If you’ve been watching my blog on a full-time basis for the past 24 hours (what? you don’t watch my blog full-time?), you may have noticed a couple of photographs that got uploaded briefly as stand-alone blog postings, and then deleted. And it may happen again, so I thought I would explain what’s going on.

Just about every cellphone today has a camera, along with email capabilities; for example, the camera on my iPhone is reasonably good, with a 2-megapixel resolution. And I’ve begun noticing many bloggers uploading photos about their activities or surroundings, so I thought I would try doing the same thing. Bottom line: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I went to the Flickr website, clicked on the “help” page, and typed a search query about “upload” and “email”; it turns out that sending a photo to a special email address will get the photo uploaded to your Flickr page right away. And it took only another moment or two to establish a linkage between Flickr and my Wordpress-based blog; now I’ve got another special email address that will route photos from my cellphone camera, via Flickr, to my blog.

I tried it out a few times last night and this morning, with inconsistent results. Sometimes the photos make it; sometimes they disappear into the Internet, never to be seen again; and sometimes I get grumpy error messages from Flickr. I’ll probably try it again at some point, but it’s more for amusement than anything else. And because it’s free, I really can’t complain to anyone that it doesn’t work perfectly, all the time.

Indeed, I suspect there’s an 80% chance that I’ll never use the photo-uploading mechanism again; about a 19% chance that I’ll use it frivolously, from time to time; and a 1% chance that it will turn out to have some important, practical application that I can’t even imagine at this point. If you multiply that by the gazillions of people with cellphone-cameras and Flickr connections, I think there’s a reasonably good chance that someone will eventually find a truly amazing application that will change the way we live our lives. I wonder what it will turn out to be …