Flickr, arguably Yahoo's best property, continues to improve. According to TechCrunch, launching shortly (within the next few weeks) will be a big update that puts much more of an emphasis on location.

On the smaller side, a zoomed out view of the world will now show the major tags for areas instead of just a plain old dot. Definitely a nice idea that should up the usage of both geotagging and regular tagging.

The much cooler feature however is the new "Places Pages". As you might expect these are pages that focus on one particular area and pull all the image and tag information for pictures geotagged to that area. The image information is pulled using Flickr's "interestingness" system that is already in place. There should be 70,000 such places at launch. TechCrunch uploaded the entire overview PDF from Yahoo to Scribd. Find that here.

Flickr continues to run circles around the photo-sharing offerings from the big boys (Google and Microsoft). I've said it a number of times, but it's worth repeating: If Yahoo really wants to turn things around they should simply look to Flickr and take that look, mentality, and usefulness into every new project they do.

TechCrunch is also saying that Flickr Video is still coming "soon".


[UPDATE 10/19]: Mike Arrington has more great Flickr news: they have just signed a deal with Picnik to bring photo editing (beyond image rotation) to Flickr. This should be implemented sometime within the next few months and will make Flickr even more attractive.

[picture via TechCrunch and Scribd]