Flickr

**Flickr**
In a nutshell, [|Flickr] is the Web's most popular photo-sharing site.

**Online Photos in Plain English**
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So, online photo-sharing has been around for about a decade, but Web 2.0 sites like Flickr offer more than just a place to store your photos and share them with family and friends through email. Flickr is a searchable, social, user-driven community. The social power of Flickr comes from **[|tagging]**, which is the process of adding meaningful keywords to photos (or any type of content). If you’ve ever used a subject heading in a library catalogue or written names or places on the back of a photograph, you’re already familiar with tagging! Flickr's public photo tags are visible to the whole community, so the entire collection becomes organized and categorized, searchable and browsable. Flickr users can also comment on each others' photos and [|create Groups] to develop photo pools (shared photo collections) and have discussions about any topic or interest.

Photo tagging is an example of a **[|folksonomy]**, an important Web 2.0 concept that refers to the collaborative organizing of content by everyday users. Unlike a highly structured, professionally developed and controlled taxonomy (such as library subject headings), a folksonomy evolves over time, as //more users// add //more tags// to //more content//. Tagging is a bit messy, can be very individualized, and is non-heirarchical (i.e. there are no "sub-tags"); For example, a photo of your dog may be tagged as //dog//, //beagle,// //rover// and even //cute// if that means something to you. (Also, tags cannot have spaces, e.g. chocolate chip cookie is actually three tags, whereas chocolate_chip_cookie (or chocolatechipcookie) is one tag.
 * Tagging and Folksonomies - Two Defining Attributes of Web 2.0**

For LOADS more Flickr goodness, visit [|Flickr Services], [|FD's FlickrToys] and the  [|Great Flickr Tools Collection] -- after you have learned about Flickr!