flickr

Flickr has quietly made a big change to its tagging system, which from now on will show who added a tag to a photo or video. As Flickr's Community Manager Heather Champ notes, this information was previously available through Flickr's API, but wouldn't show up on Flickr's photo pages. With the new system you simply hover over a tag and you'll get a tool tip that shows you the username of the person who added the tag.

Since Flickr has just turned this feature on, all previous tags will simply get an "added by … Read more

As the tragic events unfolded in Mumbai, India, the Internet backchannel came to the foreground with messages, photos, and videos from the masses using Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so-called citizen reporting sites such as Global Voices, as well as CNN and NDTV.

The terrorist attacks have left more than 100 dead and several hundred wounded in Mumbai, the country's financial center.

As you would expect, the flow of information has been chaotic and potentially unreliable, which presents some problems, especially for those with family or friends at risk. A few posts on Techmeme question the quality of Twitter messages, … Read more

Life magazine announced Tuesday that is is making more than 10 million of its archival photographs publicly available through a partnership with Google.

The archive includes many iconic images from throughout the 20th century taken by famous photographers like Gordon Parks, Margaret Bourke-White, and Dorothea Lange.

Currently, many of the photos--searchable by keyword--are available through Google Image Search. And many more will be added in the coming months, Life said.

The project mirrors one introduced in January in which Flickr began hosting thousands of images from the U.S. Library of Congress as part of its "The Commons" … Read more

Flickr on Friday announced that it has formed a partnership with Tiny Prints that will see the online stationery site's services become a part of Flickr's "Do More" offering, which currently enables users to add images from their photostream to credit cards, order prints, and create books.

According to Flickr's John Nguyen, Flickr users will be able to create customized stationery with the images contained in their photostream through the Tiny Prints service. He said that Flickr chose to work with Tiny Prints after it got the company's attention with its "lovely, high-quality, … Read more

I've always been annoyed by the significance we humans attach to numeric milestones just because they happen to involve a lot of zeros.

But 3 billion--the number of photos now housed at Flickr--is undoubtedly a big number, even if its intrinsic excitement diminishes when, for example, translated into octal as 26,264,057,000. It's also more notable when you consider that Flickr's 2 billionth shot arrived less than a year ago.

The 3 billionth photo, with the title camera-supplied name of DSC_2672_1, is a black-and-white shot of a door by Garrett Ryan Smith. (But if it'… Read more

What? What's wrong with you people? We're talking about Netbooks. Dell has a new "Mini" Note, but it's a 12-inch laptop. So, the question is: what is going on in the Netbook world these days? Also, the Internet makes you both smarter AND dumber, Google Earth shows up for iPhone, and Oprah gives out a Kindle discount. And Natali and Molly love Oprah. Deal with it.

Sling.com launch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/26/slingcom-to-launch-on-november-10/

Google Earth for iPhone/Touch http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10075543-37.html … Read more

If you've ever had a hard drive die on you, or had your computer stolen, you've probably come to appreciate--and possibly have shaken your fist at--computer backup. Bad things happen, which is what makes utilities like FlickrDown so darn useful.

This small Windows application provides a simple way to pull down a large portion of your Flickr photos at a time. You just give it your Flickr credentials, pick which sets of photos you want to download and it does the rest--putting them in tightly organized file folders on your local machine. Sure you could just download the … Read more

Update: I mistakenly said this tool does two-way sync. PhotoCopy currently only moves photos one direction--from iPhoto to Flickr.

Having recently picked up one of the new MacBooks, I've been spending the last few days getting it up to speed with all my Web services and prior storage backups.

One of the biggest hurdles I'm trying to overcome is being too reliant on software, which is considerably easier with today's cloud services.

One that caught my eye on this front is PhotoCopy from 24x7 Digital. This $20 software program, which is Mac-only, hooks up with your iPhoto … Read more

Even with careful testing and an ambition to improve features, it's hard to make changes at a big Web site.

Recent revamps at Yahoo and Google, for example, have riled some of their users. Google updated its iGoogle customized home page service, adding a left-hand navigation bar and a larger "canvas view" for applications, and Yahoo added a new centralized profile page that mimics some Facebook features and revamped the Flickr page to shed more light on the photo-sharing site's social activity. Those changes triggered complaints that already had begun pouring in after Yahoo began testing a new home page. … Read more