Flickring on

Here's the thing about Flickr. I sort of thought it was going to be eclipsed by Picasa, the way Yahoo email was eclipsed by gmail. But the thing is, Flickr (like Yahoo email) has hung in there -- and even flourished. Clearly the site offers services that Picasa doesn't -- or it just managed to hold onto the critical mass necessary to remain relevant in World 2.0.

I have a couple Flickr sites of which I am particularly fond -- one is the site that holds historic photos from my library's collection -- and just recently surpassed 300,000 hits. That's a lot for a little library like us, but we happen to have a great collection that has been used by everyone from architects to historians to historical ecologists (who use historical data, including photos, to measure the impact that humans are having on the natural world). Another fun thing to do there, which I love pointing out to library patrons, is to run your address through the site; chances are decent you'll get a photo of your house from the 1950s or '60s, taken by the property appraiser's office. A volunteer just spent hundreds of hours scanning in those photos, one at a time, and labeling them with the individual addresses.

Another part of Flickr I like is the photoshare of Under the Sun, a public radio program out of WLRN in Miami. I'm not just saying that because they made the above photo, which I submitted on the Flickr group, their photo of the week recently. Hey, if you ask for chicken photos you're going to get stuff from Key West.