Sometimes you can find gold nuggets in the rough. The nice thing about the web is that you can share these nuggets and everybody can benefit. Let me tell you about two that I have found recently. I enjoy travel and photography, and the web is an ideal way to make armchair visits around the globe. Unfortunately most web sites describing places are worse than useless: pictures scarcely larger than postage stamps, often lots of adds, and little useful information.
Enter Flickr and Wikipedia.
While reading an article on the BBC website about Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, I was fascinated by the stone carvings. Unfortunately the pictures on the BBC web site were too small. Now, one thing I have noticed is how useful Flickr and Wikipedia are when you want to see travel pictures of a place. Look up Rosslyn Chapel on Flickr and you will see lots of pictures taken by several people. Many of these are full resolution 2000 pixels across or larger. So if you want to look around at almost any place on the globe, just enter that name in Flickr. Most of the time you will find somebody has posted some pictures about that place, and those pictures will often give you a far better idea about the place that any tourist or commercial web site can do.
Recently an opportunity to visit the east shore in Maryland came up, and a friend suggested St Michael's as a destination. Googled web sites on St Michael's had little of interest. Then I tried St Michaels in Wikipedia - what a difference. One of the really great things about Wikipedia is that most of the pictures include links to full size images.
I don't think that using Flickr and Wikipedia as travel resources was something that could have been foreseen. But these are good examples of quite unexpected serendipitous benefits that sometimes surface.
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