Flickr - #5 #6 - week 3

Glory be, I've been to Flickr and survived the experience.

Can't say it's for me, but I appreciate the concept a lot more than I did the vent concepts otherwise known as MySpace et al. I really like the have it stored somewhere else, and everyone go there to see it, vis a vis emailing huge amounts of data all over. Is this the electronic world's equivalent of the physical world's reduce-reuse-recyle behaviour writ large? Why yes, I think it is.

Curious though, how it's all made so easy... No nuts and bolts, everything happens in the background. Speaking of extensions of real world concepts into the e-world. I read a book the other day about the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line (and a whole lot more, but...) and it struck me how little I know about the everyday things around me. What exactly is a sextant, how does it work, etc was how it started...

So today I ended up spending 40 minutes reading about the programming and technology concepts that led us to the kind of things taken so for granted by e-world savvy (ie not me) people - blogging, Flickr et al being a tiny portion of same. Fascinating, but.... 10 lifetimes wouldn't be enough to give a quick once over to knowing more about the interesting things I've *already* come across. The world's too big, too complex, too too, for a generalist...

The photomontage from flickr was the only one of the various bits and pieces on mashups that really caught my imagination, although I did enjoy learning what they were, where they came from (as it were!) and how they are used. I guess the intellectual component rather than the visual appeals...