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I first took up a camera around the age of nine, but it wasn't until I discovered Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO)'s Flickr photo-sharing site that my "career" in photography really took off. While I'm certainly not hitting the runways of Milan with my Pentax PZ-1P anytime soon, this year I sold several photographs and permitted dozens of others to use my work under the Creative Commons license with which I offer my photos. (My choice is a non-commercial attribution license; as I use many of my photos for work, here on BloggingStocks, I'd hate to see rivals utilizing them as well.)

After extensive conversations with IP attorneys and other authorities in the industry, and given my responsibility of overseeing the use of thousands of photos each year, my grasp of all the legal issues surrounding commercial use of intellectual property is deep. One of the thorniest issues is that of what's called "model release," in other words, if someone's IN your photo, can you still use it?

Just in case you needed one more example of litigious stupidity, here it is. It seems that a Dallas family has filed suit against the Australian, Virgin Mobile communications company over the allegedly improper use of a photo gleaned from the Flikr photo sharing site, as reported by Associated Press. That's "photo sharing" as in, here's my picture to look at and use.

Stupid part one is that the advertising company that created the visual advertising mechanisms which are allegedly making questionable use of a girl's photo should have a general idea about what materials they're using, where they came from and what conditions surround those materials, such as rights and restrictions. They still teach about copyright in advertising school right? Just in case they don't, Flickr has a really understandable explanation of creative commons license right there on its site. It's by the photos. Advertising guys from Australia should probably read that.

In the now-famous Saturday Night Live digital short "Lazy Sunday," released in December 2005, Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg note that "Google Maps is the best - true that - double true!" Never has this affirmation been more ... well ... true.

At 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time today, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) introduced new features to its popular navigation service, allowing its users to personalize routes with text, pictures, and YouTube videos. The new service, called My Maps, includes more than 100 mini-applications, or "Maplets" that enable users to highlight cheap gas prices, provide weather reports, or seek real-estate information, which comes complete with local crime statistics.

Amateur photos from Yahoo's (NASDAQ: YHOO) Flickr service can be accessed through one feature. The new service also allows users to easily share maps and travel routes with friends, families (or stalkers).

CNNMoney quoted Google Maps product manager as noting that "We are putting the Web into maps."

To explore these new features, visit Google Maps and click on the new "My Maps" tab to get started.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research.

Web 2.0, a web for sharing content among individuals, attracted over a quarter of a billion worth of venture capital in the first half of 2006 alone.

Some Web 2.0 start ups have made serious money for their founders. YouTube's founders pocketed $1.65 billion in 2006 when they sold out to Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG); Flickr's founders took home an undisclosed amount -- estimated between $15 million and $35 million -- selling to Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) in 2005; and in 2005 MySpace's founders made $580 million selling to News Corp. (NYSE: NWS).

Here are some questions that came to my mind about Web 2.0:

• What is Web 2.0?
• How popular is it?
• Who is making money off it?
• How is it leaping the synapse from start-up to incumbent?
• What are its risks and opportunities for business?
• Where is it heading?

Click here for some thoughts on these questions. What am I missing? What do you think?

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned in this post.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) figures it is not in enough businesses already, so it plans to offer a high-definition photo [subscription required] format to the world's camera industry. The old standard, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression format, has been around awhile and may not be able to break down photos into small files as well as Microsoft can.

The move by MSFT is not unlike the one that it made into the video world five years ago. It offered its Windows Media video compression in place of the old MPEG-2 standard for breaking down video files for transmission.

Moving photos around the internet is a big business. Companies like PhotoBucket and Flickr would not exist if photos could not be broken down digitally and sent over IP. The Microsoft product offers the opportunity to do this with less bandwidth usage than the JPEG format.

There is a lot at stake. Research firm NPD Group said that digital camera sales hit $6.9 billion in 2006. The new software could be a blessing for that industry.

Microsoft does not want money for the new technology; it is part of Vista. The world's largest software company thinks this might drive consumers to adopt Vista faster. It may be right.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

The sharing of videos on YouTube and images on Flickr is an indication -- says the Economist -- of bad news for Microsoft Corp.'s(NASDAQ:MSFT) upcoming Windows Vista release. The widespread use of e-mail, spreadsheets and Internet-based software is a sign that "more PCs now talk to one another using open standards rather than proprietary ones," making operating systems less relevant.

Microsoft is hoping to offset this trend by working with open-software firms like Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL), and with initiatives like Office Live, which helps small businesses create websites; and Windows Live, a search engine/e-mail service extraordinaire.

Vista, the latest version of Microsoft's operating system, will be released on January 30th. And while customers will be able to purchase and download the software online, it is expected that most will buy the shrink-wrapped boxes in a store, like the old days. We will see, however, if the lines stretch as long as the last Windows release.

B. Brandon Barker is the author of Operation EMU

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) purchased Mybloglog.com for $10-$12 million according to different sources. Mybloglog.com of Orlando, Florida started out as a statistical data service for web page and blog owners -- which is when I first signed up -- but then launched its Communities service and evolved into a blog social network. Today, MyBlogLog enables readers and writers of web pages and blogs to communicate, building social networks and communities much like News Corp's (NYSE:NWS) MySpace.

