Over at the Flickr developer blog, Kellan Elliott-McCrea interviews Simon Willison about how his new project, Wildlife Near You, uses the Flickr API. Simon explained how the site came to be here — it was built by a team of geeks who went to an exotic locale to see what they could build in a week. The interview is a great read if you want to get jazzed about Web services — providing a robust machine interface to a site’s functionality can really unlock a ton of power.

Wildlife Near You is definitely worth browsing as well, just as a primer on what can be done quickly these days if you have a lot of talent and you’re starting from scratch. I particularly love the lists of species found on the place pages. They’re the most aesthetically pleasing and useful tag cloud implementation that I’ve seen.

Update: I left out the link to the interview itself.