Along with viewing some remarkable events that I would likely never have the opportunity to experience, video has enabled me to hear your voice. A new collaborative group is taking that one step further. Members of Word Time share the variations in our pronunciations with weekly lists of words. Here’s this week’s list:

“Caramel, touched, bottle, sensitivity, salsa, there, behind, mother, flower, calendar, barbiturate, harvard, chocolate, darjeeling, diaphragm, stethoscope, plaza, macintosh, spotted and what do you call the lace up shoes you wear for working out, running etc?”

We were walking past a flower market after lunch yesterday when we spied a woman buying a number of small, beautiful baskets of flowers. She could tell that we were intrigued and shared with us that they were for all the mothers in her extended family. Sunday is Mother’s Day and it’s an opportunity to thank the women in our lives who’ve made us what we are.

Photos from Froggy Pond Road, marytsao sahadeva, shinononochai, Lelonopo, and christyscherrer. View more photos in our Mother’s Day cluster.

I was peeking at the London page on Flickr, and I noticed “cansfestival” in the hot tags. Turns out The Cans Festival is a stencil art show happening underneath the Waterloo tube station. There’s some lovely stuff from Banksy, amongst about 40 other artists. There’s more information about the show in this Guardian blog post, “Looking for radical art? Try the South Bank, not Banksy.”

Thanks to ((morado)), Herschell Hershey, _Kriebel_ & MykReeve for their documentation of the event.

If you’re in or around Mexico City tomorrow night (Thursday), I hope you’ll join us for Muestra Tu México en Flickr. (If you haven’t visited the group, be sure to check out the active discussion and fabulous photography.)

In February, we kicked off Flickr for Good by donating 10,000 pro accounts to be distributed to qualifying non-profit groups, from global aid organizations to local libraries, and more. We’re pleased to announce that our Flickr pro account donation is now available in Australia, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, bringing our total to five countries including the United States and Canada.

While doing good for the community is a universal calling, as you can imagine, there is significant variation in the laws and requirements that govern “for good” organizations around the world. This was another reason we partnered with TechSoup to run the Flickr pro donation - so that we could offer it globally. TechSoup, which helps US-based technology companies clear the hurdles in offering donations to the non-profit sector, has partnered with several organizations around the world who offer similar services for their countries.

So! If you want to apply on behalf of your organization, here’s where to go:

• Australia: DonorTec
• Hong Kong: TechDonation
• United Kingdom: Charity Technology Exchange

The accounts are for individuals at qualifying organizations to share their photos (and video!) in support of their causes.

TechSoup continues to run the program for the United States and Canada. We hope to bring on partners in additional countries in the future.

While some dance around a maypole, others celebrate International Worker’s Day. For all, May Day around the world is a colourful event. View more photos in our maypole and may day clusters.

Photos from etnobofin and [imagedeluxe].

Taken by wee2046, discovered in the Rolleiflex group pool.

With Polaroid’s announcement earlier this year that they’ve ceased production of their instant film, ‘Roid Week 2008 feels somewhat bittersweet. Will it be the last? Will a knight in shining armour rescue our fair maiden? While some are stockpiling their film (myself included), others are throwing caution to the wind to celebrate the joy and beauty of all things instant.

Photos from Esther17, meshel, cindi miller herleman, notraces.
You can view more photos in ‘Roid Week 2008.

Our new “Share this” button makes it a whole lot easier to share your photos, video, sets and groups. You can click the button and start typing the screen name of one of your contacts – auto-complete will do the rest. Or, you can enter any email address.

You can set a global preference (from “Only you” to “Anyone on Flickr”) on who can use “Share this” and “Send to a friend” via your account page.

More info about the changes to sharing are available in the FAQs, and do some sharing of your own by way of feedback in in this Help topic.

9:20 PM PST - Hey folks! Flickr is offline at the moment, and our Operations team is working as I type to bring things back online for your viewing pleasure. Sorry for the disruption, and we will update you as soon as we can.

9:35 PM PST - That was fast! We just had a networking glitch that took a few minutes to sort out, sorry for the interruption!