradigms of Web 2.0 and turn them into demonstrable real-life products.