Many of you of course are already familiar with insanely popular photo-sharing website Flickr (which is actually owned by Yahoo; they downplay the connection there at the site), and some of you are already familiar with just how unbelievably large their database has gotten over there recently; yes, "large" as in "there's a good chance that there's half a billion a billion and a half photos there now" (see the comments below for more). And not just a billion and a half photos, mind you, but with a large percentage of them wedded to "folksonomic" information as well, such as the date it was taken, the location, the camera used, as well as various used-designed "tags" to describe the content. It's a number that can boggle the mind simply by thinking about it too much for a couple of minutes, especially considering the state that organized online photo databases were in even just five years ago.

This large a database, of course, along with all that "smart information" about the images, has created an entire cottage industry of other online activities based around it (and of course the open API and Creative-Commons emphasis there don't hurt either); check out this very site you're at, for example, whose "photo of the day" entries are picked almost exclusively from images found at Flickr. I just came across a much larger organization recently, in fact, that has its own entire background come out of Flickr; it's the fascinating and instantly addictive Utata, in which thousands of photographers band together to create intriguing projects and to help promote each other, born out of the collective dreams of a 9,000-member group at Flickr under the same name.

Turns out that this group became so active, their aims were suddenly much more complicated than their simple Flickr group could handle; that's why the standalone site was created, although everything you see there still has strong connections back to the larger Flickr database where most Utata artists are still active. There are all kinds of regular things going on over there, in fact, that will start eating up your spare time the moment you arrive; from a photo-of-the-day feature to an artist-of-the-day one, a weekly magazine-style profile of a random member, a linkblog, tech articles, personal essays and a lot more. You then combine this with the main reason the site was created, to encourage and highlight massive group collaborative projects on specific themes, and you suddenly got yourself one highly addictive online location indeed.

Anyway, I encourage you to check it out the next time you've got some free time; and don't forget that their original Flickr group is still going strong, for those who would like to participate that way instead.