Due to current business, it took me quite a while to pick up what’s the chatter is all about flickr at the moment. As you could read in the media (e.g. the internet), flickr introduced filters to allow users to categorize the safety level of their content into “Safe”, “Moderate” and “Restricted”. This “feature” turns out to be a perfect piece of code for censorship now.

What happened some days ago is, that flickr turned off the “Safe mode” option in the search that allowed you to see the photos of all safety levels. For Germany, Singapur, Hongkong and Korea. Result is that Users from these countries don’t see anything but “Safe” content.

In brief: They do not have the choice to see what they want.

It seams that flickr didn’t thoroughly think about their move which triggered a wave of protest mails, blog entries and photo contribution in flickr itself. Not wanting to repeat everything you can read elswhere: Just browse for “thinkflickrthink”, “flickr filters” or “againstcensorship” and you’ll find all the photos and comments on that topic. Overwhelming!

Didn’t we learn that “Web 2.0″ means “community”? That it means “user generated content”? And through that, a platform is nothing without its users?

Think, flickr! Think!

BTW: Can anyone recommend a good backup strategy for flickr photos?

[Update]: Googled for “backup flickr”. It returned some interesting links. One of them to a project now hosted at Sourceforge called Flickr Backup. What a surprise. On a first test it worked fine downloading single photos, multiple photos and sets. Regarding metadata there are limitations: In case you tagged your photos before initially uploading them to flickr, these tags (and GEO data) from IPTC and EXIF can be found in the file headers. For tags and GEO information you added within flickr after uploading the photos, this is not the case. So I’ll keep on searchign for somethign that saves me all the meta information I added to my photos in countless sessions.

How cool is that: Wanted to check whether I need to follow some special steps when uninstalling the NetBarrier Suite or whether it’s just the “uninstall App” button in BinaryNights’ ForkLift, when I saw the Google suggest for my typed “uninstall” in the search field! Ha, try it! Great to see the Top-10 of the things that people want to uninstall. Looks pretty desperate, hugh!? You first try “Windows Vista”, then just “Vista”, Microsoft prevails…