The app utilizes images from Flickr to show current local conditions.

Yahoo Director of Mobile and Emerging Products, Marco Wirasinghe, says, “Inside you’ll find stunning snapshots of weather around the world. With a tilt of your phone, get lost scrolling through photos reflecting the current weather in places that matter to you. We like to think of it as flipping through a stack of postcards from your travels. It’s easy to get the details. Tap the temperature for a quick view of the forecast or scroll down for precipitation, wind and pressure, a radar map, and more.”

“Our goal is to have amazing photos for every weather condition that cover the globe — morning, afternoon, and night — across every city in the world, and we want your help,” Wirasinghe adds. “Whether you’re simply a daydreamer or an avid photographer, submit photos of your favorite places to our Flickr Group and your image can be seen by tens of millions in Yahoo! Weather for iPhone.”

The app is available in 30 languages, and can be found in the App Store.

More on the Flickr blog.

The Guardian reports that North Korea’s Twitter and flickr accounts have been compromised by hackers claiming to be a part of Anonymous. The reasoning behind the attacks seems to be in retaliation to North Korea’s most recent threat to attack the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons. In fact, one of the images posted on flickr calls out North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un for “threatening world peace with ICBMs and nuclear weapons” among other things.

Other images on the flickr account include an image of the North Korean flag with a Guy Fawkes mask, and a simple “We Are Anonymous” in white text on a black background.

The Twitter hack is far less entertaining, however, as the only updates to it thus far have been multiple messages that say “hacked” while linking to North Korean Web sites that have been taken down by Anonymous.

Unlike other recent hacks, I doubt that North Korea will try to wrestle away its accounts from Anonymous. I highly doubt that Twitter and flickr are in the mood to help them get the accounts back either.

Yep, Flickr for iOS now has hashtag support. You can addd hashtags to any photo’s title of description, and like hashtag functionality in any other app, clicking on the tag will open up a search of other photos on the service with the same hashtag.

Version 2.11.820 also allows iOS users to participate in Flickr’s weekly photo challenge, #FlickrFriday.

You still won’t find any “hashtags” on Flickr on the web – it’s still just “tags.” And any current web tags don’t translate to clickable hashtags on the iOS app. It look like for now, this shift toward hashtags is a mobile-only venture for Flickr.

In other hashtag news, anyone popular social service may be adding them in the near future. Recent reports said that Facebook is working on incorporating the hashtag.

You can grab the new Flickr for iOS today.

First up, Flickr photo uploading is now faster:

Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to optimize uploads, but also start uploading in the background while you think about the photo’s title or where you want to share it to. You basically get the best of both worlds: High resolution uploads that will make sure that you can enjoy your photos in great quality in the future, plus fast uploads in the background, so that you don’t have to wait.

It’s now easier for you to save photos from your photostream to your camera roll, too.

Feature wise, Flickr now automatically saves your photos to your camera roll before you add a filter. Also, you can now tag contacts in comments with an @-mention. Whenever someone does that, you’ll now get a notification.

The high-resolution photos in the lightbox view have gotten even more high-res, and Flickr says that you’ll be more impressed when you zoom in.

And last but not least, Flickr finally lets you take photos using the iPhone’s volume up botton.

In short, a couple of nice new features and UI improvements. You can grab the new version of the Flickr app from iTunes today.

To access these images, simply go to Yahoo Image Search, and search like normal, then if you want to use something, just select the “labeled for reuse” filter on the left-hand side, then hover over the thumbnail to see details about the photo (including the photographer’s name).

Then, just click on the thumbnail to view the image. You can see the specific Creative Commons license terms for the image by clicking “attribution”. You can also see more pics from that particular photographer if you click “i”.

The feature is available on the desktop version as well as on mobile devices and tablets.

This is a welcome addition to search results for bloggers, and anyone writing on the web on a regular basis, who is on the lookout for interesting usable images for articles and posts.

Yahoo has released two major updates for flickr today – one for iOS and the other for the Web version. The iOS app received much of the attention as it now features a number of enhancements that has the venerable photo service becoming more like Instagram.

The first thing you’ll notice about the new flickr app is that it encourages users to take pictures with the app and play around with it using all the new filters within the app. Photos can also be corrected and cropped from within the app.

After that, users can share their flickr photos on any number of social media outlets, including Twitter. Unlike Instagram, flickr photos will show up on Twitter cards. Beyond that, users can upload unlimited photos from their camera rolls, and take advantage of all the site features on flickr proper.

The photos themselves now contain accompanying details like geotags, which camera was used, and the people tagged in said photo. Users can also pinch-to-zoom on photos and no quality will be lost for high resolution photos. It’s especially helpful for those who want to take a close look at fine details.

