Flickr

I chose the website Flickr.

I chose Flickr because it is both a site that I enjoy, and a good example of a social website. It has millions of active users all adding photos or tagging other people's pictures, constantly improving the site.

The site provides photos. One can search for almost anything and find relevant photos.

The site gets this information from its users. Anyone can sign up. From there they can upload their own photos, and add relevant tags to those photos. They can also tag other people's photos.

The site is very easy to use, with a powerful search engine that lets users look for whatever they want. Results are then displayed in a friendly, accessable format. Results can also be sorted by how recently the photos were added, how relevant the tags on it are to your search term, or how "interesting" it is - which factors in many things, such as comments, click throughs, and favorites.

While not exactly the same, Google Images competes with Flickr in certain respects. If you are just trying to search for a photo, and do not want to add your own images, Google Images can provide this functionality.

Because Google searches practically the entire internet, and then shows all the images that it encounters in the Google Images, there are more photos known to Google Images than there are to Flickr. For example, searching for "food" gives you about 2,980,000 results on Google Images, while Flickr only comes up with 906,279. So, in terms of the sheer number of images available, Google Images beats Flickr.

Thanks Zach Horowitz

As you can see, a few days ago, per the assignment, I added a link to Zach Horowitz's blog, and he added one to mine.

Fantastic.

Analytics

date range	visits	page views
10/4/06-10/10/06	2	17

They Rule

I chose the companies I.B.M. and Circuit City Stores, as I am interested in technology. Sidney Taurel is on IBM's board, and Carolyn Y. Woo is on Circuit City's. I found it interesting that to get from one board to the other, you had to go to less technological companies in between. While Eli Lilly, as a pharmaceutical company, certainly has a lot of technology, it isn't the same that you'd see IBM making or Circuit City selling. The other company, Nisource, is even less related, as it is a natural gas and electricity distributor from the Midwest.

Bookmarks

So I added some bookmarks on ning:

• The End of the World is a hilarious animation about, well, the end of the world.
  
• Overheard in New York has funny quotes of things people heard while living in New York City. If you just browse through a few of them, you are sure to laugh.
  

Look out, a picture! Linking to yahoo!

Creativity is Commonplace

So now I have a CC license, viewable here.

It lets users copy, dispense, show, or play my work, to change it however they want, and they can even use it for commercial purposes. All I ask of them is that they attribute it to me. I did this because there is nothing particularly important on this blog, so I figure I might as well be liberal in my restrictions of it.

Look it's comic sans! And courier!

Some Links

If you like cool gadgets, check out Engadget and Gizmodo.

Commonwealth Ave

Commonwealth avenue is a rather long street. Don't you think?