I started posting on Flickr in 2006 after visiting the Flickr site of a coworker. She had posted some photos she took on vacation and had given me the link so I could see them. It occurred to me that Flickr would be a good way for me to share my vacation photos with my family--it would save me from e-mailing duplicate copies of pics to many different accounts.

Then in 2007 someone I hadn't been in touch with for years contacted me here. He had a Flickr account, too. At first, I thought, wtf? Why is he looking at photos of my family? He didn't know any of the people in my pics. And they aren't terribly good pics, either.

But I gave a courtesy look at his account and then I found he had contacts on Flickr and I looked at their photos and I noticed they contributed to groups, and I looked those photos, too. And I realized that, oh my God, there are lots of other people on Flickr! And they're looking at each other's photos!

There was a whole lot of interactivity here that I had been oblivious to. I had thought of Flickr as a place to deposit photos so that people I already knew could view them. It just never occurred to me that there was more to the site.

Since then, I've found contacts of my own, joined lots of groups, looked at many, many photos, and interacted on a variety of levels with a whole bunch of people here. Yeah, welcome to Web 2, Kim.