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Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site, has unveiled a redesigned site today that puts new emphasis on photos and all of the extra data - and the stories they tell - hidden inside of them.

The site had been in testing since mid-June by more than 800,000 members, but now the final version is available to all.

Last month, social photo-sharing site Flickr finally added some long-awaited Facebook integration to its service, allowing users to simultaneously post photos on both Flickr and Facebook with one upload. But there was a small problem with the way that the new feature was set up: it basically spammed your Facebook Wall with post after post about your new photos.

Today, that problem has been fixed, reports Flickr.

San Francisco-based micro-blogging service Posterous launched a marketing campaign back in June that raised a few eyebrows across the Web for its apparently brazen approach. The company has been rolling out new tools since the beginning of the campaign aimed at helping new and existing users transplant their data onto Posterous from other services - services it referred to as "dying platforms." Today, the campaign came to a close with the release of the company's final switch tool for the behemoth blogging platform, Wordpress.

Perhaps you have some spare time on your hands, or perhaps you just want to do good for others from the comfort of your desk chair. Either way, a great way to fulfill these needs is to participate in crowdsourcing - community driven conglomerations of small efforts by large crowds of participants. The simplest form of crowdsourcing are online wikis like the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other great examples. Here are a few great ways to get involved in the wonder of crowdsourcing.

In the wake of the BP oil disaster, real-time mapping technologies have been recruited to improve communication and promote collaboration between people in local communities, as well as federal, state and local responders. Last week NOAA released GeoPlatform.gov to provide near-real-time mapping data to those connected to the crisis.

The site lets you track everything from daily spill positions to the locations of ships responding to the crisis. State and non-governmental organizations are also collecting and mapping real-time information. In some instances the efforts include citizen-generated data from iPhone apps and photos mapped on sites like Flickr.

Social photo-sharing site Flickr has, at long last, added some much-need social networking integration to its online service. You can now simultaneously post your photos to Flickr and Facebook. Only photos you set as "public" will appear on your Facebook Wall, however, as the new sharing options respect your photos' privacy settings.

But don't be confused if you start seeing double-posts of Flickr photos once you enable this new feature: this supplements, but does not replace the native Flickr sharing you may have configured earlier via Facebook settings.

A new mashup lets you track the BP oil spill news using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more, all from one interface. Called "Oilaholic," the site serves as a one-stop shop for everything oil spill-related, including the latest tweets, the live video cam feed from uStream, the latest Facebook news and Flickr photos, the hottest headlines from Google News and elsewhere on the Web, a real-time "leak meter" feed (which is incredibly disturbing), and a live chatroom for venting your frustrations after you look at the leak meter, plus links to useful resources including government agencies, volunteer efforts, phone numbers to call and more.

Nothing's more lonely than a disaster, even when you're one among thousands. When Katrina struck, and all the traditional means of disseminating information washed away with the waters, social media took center stage in the battle for communication.

Now that oil from the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon is heading for landfall on the Gulf Shore, social media is out front again. A collaborative multimedia website, Gulf of Mexico - Deepwater Horizon Incident, rich in social media, has been launched information for those who are or might be hit.

On Wednesday of this week, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake wrote a provocatively titled blog suggesting that wanna-be entrepreneurs should drop out of college. She based this opinion on the amount of successful companies founded by drop-outs, including Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft, as well as the drop-outs she finds herself investing in as an angel. But should education play such an insignificant role in entrepreneurship? The answer is not as simple as some think.

When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr. Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium.

Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead.