Thing 5, Thing 6, and Thing 7

Photo Sharing and Editing

I’ve never visited the Flickr page directly. I’ve always been directed to it from other sites, after clicking on images, etc. I knew that it was a popular photo hosting and sharing website, but had no idea as to its true size until the moment I clicked their front welcome page and saw that 5214 images had just been downloaded in the last minute!

For some reason, my instinct always leads me to wonder about security and privacy issues with websites and popular applications. Regarding Flickr, I was concerned mainly with ownership rights, etc. – do the photos you upload become the property of Flickr? After perusing the site and other resources discussing it (mainly Wikipedia – which definitely is not definitive, but will do…) I understand that the option to release an image under creative commons usage licenses or retaining all rights reserved is given to up-loaders. I was a bit relieved at this, for I doubt people would be too happy to learn that Flickr had sold their images to advertisers, etc, without permission! To continue with the security/privacy/ownership vein, I discovered that they also allow privacy settings that are rather strict, allowing only the uploader and select others to view the material, which, again, I liked to learn.

But I am a bit shrewd and tend to fall on the perimeter of online groups, and Flickr advertises itself not just as a photo sharing application, but as an online community that deals with more than photos. What I found to be truly interesting is that Flickr is known for being of the first to utilize and develop (promote, introduce, etc) the tag cloud. This is amazing, in the realm of information organization and online metadata. Searches can be much more efficient when tags are applied to a specific image. And this is when having an open community that actively participate in tagging images demonstrates the usefulness open source, creative commons material. This collaborative tagging, or folksonomy, is one of the neatest aspects of Flickr.

Mash-up
Research teams at the University of North Carolina and ETH-Zurich (Switzerland) created an absolutely thrilling mash-up using only photos made freely available on Flickr. To do so, the first task for the researchers was to discover all images with the tag 'Rome". Then, an image analysis tool was used to group photographs of the same object together. From these images, a rough 3D model of what the object would look like was created. In addition to being visually pleasing and interesting, models such as these can be useful. For instance, the most popular spots to take a photo become apparent when the angle each photo is analyzed. Therefore, impact on popular sites by tourists could be minimized if officials were able to direct them to the most used and popular vantage points. Read more about this awesome mash-up here.

Online Image Generator

This is an image that was quickly and easily created at the online image generator Image Chef. Such tools would come in handy if original artwork would be too difficult and time consuming to come up with. An image like this hear that reads: Love Your Library could be quickly used to promote an event by placing it on a website or a bookmark (as long as permission issues are understood and followed!) In addition, such an easy to use program could be used in an after-school program for youths - an introduction of sorts to both Internet tools and Internet created graphic art.