Flickr have just announced a fantastic new project called The Commons. The idea behind which is to harness the collective power of the Flickr community by allowing us to tag reference collections of images from institutions around the world.

The Commons kicks off with a pilot scheme involving the U.S. Library of Congress. From their photo catalogue of over a million photos the Library team has chosen around 1,500 photos each from two of their more popular collections, 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.

As well as being a historical treasure trove for us to pour over, absorb and catalogue, these images are also under a “no known copyright restrictions” license. It doesn't mean they're Public Domain, but it should allow for all sorts of interesting re-use possibilities.

It's very addictive once you get involved and reminds me a lot of Galaxy Zoo in a way. There's an aspect of “…just one more picture…” to it, which is bad for me as you really don't want to know how many hours I've lost to Galaxy Zoo.

For more commentary on the project, pop over to Adactio where Jeremy Keith has posted some thoughtful insight.

Artur Bergman over at the O'Reilly Radar has had a chance to look at the new Virgin America planes. The inflight entertainment system sounds amazing!

Developed internally at Virgin America, the system is named Red and provides live satellite tv, movies, mp3s, games and plane-wide chatting. Yes, chatting. There is a general chatroom, a private invite channel for your friends, and direct user-to-user messaging. When watching television, you have the option to chat with everyone who is watching the same event.

There are also some other smart touches like USB sockets for charging of peripherals, and being able to order food via the system which keeps track of what's been ordered so ground crews know how much to restock…

…oh, and it has Doom on it…

…yes, that's right, Doom.

Update (9th August): Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing writes about the experience on the Virgin America Inaugural, and Artur Bergman blogs about the flight on the O'Reilly Radar, including a screenshot of Doom on the IFE. Cool stuff.

OK, here I go. I’m going to make this whole website right now on this dry-erase board.

- No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July

Most creative website I've seen in a long time. Well worth 5 minutes of anyone's time, and I want to read the book now.

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.

So, not only does something I can see from my front room window end up on Neatorama, but the site that they link to (Around The World) is running Drupal.

Of course, now I have to link to my ObSharkPic.

I had completely forgotten about filling in the form on the NASA site for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, but lo and behold there I am!

Myself and over 430,000 other names have been inscribed on a CD attached to the spacecraft, which is currently approaching Jupiter for a gravity assisted slingshot to the outer reaches of our Solar System. We're due to arrive around July 2016.