Flickr: More than just an online photo album

A year after its launch, photo sharing site Flickr has taken the online journalism world by storm, reports the Guardian Online. The company's owner, Stewart Butterfield, cites three main reasons for the company's success: advanced Web technology, widespread use of digital cameras or cameraphones and a general comfort level of interacting with people online. Butterfield's wife and former Salon.com art director Caterina Fake, says that photo-sharing has become just as much of a networking tool as blogging or networking sites such as Friendster. "Blogging has had a big impact, and people are a lot less frightened of being themselves online," she says. Flickr's policies regarding hotlinking have enabled bloggers to include photojournalism as a part of their repertoire. Flickr has grown tremendously in popularity, and now boasts more than 3.5 million photos online--82% of which are publicly available.