For those of you who haven’t heard about Flickr yet, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Hiding under a ROCK??

Just kidding. There are always new technologies that fly under people’s radar until serendipity steps in.

Anyway, Flickr is one of those hot new web technologies that has virtually unlimited possibilities. In a nutshell, it’s a place you can store pictures online for free. There are no limits to the quantity of pictures, but if you only have a free account, each picture has to be less than 5MB in size and you’ll only see the most recent 200 photos in your photostream.

You can set privacy levels to allow anyone, friends, family, or nobody to view and download your pictures. You can get your own web address so your friends can browse through all your pictures. You can set up a family account so only your family can view those select pictures. You can add captions, descriptions, and labels (tags) to your pictures. You can allow others to leave comments on your pictures. You will have your pictures available in various sizes, from thumbnails to full size. You can even upload your pictures (with tags if you like) from your cameraphone.

And of course there are also fun tricks you can do, like adding comments to select parts of your pictures (e.g., adding people’s names to their faces in a group picture), creating sets or slideshows of photos, using RSS feeds, or even ordering photographic prints from the pictures you upload (or anyone else’s that are being shared).

By the way, the whole system of people adding tags as they view your pictures is called Folksonomy.

Whether or not you actually TAKE pictures and upload them, Flickr is an awesome tool for FINDING pictures that you might need. As long as you follow the copyright licensing that individuals have placed on their photos, you can download the pictures and use them however you like. Try visiting Flickr and browsing through some tags that interest you. If you’re like me, you’ll get hooked just looking at pictures of places or people or things you’re interested in. This “tags” link I just gave you will take you to a Tag Cloud of the all-time most popular tags on Flickr.

Check it out!