Saturday, April 4, 2009

Internet Activity #4

This final internet activity is about Tagging and Mashup.

Explore Flicker
I like Flicker so much, I know this website just a year ago, but it is so impressive that make me cannot ignore it. The Flicker group is huge, this huge photo fans group has built up amazing Flicker website and expanded the website all around the world. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. A tag cloud is just a set of related tags with corresponding weights. In flicker we can easily use tag cloud to find the relative photos. Of course, the people who update the photo has to tag the photo in term of words first.

Interesting Pictures I found: (click those links below)

Flickr Mashups

I like the Flicker Color Fields so much. When you click on a color, it shows every picture around it which make up by the same color. It's so impressive and give a visual attack when I saw it. Actually it is just links to the main Flicker website, which is very simple to do. The FlickerVision is another cool one. It's actually a mushup contains both Flicker and Google Map. It's very cool that you can see the world map and the photo in that place at the same time, and it's updated very quickly. The Retrievr is amazing. I still cannot figure out how it works. It's just so smart that can notice both color and shape that I draw and list all related photos. I got so much fun from it. In my eyes, those Flicker Mashups are a kind of expansion of Flicker, they can be many simple links to the main Flicker website, but they bring me more fun.
Google Map Mash-ups
Some google map mash-ups I found is listed as following:

- Qlock : Check the time in a world location
- Google Planimeter : Measure Area
- WeatherBonk : Check the weather anywhere
- Panoramio : Map your photos

There are so many mush-ups from google maps, I only listed these four pieces which I am interested in.
Online Generators
3 of my own masterpieces:



The online generators bring so much fun to me. I have tried both the Generator Blog and Big Huge Labs, and they are both very easy to use. What you need to do is typing text or adding a photo and select the style. But, the result you can get from, which is amazing, and very cool. I think the difference between The Generator Blog and Big Huge Labs is that they have different style. Generator Blog more focus on words or text insert in the existing picture. On the other hand, Big Huge Labs more focus on adding a picture in a existing format. I think I prefer the big huge labs because it helps to create cool and beautiful pictures. The online generator can encourage our creative ability and beautify our blogs.