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The universe according to a true Londoner

Well, rather lost in Galaxy. A Tag Galaxy to be more specific. A nice new Flickr search tool from some German developers. A simple interface belies an engrossing site and slick animation touches that will have you hooked for some time.

Start by entering a tag for Flickr – being a Londoner my imagination stretched as far as ‘London’.

You can then zoom in to London or choose a ’satellite’ tag. Big Ben was my next obvious choice (my name being Benn, of course). The camera pans through space and shows the combined tag cloud.

Big Ben is my stage name...

The nice thing here is that planets are positioned based on the amount of relevant links they have. They also orbit your central tag. It’s all very pretty. You can go further by clicking a planet. Clicking the central planet produces a flat render of the planet and then the images start to appear in a quite majestic/ Matrix way…

What Big Ben looks like without any clothes

The photos are coming...

... like flies around (ahem).

The transformation is complete.

Then you just browse around the globe to find the image you want and zoom in – you can even go to the Flickr page.

corny Big Ben image

OK, so you can search on Flickr just as easily and a lot faster but who cares. This is a much more immersive and fun way of doing things and if you have the time to play and search for images then why not? You’ll soon find you’ll be clicking on planets, spinning them, rotating them on their axis, and thumbing through all the images contained inside. I wonder if they do an API of this? I feel a widget coming on…