MyBlogLog only started its Communities not too long ago, but it grew quite fast with the help of a few A-List bloggers such as TechCrunch and Lifehacker who signed up for the service. Currently, MyBlogLog is available on about 45,000 blogs and has about 33,000 registered readers. The service looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day, with technology and real estate subjects among the most popular.

While the social network part is more valuable to future growth according to both Yahoo! and MyBlogLog, Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog, thinks that given his company's statistical monitoring service, it could also sell information to advertisers about where to advertise what. This can become more significant as the company grows.

My ongoing question is whether Yahoo!'s strategy of buying small businesses such as del.icio.us and MyBlogLog as opposed to buying large, established networks such as Facebook is working for the Internet media giant. It's a strategy that worked well with Flickr, but del.icio.us is still growing and I guess we'll have to wait and see MyBlogLog's eventual contribution.

[Here's the announcement in Yodel.]

Several years ago when Web 2.0 companies such as Flickr.com and MySpace hit the market there was lots of talk of how there would great growth opportunities.

Well it's still hard to find highly profitable companies in the Web 2.0 world.

Perhaps, the business model is how these companies are able to capture venture capital?

This week, Dow Jones' VentureOne released a new study on Web 2.0 fundings. So far this year there have been 49 financings for a total of $262.3 million. Keep in mind that for 2005 there were 51 deals, amounting to $199.1 million.

It's kind of tough to define Web 2.0. But VentureOne has a definition: a company with "a business model that revolves around a dynamic interface facilitating participation through such methods as user-created content, networking, and collaboration." This usually means using things like tagging, blogs, social networking, mashups, podcasting, and wikis. Oh, it also means using such cool technologies as RSS and AJAX.

Compared to other sectors, Web 2.0 financings are still a small part of the VC landscape. In 2006, VCs have invested about $13 billion. However, Web 2.0 has managed to get a tremendous amount of PR. So, the space looks a lot bigger than it really is.

Looking at this, we can see Web 2.0 is still in the early stages. But if Facebook does sell for a high price tag to Yahoo, expect the fundings in the Web 2.0 space to go wild.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

People power is driving real growth on the Web, according to a recent report from Nielsen//NetRatings. That is, five out of the ten fastest growing Web brands rely primarily on user-generated content – which is an amalgam of things like videos, pictures, and blog posts.

There are the usual suspects. Yea, MySpace is on the list, which had an 183% year-over-year surge in growth (in terms of unique visitors). Actually, this is an amazing feat, given the fact the site already had a huge base. Hmmm....maybe Google's decision to plunk down $900 million was a good thing.

Another barn-burner was Wikipedia. It clocked a 181% annual explosion in unique visitors. Yahoo's Flickr was a standout, with 201% annual growth (the site now has 6.3 million unique visitors).

There are also some not-so-well known companies, like ImageShack (233% growth) and Heavy.com (213%).

Hey, but it's not just scrappy and cool Web 2.0 firms that are benefiting from this trend.

After listening to a talk by the brilliant and peppy Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr and now-Yahoo! employee, on Friday, I was intrigued to see an interview with Yahoo!'s VP for product strategy (the guy who makes the deals), Bradley Horowitz, about what the entrepreneurial tech firm is looking to buy next [WSJ subscription required].

He mentioned that his team looks at hundreds of pitches each week, while he ends up seeing only "dozens" of them and still so many of the products have the same pitch: "it's the next Flickr!" they all say. He's surprised at the number of "Computer Science 101 projects" that come across his desk -- i.e., companies that are both obvious and simplistic.

He's looking for people ("in it for the right reason" and "passionate about their product") more than he is product, but he's unclear as to what sort of product he might invest in. When you think about it, Yahoo! already had photo sharing before it bought Flickr. The next big thing for Yahoo!? Just might be more of the same, but with really cool folks attached to it. After all, haven't all the really great ideas already been invented?

Sarah Gilbert has a Wharton MBA and worked in investment banking for several years, then at a series of increasingly edgy startups before finding her calling, producing blogs for AOL. She doesn't own stock in Yahoo!.

Photo courtesy Horowitz' colleague Stewart Butterfield.

I'm attending the 2006 Blogher Conference in San Jose, California, and many of the net femarati are here. I just finished listening to an enlightening talk by the co-founder of Blogger (now owned by Google), Meg Hourihan, and the co-founder of flickr (now owned by Yahoo!), Caterina Fake. Moderator Marnie Webb pointed out that both of the products for which the two speakers are famous, were accidental by-products of their respective companies' original mission.

Fake was working with her co-founders on a role-playing game, while Hourihan was working on project management software. Declaring the concept of a stealth period "dead," the flickr co-founder mentioned that user feedback was central in determining how the photo sharing software would be shaped; and Hourihan echoed that sentiment with regards to the very useful blogging software her company, Pyra, developed just for fun. "If we had started out to create a photo sharing site, it never would have happened," said Fake. "We would have done market research, and discovered that all the money was in on-demand printing, and that took too much capital investment, and we'd never make money. We would have decided it wasn't worth it."

