Salon has a terrific article (see link below) on the new social activity taking place on the photo-sharing site flickr. Recently I mentioned a Nielsen report that showed people are going online for ‘shared interests,’ and surely this is one of the best examples. The simple premise that people might enjoy talking about photos that strangers took of the same subject has led to amazingly collaborative creations. Then there are the people who share images with their existing social network. It’s incredible to read about all the different activities which are emerging.

Link: Salon.com Technology | The Friendster of photo sites. (Free if you agree to watch an Ultramercial.)

On most sites, you create your own album or page of photos, and invite your friends to look at them. But on Flickr, you can mingle all your photos with similar images, creating an endlessly beguiling cross-pollination of photos that spark a host of unique communities. Flickr allows its more than 176,000 members to meet each other through both images and words in an ever-evolving visual playground. The onslaught of images that appear on the site range from the truly artistic to the bluntly documentary, a pool of more than 2.2 million photos that’s growing at the rate of about 30,000 a day. What’s unique is that 82 percent of the pictures on the site are publicly available to anyone who cares to look at them and riff off them. Members can keep their photos private, shared only with a specified group of intimates, but most choose not to, allowing the pictures of their cat or car to freely commingle with others.