Wow, what a fun way to waste time. If you look below this post, you will find the two mashups I added to my blog. The first is a mini version of the Fastr game. The software randomly supplies a public photo from Flickr, and you get to guess the "tag" or keyword that describes it. The second is spelling with Flickr -- books seemed to be a very appropriate word that was short enough to fit all in one line on the screen.
I tried all of the different mashups listed in the Webmonkey article. The only one I had trouble using was Flickrball. (I may have been too impatient to wait for everything to load properly). I found it was much more difficult to keep track of pictures (as opposed to numbers) while doing a Sudoku puzzle but much more fun to be able to change the photos while solving without losing your place. Retrievr reminded me of why I hate playing Pictionary ... obviously my drawing skills are not stellar because the photos pulled up matched my intents only in the color I chose. The most interesting to me was Tagnautica. Some of the keywords with the largest nodes were not words that I would have associated with my original keyword; for example, "cats" linked to "canon". How are the 100 "matches" selected? I loved the visual progression of using the site though; it reminded me of stringing beads on a necklace.
I can see lots of applications for graphic design in library use ... especially with the tools listed at the Big Huge Labs link. With staff time and enough available computers, I can see middle school/teen programming opportunities too. I imagine many of that age group can use these sorts of tools without even thinking twice, but do all of them have the opportunity/resources to try them on their own.
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