It's quite an interesting detail of product history and it's amazing to think how many great, world-changing products were accidental. What's more, it's worth considering from a management strategy point of view: how does a company encourage its employees to invest time in offshoots of the central strategy, and then fail to analyze those happy accidents to death? Are big companies forever destined to buy these providential mistakes simply because they never would have made sense, had they been "product developed"? Even Google, king of the entrepreneurial, "throw it up against the wall and see what sticks" spirit, had to buy Blogger. Which companies are best positioned to find and care for accidental successes?

I recently wrote a BloggingStocks post about Yahoo's recent deal with Zillow, an online real estate company. My take was that the deal was a sign that Yahoo is getting serious about mining its huge amount of data. The data, in fact, is getting much more interesting with such new social networking properties as Flickr, Del.icio.us and so on.

Well, this week, Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, who will become a vice president and Yahoo research fellow. He is certainly a brain, having worked as a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin and co-founded the Data Mining Institute. There is also a scholarly paper trail, with over 150 technical papers, as well as a definitive book on data mining, Database Management Systems.

Although, he does venture into the real world. In the late 1990s, for example, he co-founded a collaborative software company, called QUIQ.

You can get more detail on him at his web site.

Basically, his mandate will be to push "social search." Think of this as leveraging the "wisdom of crowds."

That is, as user-generated-content grows – with things like videos, blogging and even Yahoo Answers – search is ready for major change. True, Google's PageRank is solid, but it will probably not be the method for the long haul.

So, while Microsoft and Yahoo greatly lag Google in the search game, there is still hope. And, it probably lies in academics who are pioneering data mining.

Today, Shutterfly filed to go public. Founded in 1999, the company is now a leader in Web-based publishing of digital photos for consumers (allowing such things as editing, sharing, and printing).

Shutterfly's revenue model is to sell high-quality prints. In fact, to ensure quality control, the company has its own manufacturing facility in Hayward, California.

Another key advantage of the Shutterfly model is that content costs are practically nothing (the company's users create the content by uploading pictures).  Also, because people want to share photos with others, Shutterfly has a viral distribution model.  In May, the site attracted 4.1 million unique visitors.

Up until now, online photo companies have been selling out to major companies, like Yahoo! (bought Flickr) and Google (bought Picasa). In other words, Shutterfly faces intense competition.

I think it is generally recognized that the Web 2.0 world loves flickr, with its viral, community-focused fun and its AJAXerrific cool. But a recent report from Hitwise shows that flickr is a distant sixth in terms of market share, at just less than 6%, beaten handily by 44% dominator PhotoBucket (the company's competitive strategy: be a storage backend for users who wish to post photos to MySpace), and even by the far less sexy service of flickr's parent, Yahoo! Photos, at 18% (in second place). Webshots Community, Kodakgallery.com (formerly Ofoto.com), and ImageShack all rank ahead of flickr in terms of market share.

There's a story here, that flickr may seem cool but it's not even a big deal in the traffic big dogs. I don't know if I buy it. LeAnn Prescott, who blogs the market share charts, notes the MySpace strategy of PhotoBucket and mentions that three photo sharing sites in the top 10 are getting the vast majority of their traffic from the teen-centric social network, including Imageshack and Slide.

It's all about the growth of the platform, and the longevity of the business strategy. As a hard-core photo enthusiast who lives and breathes Web 2.0, I've used most of the non-MySpace services. I did Webshots Community, then I switched to Ofoto, and when Kodak bought it I was using Yahoo! Pictures and my own web site. And then I discovered flickr. Now I have 1,859 photos uploaded there. I think that I -- an early adopter who has already convinced any number of friends, family, and colleagues to switch to flickr -- am a fair indicator that the prospects for flickr are good. I have to wonder if PhotoBucket and others who rely so much on one source of traffic.

There it is: the real question. Is that one source a long-term play? Will MySpace still be rocking and rolling in three, five, 10 years? I doubt it. I'd put my money on the technology and monetization potential of flickr anyday.

Yahoo! and Netscape, oh my! Both are diving head first into the concept of "social search," integrating the mysterious ranking systems of the search engine with the cool democratic nature of the social bookmarking site. As Time Warner was preparing to launch its beta version of the new Netscape, Yahoo! was talking about integrating del.icio.us and flickr, two very very grassroots-y and user-driven properties, with the unknowable algorithms behind its search engine.

Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! says his social search will "tap the untapped authority of users" while Jonathan Miller of Netscape says "We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better."

These ideas are good and pretty but I have to wonder: how is this any different from how Google has given more weight to blogs in its search engines? How is this different from giving weight to incoming links (which are the most democratic of all democracies)? Yahoo! thinks I am the untapped authority, but really, I'm quite respectably tapped with some 8000 visitors a day to my personal blog: all through the power of my content. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg, other bloggers who fit the category are cashing checks from Google every month.

It's all lovely, and fun, and a good idea. But social search is just a new way of creating a network effect, and the end result will be no different whether you're getting popular through votes or links from your ever-expanding group of friends.