23 things, pt. 6 - get mashed on flickr

Part 6 involves flickr mashups. Before this I didn't have any firm definition in my mind of what exactly a mashup was. My flat-mate had played various mashup songs, which I didn't really get into. Sure, there is about 3 seconds of humour value, but beyond that the genre is not for me.

Now I'm of the opinion that mashup is just another of those catch-all hype words. So I set aside my amusement that mashups seem to get billed as new and exciting despite the fact tools like these have been around for years. I trawled this exhaustive list for flickr mashups, but didn't see anything of particular note or use until this one: steganography with flickr.

This tool takes a file and hides it in image data which then resides on flickr. I imagine with a few scripts set-up it could be relatively easy to use, but I don't think I'd ever need to (other than for the novelty value and to appease the tech geek within me).

It just occured to me that there is a mashup tool that I use regularly: Antiarc's sig image generator, which takes data from the Armory and pops it into a neat little signature image (the one below). But, it also illustrates one of the key problems with mashups. Notice in the image below the 0 Health, 0 Mana, 0 Kills? Well, these should all be somewhere around the 1500-2000 range. The Armory however, has issues at the moment which has the flow-on effect of breaking things like the signature image below. I had to re-size the image to squeeze it in, so the text isn't as clear as it should be.

So I can see the value in mashups, but I'd never rely on one given their dependency on external data sources.