What is… Flavors.me?

Anyone who’s been paying attention has seen the dearth of writing going on here lately. I’ve been experimenting with lifestream focused themes that let me feed the beast that is this blog in an automated, sound bite fashion using feeds from the various services I use on a regular basis; Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Netflix, YouTube, etc..

And the lifestream is precisely where Flavors.me excels. As they describe themselves, “Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet.”

I read (briefly) about Flavors.me in one of the feeds that I scan, but when I saw Bryan Harney tweeted about Flavor.me, I decided to check it out.

The service very simply and elegantly does what it sets out to do — creating a portal to your presence on various social networks. You can upload a background, tweak the colors and fonts and configure which services you want to connect to and share. There’s no direct interactivity, but in my view, that’s a good thing. If someone wants to comment on your Flickr photostream or retweet that clever quote, they can click through to the source service and do it there.

The best way to “get” Flavors.me is to poke around and try it, but if you’re timid about sharing, Flavors.me creator Jack Zerby has posted a terrific video overview.

Now go check out my Flavors.me site, and then give it a try!

Flump lets you batch download Flickr photos

Flump screenshot

Flump is an Adobe AIR application that lets you download all the public photos from any Flickr user. Written by a couple of Adobe employees — Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers — Flump makes it easy to backup your photos for archival purposes — useful if Flickr ever looses your stuff.

Personally, I have grown to trust Flickr for all my photos, and often I don’t even bother keeping local copies. This trust in “the cloud” sometimes worries me, especially when I hear the horror stories of people losing their Gmail inbox or worse. Flump fills the gap and makes it easy to create a nice clean backup to my local drive, where I can then burn it to DVD and file it away.

You can get Flump now at Google Code.

Thanks to Amit for the tip.

Spell with Flickr

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.

jack of spadesE\F (with rivets)
scrabble hESTeR

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

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Site of the Day

Today’s nugget is Frappr, a mash-up of Google Maps and Flickr-like photo sharing. It looks like a neat way for groups to share a bit about where they’re from. Check it out — I’ve created a group for BigBlueBall.

Geotags, FlickrFly and Google Earth

Technology really is pretty cool.

I’ve extolled the virtues of Flickr and Google Earth before, but now a guy by the name of Rob Roy has linked the two together with FlickrFly. FlickrFly adds a nifty little “Fly to this location” link to your properly geotagged photo. Clicking the link (assuming you’ve installed Google Earth), will take you around the globe and zoom you in on that spot on the big blue ball we live on.

If you’d like to check it out, grab a free copy of Google Earth and click one of the “Fly to…” links to see Sacre Coeur, Place Vendome, Thousand Island Lake in the Minarets (really cool with terrain turned on), or the Golden Gate bridge.

Adding Geotags
If you use Flickr (and why shouldn’t you… it’s free!), it’s now even easier to add geotags to your photos. There’s a new Greasemonkey script for Firefox called GMiF that puts the power of Google Maps right into Flickr. Makes it really, really easy to point-and-click to tag your photos with the correct latitude and longitude information.

For more on geotagging, check out the Geotagging Flickr group.

Flickr Oddities

Ugly catSometimes 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!