splashr BETA is a kewl tool for presenting tagged flickr photos.
you can customize which photos you want displayed based on their tag(s) and whether you want everybody’s photos or just your own. then the real fun begins — choose from many different presentation layouts — here are a few:
- reflector film strip of my trees pics [press play >>]
- interactive desktop of my india pics [press play >>]
- web gallery mosaic of my france, london, scotland pics
- slideshow of everybody’s sky pics
a fun way to create on-the-fly photo galleries of flickr photos!
(and just for funsies i upgraded my flickr account to flickr 
last month!)
while driving (passengering) through the maze of GTA, particularly mississauga, i was able to connect to random unsecure wireless networks from houses & apartments in the periphery… so i checked my e-mail while stuck at a rather lengthy traffic light.
it is only a matter of time before wireless will permeate our landscape, and i will be able to do some drive-by-blogging!
for an interesting 3-D visual representation of relationships between words in the english language, check out ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus — once i used up my free searches, i subscribed to an annual subscription.
looking up a word creates an interactive visual map with your word in the center of the display, connected to related words and meanings
here is my thinkmap for the word cool — searched in free association mode which gives the “most extreme visual thesaurus experience!”
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the visual thesaurus also supports several other languages in beta, including french — here is my search for froid:
connections between similar terms are drawn with dashed+solid lines and colour-coded dots indicate whether the related terms are nouns, verbs, adverbs, or adjectives. there are many settings to play around with, and there is a mesmerizing, kewl feature called auto-pilot where you can watch the thesaurus auto-randomly jump from word to word.
not just for funsies, this tool can be used to illustrate concepts and keywords in an information literacy context:
get them to think about the disconnect between keywords they choose based on a specific definition, and the search engine technologies that do not have the ability to differentiate between various meanings or context. — LibraRonin
