In the Web 2.0 era, simplicity is king. No matter if you're talking about user interface, ease of use or the idea for a blog. To take the latter as an example; there are a number of great blogs out there using other people's images in creative and somewhat controversial ways. The concept is as simple as it is genious: 1. Find a topic that people can releate to. 2. Search for user generated pictures that relate to that topic on a photo-sharing service such as Flickr (the best one) or a social network. 3. Post the picture to your blog with witty commentary. 4. Watch traffic grow and comments flowing in. Three hilarious blogs built using this recipe for success that I recommend to check out is Sorry I Missed Your Party, Hot Chicks With Douche Bags and Demonbaby's MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards. Do you have any other good examples, perhaps using videos instead of photos, post a comment and share the fun!

Facebook has had an update feature similar to Twitter for a while. Now Facebook has a feature that lets users add feeds from other web services like Flickr and del.icio.us — just like FriendFeed. From a technology perspective, Twitter and FriendFeed are now reducable to Facebook features. Even if those two apps are currently more robust than their equivalent Facebook features, there’s nothing to stop Facebook from copying them in their entirety.

Sunnyvale, Calif. - Yahoo's (NASD: YHOO) Flickr photo-sharing site on Wednesday launched an anticipated video-sharing feature for its 42 million monthly users.

San Francisco - Yahoo's (NASD: YHOO) Flickr photo-sharing service intends to branch out into video with the beta launch of a new Flickr video service next month, CNET News.com reported. The company told CNET that Flickr Video will not replace Yahoo Video, and that the service is not meant to compete with YouTube. Flickr director of product management Kakul Srivastava told CNET the service has to appeal in an "authentic" way to the Flickr community.

Vancouver, Canada - Yahoo's (NASD: YHOO) Flickr photo-sharing site is now host to over two billion photos, as a user from Australia posted the two-billionth image to the site yesterday. The Vancouver-based was founded in February 2004, and acquired by Yahoo in March 2005.

San Francisco - Creative Commons, the nonprofit that advocates for less-restrictive copyright license terms, has found itself the target of a lawsuit, after a photo of a 16-year-old posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons license found its way into a Virgin Mobile ad campaign.

Several years ago I wrote a two hundred page thesis for a Masters program all about user interfaces.  The premise was that simplicity and usability were guiding principles to making any online site successful (seems obvious, I know, but it didn't use to be).  Since the late nineties, the importance of usability had slowly been getting more and more important. 

In June, Yahoo! Photos began to close, and users are being encouraged to join Flickr. Later in the month, Yahoo! began including Flickr images in Yahoo! Image Search. These efforts have resulted in an increase in Flickr's US market share of 38% in the past four weeks (week ending 7/7/07 vs. week ending 6/9/07). Flickr is now the #2 photography website in the US, with 6.42% of category visits for the week ending 7/7/07.

Seattle - Imagekind.com announced this week that it has partnered with Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site to launch commercial framing and photo sales for Flickr members. Seattle-based Imagekind.com, which operates an online community for creating, buying and selling physical artwork from digital files, said that Flickr members will be able to order framed copies of their own images, as well as offer them for sale to others, earning a commission on every print sold.

San Francisco - While traffic to "Web 2.0" sites -- like YouTube, Flickr and others that encourage users to upload their own media -- has increased dramatically, the percentage of these users actually contributing content to such sites remains slim, according to a new study from website ratings firm Hitwise.

On Wednesday, April 11, MySpace blocked videos and slideshows hosted by Photobucket from appearing on the site due to an apparent violation of the MySpace terms of Service agreement. Did this blockage have any effect on Photobucket's traffic, and how much traffic do the two sites share?

Sunnyvale, Calif. - Yahoo has announced plans to offer unlimited e-mail storage to its customers starting in May, upping the ante in the free e-mail space where Google offers 2.8GB for free and Microsoft 2GB.

This is a picture of my copy of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It has broken my record for the “book with most stickies.” My system is that the stickies on the top edge are ideas for my next book, and the ones on the side are ideas for this blog. As you can see, it’s a gold mine for great stories about entrepreneurship. Here is a list of some of my favorites. The major lesson: Entrepreneurship is all about tactics, hootspah, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money.