The final addition to the iOS app is improved discoverability. The app makes it easier to find photos from friends and photographers that you follow. The app also features a new Explore tab that’s always updated with the latest most interesting photos.

The iOS app wasn’t the only flickr product to be updated as the original Web site has also received a few upgrades. The Web site now features a new navigation bar and a new Explore page. The navigation bar has been shortened and simplified. It will be rolling out to users over the next few days. As for the Explore page, the photos have been aligned in a justified format so that it’s easy to view the most interesting photos uploaded in the past 24 hours.

You can grab the new iOS app from the App Store now.

A scientific report recently came out that discussed the “the confluence of citizen scientist, online image database and cybertaxonomy.” The Internet has given rise to such terms like citizen scientist or citizen journalist. What’s fascinating is that such discoveries by these “citizen scientists” are nothing new.

The paper says that new species are being discovered all the time by people that just like to take pictures. These people upload these seemingly innocuous photos to Facebook or Flickr only to find out later that they have discovered an entirely new species.

Here’s how it all went down according to the paper:

The discovery of a new species of Semachrysa described in this paper is a direct result of the incidental interaction of photographer/citizen scientist, online image database and professional scientists. Images of Semachrysa jade sp. n. were initially posted by the second author on the online image database Flickr for comment by the photography and natural history communities. The specimen had been released once it was photographed and at this stage no determination had been made on the taxonomic identity of the species. The online images were then randomly examined by the senior author who determined that this distinctive species was not immediately recognizable as any previously described species. Links to the images were forwarded to additional experts in chrysopid taxonomy to elicit comment on its possible taxonomic identity. After extensive discussion it was concluded that the species was likely new to science but its generic placement inconclusive based solely upon the images at hand.

After the initial discovery was made, the scientists traveled back to the same spot with the original photographer to capture some specimens for study. They were able to come out of it with a male and female specimen of this new species.

Check out the beautiful photos of this news species of Green Lacewing:

In other science news, you can read the entire fascinating report on social media and science combing their powers for good right now. It’s absolutely free. The study was released under a creative commons license so we call can enjoy it. Now if only other scientific research would go free so we could all benefit from it.

[h/t: Monga Bay]

Not 24 hours later, Mayer already had a big request from the internet community:

PLEASE MAKE FLICKR AWESOME AGAIN.

The site dearmarissamayer.com was created, and the message was spread virally over Twitter. Clearly, ex-Flickr and current Flickr users simply want the once-leading photo-sharing site to be restore to its former glory. And since Marissa Mayer now runs the company that bought Flickr back in 2005, I guess she seemed like the right one to ask.

Now, Flickr has responded to that request in a pretty stellar fashion. Here’s what you’ll find at flickr.com/dearinternet:

Note Flickr used “awesomer.” Well played.

For reference, here’s what the original Dear Marissa Mayer message looks like:

Flickr’s message is an open invitation for qualified individuals to apply for jobs with the company. According to their about page, the Flickr team is comprised of only 42 people. As of right now, they are looking for two software engineers, a frontend engineer, and senior service engineer, and data storage engineer, and a community manager.

[via Wired]

It was surprising in that both parties involved did a great job a keeping everything under wraps, and many felt that Yahoo’s interim CEO Ross Levinsohn would eventually get the job.

Today is Mayer’s first day on the job at Yahoo, and she already has a request from the internet.

A Twitter campaign is building that tags #dearmarissamayer. Attached is the new site dearmarissamayer.com, which displays one simple request:

As you remember, Yahoo acquired photo-sharing site Flickr back in 2005.

Mayer will have her hands full with more than Yahoo come October. Today, we learned that along with the big career move, Mayer is also pregnant with her first child, a boy.

The popular photo-sharing site has previously worked with (and will continue to work with) OpenStreetMap in order to fill in the gaps left by commercial maps but Nokia will be the major provider of awesome, updated maps. You can see below a before and after comparison of what the updated maps will look like (in case you can’t tell, the older map is on the left).

Flickr said that the new maps are available to everyone as of today, but when I use Flickr to go map around I’m still seeing that the maps still have the Navteq 2010 tag (Navteq is a subsidiary of Nokia). Nokia’s map site, however, displays an updated Navteq 2012 copyright tag, which I imagine Flickr will eventually display once the site’s maps are all updated. Even searching for the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, as was used in the above example, I’m still seeing the older map. At any rate, the updates will be arriving soon enough (I presume) so keep an eye out.

Nokia’s having quite maptastic moment lately. Nokia partnered with Bing earlier this year to boost the aesthetic and search quality of Bing Maps while last month Bing announced that Nokia would be providing backend support for real-time traffic info. Last week, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Windows Phone 8 would be getting mapping support from Nokia instead of Bing Maps.