Friday, October 5, 2007

Roussel's first "librarian trading card"

How do you like it? (btw, that's not my face - though I may look like that in a few years, haha. That is the Professor from "Gilligan's Island" as an old man during a dream sequence). The trading card program zeroed in on his face for some reason.

Mashup Madness Spectacular!

Well, last week I was introduced to the joys of Flickr. Although I had been to that site to look at people's pictures before, this was the first time I had signed up to use it myself. Hopefully I will continue to do so. Then I explored mashups (web application hybrids). Many of them used Flickr images in some way, but others used different applications altogether. It is amazing what they can do with these things, in ways that were never intended or envisioned by their creators. I'm sure some mashups arose as complete accidents. Although many of them are just for fun, I know many useful ones have been created for business applications.

I looked for mappr. com, but that site appears to have vanished. Also, I went to that "Flickr Montagr" page but it doesn't seem to function for me. Hmm. I was successful, however, in creating several trading cards and my very own "Librarian Trading Card." It is just a practice one, based on the first blog from this page. I will try to post it to this page in my next entry, as I don't want it to erase my blog entry like it did a few hours ago.

I found several fascinating mashups, including some from Jim Bumgardner's site: http://www.krazydad.com/colrpickr/ He has created some memorable ones, but my favorite so far is called "SF Cover Explorer" and is found here: http://www.coverpop.com/pop/visco/ It looks like a huge pile of old pulp magazines, and if you hover over one of them, it rises up so you can see it clearly, and tells you who the cover artist is and gives info on that magazine. If you click on the picture, it will take you to the site "Visco - The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art" at http://www.sfcovers.net/ where you can learn all about that magazine. (I recently bought some cool old pulp magazines, including "Thrilling Wonder Stories" and "Astounding" from the 1920's & 30's).

Another one I liked was Stick Figures in Peril: http://www.coverpop.com/pop/flickr_stickfigures/ check it out and enjoy!