Science Addiction

The internet is adding language to our collective vocabularies faster than any other ‘”invention”:http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/ ‘. Here’s a prediction (if you haven’t heard enough of those):

In the “future”:http://rinkworks.com/said/predictions.shtml, flickr’ed will be part of you vocabulary.

Yep- you will be googling blogs with flickr’ed albums and nobody from the last century will have a clue what you just did. Maybe people will “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us you too. And hopefully, “AJAX-ing the CMS”:http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/421 will be out of date.

As you can see, I just re-discovered “flickr”:http://www.flickr.com (and del.icio.us). And I love it (“here’s my collection”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/devanjedi/). For those starting with Flickr:

• You can “register here”:http://www.flickr.com/signup/ (If you already have a “Yahoo!”:http://www.yahoo.com ID you can use that here)
• Upload pictures as public (for the world to see and admire) or private (for your friends to see and laugh at). Upload using your browser, email or third-party applications. And set licenses for each (from “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ to iron-clad copyrights).
• Link your blog to flickr so that you can blog a picture you see directly from flickr
• Tag your pictures and group them as you please. Tagging is the most powerful part of flickr (and del.icio.us too, but I’ll get to that some other time). The more relevant and complete set of tags you apply to a photograph, the better community you will form around them. Click on the links in this sentence to see what I mean: “I”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/i was “born”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/born in “Baroda”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/baroda, “India”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/india and now live in “Waltham”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/waltham, “Massachusetts”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/massachusetts.
• Explore other people’s pictures, comment and flickr (I said it was a verb, I just haven’t decided its usage).
• And if you’re a developer, check out “the flickr API”:http://www.flickr.com/services/ and build your own interface or application to it.

Even if the word ‘flickr’ doesn’t make it into your vocabulary (it’s already in mine), this model of service certainly will. And Yahoo! knows that- maybe more than the “much revered Google”:http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/06/29/nyt.friedman/. They bought flickr in the past and “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us today. Those two make for some fine ‘”synergy”:http://www.forbes.com/2001/01/24/0124disaster.html’, to use a word from the ghosts of dot-coms past…