This weekend, February 25 and 26, our very own Jamal will be at Photo Hack Day 2 in New York to give a presentation on the Flickr API and to answer any questions you may have while hacking.

What’s in it for me? First and foremost, a lot of fun, hanging out with fellow hackers. There will be awesome APIs and developers, food and drink aplenty, and cool evening activities.
Oh, and did we mention that the winners of Photo Hack Day can get up to $5,000 in cash? Or that the best use of the Flickr API will get a $100 gift code for the Photojojo store? And iIf this is still not enough, every participant (yes, even if your app doesn’t make it into the top Photo Hack Day apps) will get one year of Flickr Pro with all its benefits. Yay!

What’s an API, you ask? It’s a system that third parties can use to programmatically access Flickr. When iPhoto sends your photos to the site? That’s using our API.

Here are some awesome examples of people using our API:

commonsExplorer:
A Java application from the University of Canberra that pulls in information about the Commons collection via the API and builds a text cloud from the titles of photos, which lets you click on related words to show matching images.

Flickr Poet:
Turns lyrics or a poem into a photographic display based off the words, using images from Flickr.

Stuck on Earth, a fantastic mapping app we recently introduced to you here on the blog.

If you’re interested in playing, check out our Developer Guide and the complete list of our api methods to get started. Enjoy!

Photo from blech.