On Twitter, Marshall just pointed to Tag Galaxy, a super-slick and fun new way to browse Flickr photos by tag. You enter a tag and it renders that tag as a sun, with a bunch of related tags orbiting it:
Add a new tag and it drills down into all of the photos and related tags that share those two tags. Finally, when you’re sufficiently happy with the filtering, click on the sun itself and it lays all of the photos on the surface of the sun…planet…er…heavenly body:
You can then manipulate the sphere, spinning it to browse using the scroll wheel to zoom. I’m not sure how practically useful it is, but it’s sure fun to play with. It’s kind of graphically-intensive, and brought my old Windows PC to a crawl. It was quite speedy, however, on my MacBook.
On a related note, Waxy just linked to WolfenFlickr 3D, which uses Castle Woflensteing 3-D, an old-school first-person shooter, as a Flickr browser.
DarrenBarefoot.com 