Tag Galaxy is a new Flickr-based visualization web app from Germany. I gotta tell you that I find this utility simply mesmerizing.

This is how it works.

From Tag Galaxy you enter a tag to search Flickr for, it returns what looks like a star in the middle of your screen with one or many planets revolving around it. Your ’star’ is actually a representation of the tag you searched and you’ll see the number of photo’s represented by it that used your tag.

The ‘planets’ are other popular tags (second tags) that are associated with your tag. For instance, I searched for the tag of my town’s name. The planets that showed up were things like ’sunset’, ‘lake’, ‘park’, etc… Clicking on one of the planets zooms in and you see a new representation of the star/planet configuration again. Though each of these new planets are a third tag associated with the two tags being represented in the middle.

You can continue to hone in on more specific photos using an every growing list of tags, or click on the star in the middle at anytime.

When you click the star, it turns into a spherical object that contains up to 200+ photo thumbnails that comprise the tag list you’ve drilled down to.

You can click on any of the photos and they’ll expand to a larger version to view, you can click through to the Flickr page from here if you like. You can scroll this planet in any direction as you scan the thumbnails looking for the photo of interest.

Enjoy!

I guess small towns like Seattle, even though it’s fairly cerebral and book’ish, may never partake in this kind of book event. Good for you San Francisco, hope you enjoyed your Naughty Librarians Convention.

On behalf of geeks everywhere, including those that make passes at girls that wear glasses, we’re looking forward to NLC 2009!

Today’s my birthday, I choose to start the day off with Booth Babes + Pirates. Great Combo, eh? Let’s hope the rest of the day fairs as well.

“Pirates of the Burning Sea” Promo:

Stumbled across this Anime Easter Bunny on darciastevenson’s Flickr page. Cool.

Update: Thanks to Roys for tracking down the original artist - khalitzburg at deviantart.com.

I always like seeing the different objects that the electrical build-up in a storm can find to discharge through, especially cloud to cloud lightning. This one below  by Flickr user Yorri¢k is reallY cool but isn’t all that rare; since it’s over water it’s probably just as likely to find an opposite charge within some other portion of the cloud than it is over a body of water.

But I do really like how it appears to originally be attracted to the water on the right or the ship on the water when the greater difference was found in the other end of the cloud and changed directions. Nice ’smiley’.

Wikipedia has an excellent cloud to cloud lightning photo as well, thought it’s ‘flattened’ on the underside of the clouds.