I’ve had a Flickr account since 2008. My own photostream sits past 4,800 photos now, and for a long stretch of that history it wasn’t just a place I put my own pictures. In February 2009 I wrote a HOWTO on this blog about posting straight from a Nokia S60 phone to Flickr, because, as I put it at the time, “a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching.” I wasn’t a bystander watching open education discover Flickr. I was helping build the on-ramp for it, in a professional life spent almost entirely in EdTech, first at DETAFE, then building learning management systems at Brightcookie for over a decade.

Then, in 2011, I wrote a different kind of post on this blog, “Facebook - good riddance!”, deleting my account and declaring myself done with a company I’d never trusted. I illustrated it with a Creative Commons photo pulled straight off Flickr, credited to a photographer going by cogdogblog. That habit, reaching for a CC-licensed Flickr image whenever this blog needs one, has held for 15 years since, and it’s still the workflow described in this site’s own editorial instructions today.

This isn’t that kind of post. I’m not celebrating anything.