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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!

For this week’s theme of “blur” I chose this photo taken on the Las Vegas strip last month during CES.

technorati tags: photo friday, blur, las vegas, photo, meme

Like the title says, just type in something (your name, your web address, a small phrase) and this great little online tool will take what you typed in and fetch pictures from Flickr for each letter.

Give it a try — it’s a very cool Flickr applet!

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This week’s Photo Friday theme is “Vanity.” My selection? My fastest vice, taken on a bluff over Lake Elsinore at sunrise.

Vanity. I suppose I could’ve used a picture of myself (or just pointed people to the image in my blog’s header), but that would’ve been too obvious. What distinguishes vanity from pride? As I’ve already discovered, pride is considered the most serious of the seven deadly sins. Is vanity synonomous with pride?

Novelist Jane Austin suggested, “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.”

I think I’ll take a drive and reflect on that.

This Friday’s theme is pink. A quick search turned up this photo of my daughter’s pink Chuck Taylors. Perfecto!

Taken on Christmas Eve, 2004. True, it is a little blurry, but she couldn’t keep still (and I wouldn’t use a flash). I liked the effect the movement gave the image. You can click the image to see a larger version.

Have you posted to Photo Friday yet?

This week’s Photo Friday theme is panorama. I enjoy creating panoramas and have posted a few on Flickr. But for this theme, I thought it would be fun to share the very panorama I used to create the header image you see in my blog.

I photographed this sunrise over Lake Elsinore on my drive to work about a year ago. I didn’t use a tripod, just eyeballing it with my 3Mp digital camera (the very one I lost at Versailles last year) and stitching it together with Photovista Panorama. Most people who see it assume it’s a coastal view, but actually it’s looking east over Lake Elsinore, from a lookout point on Ortega Highway. The clouds are hanging low over the lake, and the lights you see on the right side are the headlights of my fellow commuters, snaking their way through the Cleveland National Forest to work in Orange County.

Most people don’t bother to stop and soak in the view. What a shame.

The theme for the final Photo Friday of 2005 is, most appropriately, the Best of 2005. For that, I chose this shot of Venus d’Arles at the Louvre.

The theme for this week’s Photo Friday is “depth of field.” This is a technique I’m still getting a handle on with the new Nikon digital camera, and I don’t have any good shots available. So I grabbed the camera and took a few, and this is the result.

If you haven’t already done so, check out Photo Friday. It’s a fun, weekly meme.

For Photo Friday — an interesting photo site with a new theme posted every Friday.

Sometimes you stumble across something that makes you go “huh?” Perusing the “100th most viewed” discussion on Flickr I ran across this appalling pet. I’m sorry, but this cat is not appealing. In fact, it’s horrifying. I’m sure it’s rare and expensive and it may be very sweet, but I’m thankful it’s not mine!