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.

There may be many good reasons to own an iPhone from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). Although I still haven't gotten my hands on one, I have been able to get a good look at some of what the device can do. Perhaps these aren't the ten best reasons, but they are ten good ones.

To the best of my knowledge, all of the photo gallery images that I'm providing here for you have been sent using the iPhone. Though I'm impressed, I did notice that the iPhone image quality declines slightly as light levels decrease, but it still does remarkably well for a phone. Yes folks, the attached gallery pictures were sent by mobile phones.

The gallery images are all at original resolutions and are all unretouched. If it is true that we can now take digital images of this quality and instantly download them to our favorite picture manager as well as e-mail them to anywhere in the world that we choose, it is my opinion that the makers of memory cards for digital cameras had better be working on some new product ideas, because I'm guessing that image data storage has just taken a turn for the best.

Please do enjoy the gallery.

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.