Flickr is complete genius - masked as a photo site, it is one of our most powerful community building tools to date. it acts like:
other benefits:
- part blog by having a sense of linearity and comment threads
- part wiki by letting you edit the description of each photo much like you edit MicroContent in this TiddlyWiki
- it has tagging like GTDTiddlyWiki and naturally extends outward to the global tagging space.
- it has a groups (aka pool) mechanism for discussion threads and photo pools (ie. DanceCatalyst can share their pictures with their respective kids and/or new BuildingBlacks or DanceGames they've come up with)
- part data structure inherently created by it's set mechanism (supplemented by its tagging and pooling mechanism)
other benefits:
- it's web resident and hosted
- it has an external API to mash into just about any social application you wish to write
- built in discovery (aka explore) mechanism distinct from text-based web searches
- it extends the notion of "comments" to visual notes - beyond just text
- has excellent support for international character sets (ie. Thai!)
- built-in support for CreativeCommons licensing models
- built-in security mechanism at varying levels: public, friends, family, private
- batch processing akin to editing multiple wiki entries at the same time based on arbitrary criteria
- built-in statistics akin to "page views"
- favorites mechanism providing real-time feedback
Experiments
- query blocks with photos! (note: unordered)