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.

The hatred people direct at those who are different to them doesn't even begin to compare to the hate people reserve for those who are extremely similar to them.

- flashboy

The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There's some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you've never seen before. You're still really inside some annotated version of your own head.

- William Gibson, interviewed on the Amazon Bookstore Blog

Hat tip: Boing Boing

The results of this search are a classic example of why DRM won't work.

As was once said...

Given enough eyes all bugs are shallow

... and when we're talking about DRM, it is most definitely a bug.

Update (2nd May): Interesting developments overnight. Turns out Digg was removing posted stories about the HD-DVD key, that of course triggered a user revolt, and now Digg has changed it's position. Heh.

I debated about adding the 'funny' tag to the original post, and in the end decided not to. Events last night have made me change my mind.

Ze Frank has posted a list of the most popular shows.

Below is a small collection of popular entry points into the 250 episodes of the show. Some are silly, some are sad and some might not make much sense until you dig around a bit.

And if that's not enough, there's also the sportsracer wiki top 50.