Exploring Flickr!

I'm having a lot of fun exploring Flickr, as you can tell. The concept of community tagging and comments works really well. I first came across Flickr via the O'Reilly MacDevcenter, where they recently published an interview with the CEO of Flickr.

Beyond all the fun aspects of finding photos featuring the colour orange, Flickr has real utility for other uses as well. I'm exploring uploading some very old family photographs that I've scanned for other members of the family to have access to. Hopefully, wider access will turn into better identification, and additions to our genealogy project. Essentially, anyone can tag and annotate the photos, and I don't have to serve as a central resource point -- Flickr manages all of that. This will also free up room on my personal website for things other than family photographs -- like text data! Genealogy trees! Essays!

I can also see using Flickr for a professional portfolio. Adding a Creative Commons license is easy as pie, as is restricting access to full-size images.

Integration with RSS feeds is very well done. I can subscribe to a photostream, to a group or a person, to comments about my photographs, and so on. I can add a random selection of my photographs to the sidebar of my blog. I can choose a photo, create a blog entry, and post it from Flickr.

I'll be interested to see how Flickr continues to evolve; their development team is obviously on the ball and very slick.