YAHOO!, for those of you too young to remember, used to be the Google of its day.

There was a time when Yahoo! was the company making all the cool web stuff, all the headlines and generally ruling the internet roost. But Google swept all that aside.

Last week, the company abruptly fired its CEO Carol Bartz, only 75 days after giving her a vote of confidence. Pundits wondered aloud where Yahoo!’s inventive spirit had gone.

It’s not gone anywhere. Yahoo! is still coming up with great ideas, the most recent of which is part of photo sharing site Flickr (www.flickr.com).

The idea’s called Geofences and works because so many people are using their smartphones as cameras these days (Apple’s iPhone 4 is the most popular camera among Flickr users now).

Smartphones automatically store location data with the photos you take. That data gets uploaded to Flickr with the photo so Flickr knows exactly where the picture was taken.

With Geofences active, you can set a magic ‘fence’ around the photos you take at a specific place so that only certain people will see them.

Pictures you take at home will only be visible to your family. Snaps you take at work will only be visible to your colleagues.

It’s an ingenious idea because it takes something automatic and turns it to our advantage.

It could also be expanded beyond privacy settings. Flickr could turn certain locations into hotspots that generate specific tags on your photos. Or how about a game where, to win the prize, you have to go somewhere and snap something before someone else does?

THE NEW RENAISSANCE

According to writer and thinker Ben Hammersley (www.benhammersley.com), we’re living through a vitally important time in human history, a moment just as big as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It’s the moment where the generation that grew up not really understanding the internet begins to hand over power to the generation that grew up with it. Hammersley gave a speech on the subject which you can read in full at goo.gl/5fDIL.

BROWSING AROUND... DICTIONARIES

:: Snappy Words visual dictionary

www.snappywords.com

:: The (computer) Jargon File

catb.org/jargon/

:: American dictionary

education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/

THING OF THE WEEK

:: Bee beards!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O84fRLVyLY0