It’s not news that the internet has changed how we get information, but many people who aren’t techies or are over the age of 30 may not know about some mainstream web services out there that allow any person to disseminate his or her perspective of events to the general public.  A perfect case in point is the online photo sharing site Flickr which was purchased by Yahoo! a while back and how it is being used by photographers to get out pictures from the war zone in Lebanon.

For those not familiar with Flickr think of it as an online photo album that anyone can use for free and upload pictures that can either be made private or can be shared with the world at large.  What made Flickr revolutionary when it first launched is that it allows users to "tag" each photo with descriptive words which means that anyone can search for photos by those tags.  So if you want to find photos with the tag ‘lebanon’ you simply visit Flickr and use the search field and type in ‘lebanon’.  Here’s a string of Lebanon photos from a user named "arabist", but please be forewarned that there are some graphic photos there so don’t look if you’re squeamish.

Flickr is just one example of how a seemingly simple mass-market service can totally upend a traditional information paradigm.  It continues to be fascinating to me to watch how our traditional news and information purveyors adjust to their new environment of an audience that is increasingly attracted by other information sources and of course there’s a lot of debate about what it means to traditional media outlets, but I’m convinced it’s better for us as a society to be able to get as many images, or perspectives if you will, in addition to the traditional filter provided by the traditional media outlets.

Update: Here’s the blog of a BBC journalist in Beirut and it uses another free web service (Blogger, owned by Google) and here’s his Flickr stream.