NICK DOUGLAS — Yahoo will shut down its popular photo sharing service in favor of the smaller but growing (and more snazzy) Flickr, which it bought in 2005, says TechCrunch. (The cool news: Yahoo will help users export their photos not just into Flickr, but into Photobucket, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Kodak Gallery.) As blogger Thomas Hawk pointed out, Valleywag reported this as "unannounced fact" in February, but Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield said not to "put a lot of stock" in our reporting. You nearly got us there, Stewart! Photo: Indoloony

Earlier this week, Flickr's fleet of image cache servers went temporarily insane, returning random images from the cache rather than individual users' proper pics. For some, this was just a mystifying annoyance, but a significant number of Flickr users had porn served into their personal photostreams. Many thus afflicted were only confused (blame Digg!), while others got a little freaked. Says one: "I was concerned because I don't want any of my visitors coming through and finding pictures of somebody's crotch, quite frankly." It's the "quite frankly" that shows she's serious, right? Anyway, I'd be curious if there's any data out there regarding just how much of Flickr is porn these days. The UK versions gets significant porn-hunting traffic from search engines. Anyone know how things stand in the U.S.?

Regarding Thomas Hawk getting referral traffic from a private Flickr forum discussing the possible Flickr-Yahoo Photos consolidation:

Thomas Hawk (CEO of Flickr competitor Zooomr) riffed on our prediction that Yahoo Photos would be terminated, with the possible coda of having its users and content ported to Flickr. Most of the reaction from Hawk and elsewhere focuses not on the demise of Yahoo Photos, but rather on the idea of a great unwashed mob of Yahoo Photos' casual snapshooters invading the pristine arty confines of Flickr. As a possible clue, Hawk tells us that his post on the issue is getting a lot of referral traffic from a private Flickr Central forum, where Flickr staff and a few admins talk shop. Know what's going on in there? Say so.

Time to upgrade this from rumor to unannounced fact — that's our bet, anyway. "Consolidation" was the word seized upon most in Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse's "Peanut Butter Manifesto." And consolidating the duplicate services provided by post-acquisition Flickr and Yahoo Photos makes sense. Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield denied there would be any merging, but that doesn't rule out "consolidation" by way of elimination. For the whys and wherefores, read on.When we predicted that competing products like Flickr and Yahoo Photos would be consolidated, Butterfield reassured nervous Flickr fans:

After the western attention, a little love for the east. Dodgeball founder and Google purchasee Dennis Crowley chronicles various delicacies from the Google NYC cafeteria. Sadly, this organic PB&J with M&Ms contains no meat. See also New York City tap water and lobster mac & cheese.

NICK DOUGLAS — A Business 2.0 blogger yesterday blew up Google's tweaked Zeitgeist (which tracks gainers, not top searches). He also deconstructed the PR-friendly "top" lists made by AOL and Yahoo (revealed: AOL's real top searchword is "google"). But what are the top searches on sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, and Craigslist?

Citizen journalists! Throw off your chains. And put on these nice new chains provided by Reuters and Yahoo!, who would like to absorb your content for free into their You Witness News aggregator. Submit photos (via Yahoo's Flickr) or video, and perhaps Yahoo! will incorporate them into their newsfeeds. Reuters might even do the same if your pics and flicks are really good. And if everyone agrees, maybe they'll even deign to pay you a little bit of something. No particular ideas on how any of this might work, though there's a poignant quote from just-defenestrated Yahoo! exec Lloyd Braun in this New York Times article from earlier in the week. Two days after launch, YWN hosts barely a dozen photos harvested from Flickr, plus a couple slideshows. Judging by the similarly anemic CNN effort ("Exchange"), it looks like "citizen journalism" suffers from the same disinterested malaise afflicting citizens in general. May be a clever ploy by Reuters to destroy citizen journalism by handing it to meme-killer Yahoo, in which case we say, good job.

If you don't instantly recognize this image, then you're obviously not familiar with the goatse phenomenon, for which you should be extremely grateful. If you've already been corrupted, however, you'll be grimly pleased to note its appearance in Park Slope, land of gaping assholes.

A news site quotes News Corp COO Peter Chernin saying Flickr, YouTube, and all the other popular content-sharing sites from the last few years are just suckling at the MySpace teat.

• Beavis: Hey this man's computers catch fire and he's having a "Fireside Chat" in the Technology Pavilion. Butthead: Huh, huh, huh. [Consumerist]

You want yer meta, do you? So here you go. Photog Atomische contributed the above shot to the Gawker photo pool on Flickr, depicting New York Times photog Marilyn K. Yee capturing the bloom on that stinky Brooklyn corpse flower everyone's (well, "everyone's") talking about. After the jump, enjoy Yee's actual vulval photo taken during the session above.

Last Friday Thursday night's gullywasher rainstorm predictably slowed or paralyzed several New York subway lines and stations; among others, the 125th Street station on the green line was blacked out from a lightning strike, and water flooded several tunnels and platforms. Gothamist brings us this fine commemoration of what it's like to stand next to a veritable torrent of crapwater, filtered through several rarefying layers of Penn Station infrastructure.

So far, the latest top-level engineer to leave Technorati has only announced his move in his Flickr photos. Ben Jenkins handled Flickr photo integration handled all CSS and HTML for the blog search company; now he's heading to Yahoo's Flickr team.

No matter how much we kid the Gothamists, we're the first to declare that head Gothamista Jake Dobkin is a helluva lensman. Not only did he capture and reconstruct this excellent panorama of the Guggenheim Museum during the recent exhibition by architect Zaha Hadid, but he did so while avoiding capture and execution by the Goog's ever-watchful anti-photo fascists. Someday we'll indulge our fantasy of dumping a load of superballs down that curvy ramp, docents be damned.

In a long overdue move, we're casting our wide net into the vortex of visual inanity known as Flickr by establishing an official Gawker photo pool. The unmoderated, public group is open to submissions concerning our usual favorite subjects — Manhattan and New York, celebrity sightings, news, gossip, and poontang. We expect the pool to get immediately stuffed with hooker ads and cute cats/babies in no time, but we'll periodically dredge the shallows to see if anything of interest floats up. Just like a cult, the rules are simple — join and submit.

Continuing today's ethnic humor theme, and coming to a sharpie-defaced poster near you: Borat backlash. Because satirically clueless, inbred, rural characters are only appropriate when targeting American hillbillies.

Entries are in for the subversive Flickr art contest, Valleywag's rip-off of Flickr's own "color our logo" art contest.

• The "color the Flickr dots" contest closes tonight. Color in the two circles on the photo sharing site's new error message. Upload your art to Flickr and tag it "valleywag". The funniest artist (maybe Prentiss Riddle, whose entry is shown here) wins a Flickr pro account and a Valleywag comment account.

Amused by the double-D error message on Flickr, the director of research at web analytics company Hitwise showed me what searches drive the most traffic to Flickr: