My friends know that I love Flickr. Even though I could create and host my own photo blog, I find Flickr engaging, fascinating, and a wonderful place for exploration. Flickr of course was one of the first Web 2.0 sites to popularize the concept of folksonomy tagging. The social strengths of Flickr with it’s contacts, friends and family model, the commenting capabilities, and user-created groups open Flickr up for inventive uses.
Of course Flickr has always been super-useful for collecting photos from events (like UXWEEK), but I ran across another innovative example today on the Drupal website. The Drupal team asked users to upload screen shots, then annotate them with notes. (As you move your cursor over the images, you’ll see the user notes). Yet another cool example of leveraging simple, readily available and free technology and integrating it within a work process. Nice.
Of course, most people are more interested in just pure fun. I’ve had my share of that. Two of the groups that I’ve been involved in on Flickr that were pure fun were the DILO (Day in the Life Of) and Squared Circle groups, both of which ended up producing posters in a sort of collaborative art experiment — immortalizing some really bad photographs of mine. Still, they remain a great way to have fun with Flickr.
Want more Flickr fun? The very best website for fun Flickr goodies is Flagrant Disregard’s Flickr Toys. They’ve got tons of little goodies to do things like make your own calendars, motivational posters, fake magazine covers and baseball cards, to useful tools like the profile gadget shown at the left.
You’ve got a digital camera. Get a Flickr account. Play with some toys. Be inventive. And have fun!
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