Thing #5: Flickr Mashups & Tools

Maybe it's the gloomy weather we've had this month, but I found myself drawn to the oranges when playing with the Flickr Color Pickr. Here's a screenshot of the brightest orange images I could find from the Urban Decay edition of this mashup:

In the original, you can click on each small boxed image to viewthe larger photo. All the ones I've looked at have been just stunning.

Another application I looked at was the Alphalearner, whose purpose is to "help children learn [the] English Alphabet through photos". The Alphalearner gives a taste of the terrific educational potential of social-networking sites like Flickr. It also illustrates some of the hazards of user-generated natural language tags. For examples of the latter, check out the photos displayed in Alphalearner's "D is for Donkey"--which seems to feature mostly human donkeys--and "Z is for Zebra" (there are some zebra-striped animals in there, but only a few actual zebras)