Most of us take digital photos and post them online, but we don’t all use the same services to host our photos. So while I may be able to remember how to find Marc’s photos from Tomales Bay on Kodak’s service, or navigate from my Flickr photoset to Saida’s Flickr pics, it’s impossible to get to Marc’s other photo albums on Kodak without logging in (which means you need an account there).

But what I’d really like is to be able to throw those three URL’s into some sort of picture masher that shows them all together, and which knows enough about how each service works to let me navigate to other albums, so I don’t have to remember who uses what service, or save those “view my photos” emails forever. Basically, a meta photo-sharing service. Is this already out there somewhere?

One simple hack would be for (e.g.) Flickr to let you add URL bookmarks alongside photosets - that way I could point to other (both internal and external) related photos from any set of my own. For that matter, I should be able to add “friends” or “contacts” from _outside_ of Flickr as well as inside. That would really make the network grow.

I find myself using LinkedIn more and more. Fantastic service, really. But there’s one thing missing. One big thing. Why does LinkedIn not offer the option to attach a photo to your profile? Is there some point of strategy I’m missing out on?

OK, I know that I don’t look like a hacker. But I was just at the Technorati Hackathon — (or was it Hack-a-thon?). I borrowed Rich’s PC (well, it’s actually a Mac) and did a little hacking. I learned about IRC, sortof, and Matt and I chatted about WordPress.

We were talking about tags, categories and trackback, and Matt reminded me of, TopicExchange. At first glance, TP seems like Technorati, but without the delay of crawling — but also without the benefit of search. Ahem. But it does let you view by posts and pivot on tags (categories). They have an XMLRPC interface, so WP could be set up to ping TP for each category on a new blog post. I think that I’ll do that later on…

I was thinking — would it be useful for something like Technorati to support tags/categories? It might.