According to our World Map, the Flickrverse has been flipping both pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches this week. That said, I’m pretty sure that there won’t be all that much cross over with another hot tag on the map — “london fashion week“.

Photos from Shari Cleland, Sadman (or) Duck, WarzauWynn, andy_tyler, grayshott.com and Marble Giant.

Recently we enabled a quiet little feature that, hopefully, allows users to navigate some of the mystery and serendipity in the 100 million geotagged photos on Flickr. We call it “nearby” and it is available for any geotagged photo on the site.

Nearby starts with a geotagged photo and then queries for other geotagged photos within a one kilometer radius. You can order the results by time and distance and interestingness but the important part is that they are photos, well, nearby to the photo you are looking at. Nearby is a deliberately fuzzy concept. Nearby in St. Peter’s Square in Rome might mean the person directly in front of you. Nearby in the streets of a small town might be the beautiful garden behind the fence and around the corner. Nearby encourages people to poke around and discover their surroundings, as though they were on foot and everything was just a short walk away.

Or to quote Rick Prelinger from his fantastic talk, at the Long Now Foundation, called “Lost Landscapes of San Francisco” :

“Knitting (geo) tags and images together is one tiny incremental step towards the creation of what you might call a four-dimensional model of the world that shows the development of place over time.”

There’s a in-depth blog post titled “Things I’m Standing Next To” on the code.flickr weblog which covers all the details but the really short version is that you can append /nearby to any geotagged photo URL and we’ll show you photos … nearby!

Photos from russelldavies, heather, ldandersen (with apologies to Jacob Harris)

Photos from Lincoln ~, J o r, hurtingbombz and arndalarm.

The Venice Carnaval is underway, where the masked and costumed revelers who are attending do not disappoint. The celebration has a history that goes back centuries and it’s modern era goes back 30 years. Enjoy the spectacle!

Photos from PaoloBis, EMIL CENZATO and arnabchat. Search for more or visit the Venice Carnaval pool.

Photos from ulimuc, Digger Digger Dogstar, Red Larry Yellow Larry and RuSt. View more from the clever people in the Facial Impressions pool

Photos from limegreeney, NabityPhotos, and Vicki & Chuck Rogers.
View more photos of the Tour of California via tag or in these groups.

February 14th, 2009 marks Oregon’s 150th birthday, and to mark the sesquicentennial, we’d like to welcome the Oregon State University Archives to the Flickr Commons!

OSU, our first university partner, joins with a sampling from the collection of Gerald W. Williams, the national historian for the U.S. Forest Service, until his retirement in 2005.

This initial offering focuses on the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal program, focused on the conservation of natural resources, that targeted unemployed young men, veterans and American Indians who were hard hit by the Great Depression. The Oregon State University Archives’s photostream shows various CCC projects, which included firefighting, farm land improvements, infrastructure projects and even the building of ski areas on Mt. Hood.

The photos are just a peek into OSU’s photographic collections pertaining to the history of forestry and natural resources in the Pacific Northwest, with a focus on Oregon. Expect more uploads from the OSU Archives illustrating culture, natural resources, and history in the coming months. In the meantime, enjoy the collection!

We’d like to welcome the State Archives of Florida to the Commons on Flickr! The 5 set collection is an initial offering from the central repository of the archives of the state government of Florida and the images included in the Commons are a sampling available at the Archives through the Florida Memory Project.

The collection showcases Florida’s people, ranging from members of the All-American Professional Girls Baseball team to Florida’s Seminole Indians, as well as places and events. The collection also contains glass lantern slides depicting many different geographical areas of Florida as well as the surviving glass negatives of noted portrait photographer Alvan S. Harper.

Thanks for your comments, notes and tags!

Photos from Joan Garvin, daniel.gene, and Daniella Zalcman.
View more photos tagged with “westminster kennel club“.

Flickr launched at ETech at 5:15PM Pacific time during the “Virtual Worlds, Distributed Interaction: Extending a MMOG with Remote Scripting, IM, Mobiles and REST” panel. We’ll be doing more in the near future to celebrate our fifth birthday, but we didn’t want to miss an opportunity to mark today’s milestone.

Photos from bees and bopuc.