First there was Myspace. It was all right, just a little too young for my 40ish self. Then I tried Facebook. Better, but still missing something.

Finally, I think I may have found a site that gives me the community aspect I am seeking along with offering the fun of sharing my passion for photography.

Flickr is hardly a new site, and I have been to it a few times in the past looking at photos from all over the world. I never really gave it a chance until I bumped into Flickr member Paul Csizmadia while shooting a feature photo of a freighter in Lorain. He got me interested by telling me about the local community of photographers who post literally thousands of images on the site.

I used my free membership to try it out, but quickly upgraded to a Pro membership level because it offers a stats package. (Why, you may ask? Well, there’s just something fun about knowing what people are looking at, and that’s what the stats package offers.)

Aside from the stats package, there are a few other really cool features Flickr offers. One of them is safe viewing. Depending on the viewing level you select, images that might be considered offensive are blocked out. If you choose to view them, you have to click on the image and choose to look at it.

There are also varying levels of copyright protection. You can put pictures out there for people to take and use as they see fit, or you can completely lock them down and protest your copyright.

Finally, the upload process is drag and drop. You don’t have to have a degree in computer science to put the photos online.

Give it a shot, and add me to your contact list so I can see what you are doing, too.

On the list of the most subversive office Web sites of all time is hulu.com. If your I.T. person doesn’t have this site blocked, good for you. If you haven’t heard about hulu yet, let me enlighten you.

Hulu was started in March 2007 by NBC Univeral and Media Corp. These powerhouse companies decided to bring free programming to the Web and there currently are more than 50 content providers putting up top flight content.

Just to name a few of the big dogs in the project; NBC, Universal, Fox, Bravo, USA, even the WWE weighs in with its wrestling programming.

And if you don’t think this site is a treasure trove, think again.

There’s the old stuff — Dragnet, Major Dad, even the Rockford Files live on via the Web site. Heck, in a pinch, an episode of The Big Valley will get anyone through a young Linda Evans withdrawal.

The top five shows on the site are Family Guy, The Office, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Arrested Development.

For Saturday Night Live, there are an amazing 379 clips, 79 commercial parodies, 44 of the SNL Shorts, and 98 of the news and politics segments.

I feel like the Ginsu Knife guy, so please excuse me….but if that’s not enough, they also have movies. The collection of films isn’t really as great as the TV lineup, but hey it’s free and you have eight hours to kill until you punch out and go home. (I’m only saying this because there’s no way in a heck a busy photog like me gets to do it, but I envision someone, somewhere tucked away in a cubicle, passing the day by watching TV on their computer).

With a picture of the site and links

I covered the opening of a new business in Amherst on Tuesday. The little bookstore is located at 132 Park Ave. in Amherst, Ohio. Owner Debbie Born of Elyria opened Roxy’s Reads & Remnants with a goal of success even though she knows the odds are stacked against her.

The inspiring part is she knows just how hard it’s really going to be. How does the little guy compete against multimillion, even multibillion dollar, competitors?

I admit that I oftentimes am a big box store consumer. I don’t spend the amount of time and money shopping locally that I should. That’s a two-pronged failure on my part. First, I am the world’s worst procrastinator. When I need something, it’s because I was supposed to buy it a month ago. The second problem is my weakness for impulse purchases. I once spent an afternoon shopping for an electric guitar. Mind you, I don’t own a guitar, don’t know how to play a guitar, and until that particular afternoon I never even wanted a guitar. But for some reason on that given day, there I was shopping for a guitar.

At least when it comes to browsing for books, I’m a little bit better. It’s something I like to do for fun. I spend a lot of time at Borders in Westlake. And until this particular assignment, I never really thought about local bookstores. And that made me realize I need to – I need to do more to help my fellow local business owners. (Aside from my job at The Chronicle, I have my own business, too.)

As consumers, we need to think local when we make our purchases. And just off the top of my head, I can think of some people that do a great job and can sometimes be cheaper than the big guys.

For example, I buy almost all of my photography gear from Loomis Camera in Elyria. They aren’t always cheaper, and they don’t always everything in stock. What they do have are some crusty salesmen who have been around since pictures were drawn on cave walls. They know the answer to almost any question, they work with you when you have a problem, and they are interesting. When is the last time you went to a big store and had an interesting conversation with an employee?

So as a result of this eye-opening assignment, I’m going to make it my personal goal to help out the little guys whenever I can. Does that mean I’ll avoid the big boxes? No. But if I can buy at either place, I think I’ll choose the little guy if possible. After all, they are regular folks just trying to do something they love, and it doesn’t hurt if they can manage to make the car payment, too.

The new Blackberry Bold, 9000 — the talk of the Internet for months — has been officially introduced by RIM, the Canadian-based mobile technology company.

The new phone once was reportedly codenamed AK, for Apple Killer, but whether it lives up to the name or not, who knows? But the 3G technology certainly has the potential to take a bite out of the Apple iPhone, the phone by which all others have been judged since it was introduced.

Blackberry has been the staple of the white collar set for a long time, and the 9000 has all the features a true power user needs along with the fun things like a decent camera, video, and enough memory to actually keep multimedia on the phone. With the effort to make the phone useful as well as entertaining, RIM is making inroads in the consumer market.

In the past week, pictures of another Blackberry, the clamshell-style phone called the Kickstart, surfaced on tech blogs. If this phone is the real deal, it’s one more step toward a new market for Blackberry. This cool little phone has all the advantages of the corporate phones, but it includes the style and usability of the phones favored by the younger demographic.

My days of pining away for an iPhone may have passed, but be sure the guys at Apple are not far away from releasing the next generation of their monster success.

I’m not much of a musical theater guy, but it sure looks like a lot of people were yesterday. The hot search term for the day on the Google Hot Trends is the Tony Awards.

If you want to find out the best play nominees or the best book adaptation check out http://www.tonyawards.com/en_US/nominees/index.html

The show will be broadcast June 15 at 8p.m. on CBS.

At least I have a month to get cultured up before the show airs and the winners are announced.