Neither. I was following your learned discussions with deep intellectual interest. 

The pictures helped though.    

Yes, but you do point out one possible drawback with the whole idea of linking to flickr, automated or otherwise.

The link goes to one picture, but then allows you to browse all of that person's pictures. People posting links do need to consider this carefully - they may be revealing more than they had originally intended! This could be particularly relevant when linking to a photo in someone else's collection.

But yes, it is fun!

Yeah.  I think that is a lesson people are learning in a very hard way at the moment with so much of their personal information on line.

I think the LJ Crush-meme is probably the best example of that!

But surely the whole point of flickr is to let people, and in particular people you don't know, see your pictures? It's all about exposure. If you have more personal pics on there you need to make them private or 'friends only' or whatever. Or use facebook.

Linking back to the original pics is part of the Flickr 'community guidelines' (which I'm guessing doesn't bear the same weight as their terms of use?). Personally I'd much rather anyone using my pics somewhere on the net include a link back to my flickr profile. Even if used in a context that I perhaps would not condone.

If a photos is marked as "all rights reserved" does posting it to a forum like this constitute "fair use"?

Man.  I want a barcamp T-Shirt.  Unfortunately I was darrn 'saaf.

Kelly, Tamlyn; you are both perfectly correct in what you say. The danger arises when people don't fully appreciate the implications of what they are doing. It's all too easy to post that highly amusing photo from the stag night to share with your friends (& the bride's mother of course), then 6 month's later post a work related photo & link to that.

The boss then sees what you really look like tied to a lamp post stark b***ock naked.

As everyone who works in CS knows, there are just so many people out there who know a little, but just not quite enough.

It does give the rest of us a bit of a chuckle from time to time though - until the day we forget what we posted too!

Actually Lucy Buykx did a discussion on this very subject at Barcamp. She described how she picked a random user off the twitter home page and followed his trail to discover who he was, what he did, where he lived and that he was currently on a transatlantic flight to the US!

Once the 'bad guys' cotton on to this wealth of potentially lucrative information, some careless users will be in for a nasty shock.

Like the first rule of the simple code of blogging says: