ReadWriteWeb

At its best, The Photo Stream can be considered a boredom buster or time waster, but it is an interesting one. The site delivers the news, not via splashy headlines, but by a stream of...you guessed it...photos. Clicking on a photo in the stream takes you to the story's web site. Newer stories are large, with their photos above the others; older stories' photos are smaller and below. The Photo Stream's interface certainly is innovative, but it may not replace your RSS reader anytime soon. However, it's still a fun way to explore the day's news.

Is this a sign of Zoto's immanent demise? Possibly, but in a world with lots of niche photo sharing sites, there may be no meta-lessons to learn here. At the very least, there's some very nice photo sharing software now available for use on your site.

Are you into multimedia? Do you stream music over the web, share photos on Flickr and Picassa, watch videos at YouTube, share links with friends, and hang out in social networks? A new startup from Ubuket wants to help make access to your content from anywhere even easier. The service they provide will let you access all your media from your desktop, social network, blog, or even your mobile device.

The Library of Congress and photosharing site Flickr today announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. The Library is home to more than 14 million photographs and other visual materials, and to start they've selected about 1500 works each from two of their collections that are known to exist in the public domain. The images come from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and The George Grantham Bain Collection, for which no known copyright exists. The collections will be housed on the LoC's Flickr page.

When you go on vacation, you no longer pack canisters of film for taking vacation photos - you just pack a digital camera and a handful of batteries. If the hotel has wi-fi, you might even upload photos from the day's activities to flickr in the evening. However, when it comes time to send postcards back home, you still have to browse through the assorted offerings from the gift shop, emblazoned with hokey "wish you were here" sentiments overtop images that look nothing like the place you're visiting.

In this post we look at web 2.0 services that give you more options with digital photos - postalz and scrapblog.

Long-time inventor Dave Winer has released an early version of his new Mac software called FlickrFan tonight. Though there are some kinks in it at launch, the service leverages a number of APIs to do some very cool things.

FlickrFan is basically a screen saver program that will display high-resolution images from any Flickr account, recent Associated Press photos or any other RSS feed with media enclosures (so Flickr tag streams or Photobucket feeds should be no problem). Presumably this is only the beginning. The software is run off of Winer's all-too-unwieldy OPML Editor, but FlickrFan looks much easier to use.

Users with a pro account at Flickr are now able to view a variety of interesting statistics about the viewers of their photos. Heather Champ said in a post on the Flickr blog this morning that the stats are intended to "give you all sorts of insight into how people arrive at your photos."