Service of the Day - Photo Sharing Sites (Google's Picasa vs. Yahoo's Flickr)

As social media and sharing continues to become more important and more common, photo sharing has been very popular, if not as widely discussed as Twitter and FaceBook-style link and status sharing. In olden times, photo sharing consisted of handing 4x6 prints around or (!) forcing people to sit through an actual slideshow ... with real physical slides. Very quaint. But now, you can upload your photos for private storage and/or sharing them with friends, family, or absolute strangers, all via the web.

Photography is one of my favorite hobbies, and I am trying to decide between two of the main competing photo sharing and storage services, namely Google's Picasa (Picasaweb) and Yahoo's Flickr. I've been using Picasa for private sharing with family and friends, but Flickr is probably a more common tool. However, Flickr was purchased by Yahoo, and they haven't exactly been treating it like the prime property that it is.

Since I've been unable to decide on my own, I thought I might ask for your advice. Which do you prefer? If you use one (or bother) of the services, I'd love to hear what you think. And I'm including links to a pair of test galleries for you to look at to see how things work:

• Google Picasa Test Album - Italy Trip
• Yahoo Flickr Test Set - Italy Trip

John's Service of the Day: Star Trek (TOS) on YouTube

Image via Wikipedia

In addition to silly non-geeky videos, YouTube also holds great value for the geek. You may not know this, but the entirety of the original series of Star Trek are available legally on YouTube. Because of this wonderful geeky goodness, I have made Star Trek (TOS) on YouTube my inaugural "Service of the Day".

To help get you started, here is the first episode (after the pilot): The Man Trap from September 8, 1966. Amazing what they were creating then.