Love that!

Flickr has this thing called an API, which stands for Application Programming Interface. We have released ours publicly, and suggested that coders around the world might like to play with it.

Most of the apps that have been produced as a result of this are TOTALLY RAD.

One of the newest ones, written by ciro@tokyo, displays a graphical representation of the semantic network of a Flickr user's tags. This is a picture of my tags, and it's an uncanny representation of my life over the last year or so. (Although it's not uncanny at all really, because I lived it, photographed it, and then organised the pictures.)


As the entire universe is wondering about how the usefulness of this tagging schwag can be defined - you know you are - we often run into the hurdle of what to do with the unstated connection between similar words. Even though this is a map of my actual tags (and my life!!), it would be really interesting to blend that data with a thesaurus or something.

I also wonder what would happen to this sort of representation if the words were replaced with photos. Would we be able to navigate that? Would it make sense?

It's such a blast to see the API in the hands of some unfettered left-brain types. More!