Thing #6

I liked the mashups. I couldn't login to the website to make a librarian trading card, but I saw some including one for Micheal Stephens, who I saw at TLA in spring of 2009. The site I liked the best was Endless Interestingness. It displays the "Interesting" pictures from Flickr and lets you scroll through them in any direction. When I first looked at the word mashups, I thought that these applications would allow you to combine photos to create a new picture. But it seems a little more techy than that with the creation of a new application. This seems like it would take some knowledge of computer code and code writing ability, which isn't at all my forte. Some of the photos are really amazing! I could easily find too many to choose from to take and put on my blog!

As for applications of Flickr and mashups in my middle school library, I can see using Flickr to find photos to make book trailers. I think it would be fun for anyone to browse all of these images and find some that appeal to them. They are so creative! I think many of these images would expand a person's vision of the world. Many of the photos aren't what a person might first think of when they think of art. Many are of everyday people or things can be seen anywhere in the world. It would be easy to look at many of these objects and quickly move on, thinking that the object is just 'ordinary'. But the photos show that ordinary can be extraordinary and that it is worth stopping to study something, rather than just skimming over something and moving on to the next. It reminds me of a new book I saw within the past few months, The Black Book of Colors. It is a book in braile and challenges the reader to think about how to describe a color to someone without sight. Looking at all of these photos challenged me to think about what actually constitutes art and what makes something ordinary or extraordinary.