Flickr Drives To SEMA In Vegas

The appeal of trade shows planted in the middle of the neon sprawl of Las Vegas cannot be enjoyed in person by everyone who may wish to attend. Fortunately Flickr is there to help car enthusiasts indulge in the love.

Flickr Goes To Las Vegas
My fellow writer Doug Caverly will probably need to be led to a salubrious corner of the Murdok headquarters after he sees what Flickr has in store for people who love cars. The lad knows what things like “VeilSide” and “JDM” mean, and can drop them into conversation like the members of the Big Blue Nation who speak fluent basketball-ese can make the full-court press part of any chat.

SEMA stands for the Specialty Equipment Market Association, and they claim their annual event is the biggest one in their industry worldwide. Their four-day trade show in Sin City draws a lot of people, many of whom attend just for the opportunity to drool over the glitzy vehicles on display.

And that’s where our friends at Flickr, ha ha, enter the picture. Right now they are carrying about 3,800 pictures from SEMA, with plenty of vivid paint jobs and burning chrome gleaming under the bright lights on display.

When visiting Flickr’s selection of photos tagged with “SEMA,” visitors can see the most recent photos on display. A Flickr representative told Murdok these images are being updated by the minute.

People can switch views from most recent to most interesting, as tagged by other Flickr users. This would be an example of that “social media” people have seen discussed everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to newly-launched blogs and lots of places in between.

One may find, as I did, that the “SEMA” tag has multiple meanings. While plenty of pictures from the trade show have that tag, so do a number of photos of a whirling Turkish dance called sema. That could be confusing to people expecting to see Yahoo’s Turbogreasel and finding shots of spinning guys in white robes instead.

The cure for that would be what Flickr called its “clustery goodness.” When exploring sema clusters, the visitor can opt for Istanbul (not Constantinople) or for the automotive displays from the trade show.

There’s a lot of vehicular joy to be seen. We should probably keep the automatic emergency defibrillator nearby when Doug comes to the office in the morning and catches up with this thread. He could go into “car-diac” arrest.

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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.