For this reason, photo sharing on the internet is increasingly big business - a fact demonstrated this week when social media giant Facebook snapped up picture sharing outfit Instagram.

Instagram produces an 'app' (or application) for smartphones that lets users take pictures with their phone's camera, apply a series of arty 'filters' on the image that can change the tone and colours of the picture - often mimicking old Polaroid pictures - and then lets the user send their picture to a variety of social networking services, including Instagram's own.

What's really got tongues wagging though is the price of this acquisition: a cool $1 billion. Rather a lot for a company with only 13 employees, and which has yet to make a single dollar of profit (the app is given away for free). It seems that Facebook was attracted by Instagram's quick accumulation of 30 million users in just two years, and the notoriously fashionable makeup of those users.

And it's not just Facebook trying to snap up the photo-sharing market. In 2005 the struggling search-engine company Yahoo! bought the popular service Flickr just a year after it had started.

Of course, even now, Instagram isn't the hottest photo-sharing service around. Pinterest started in 2010, and is already the third biggest social network in the world. How long until someone cracks open the chequebook for them?

Find out how to use a digital camera and share your photos online with our WebWise guides.
Read more from the WebWise blog about photography.

Alex Duin has spent his whole life wading through technology and the media, and in the process has worked and written all over the place, including for Channel 4, and Digital Unite. He divides his time between London and Manchester.

BBC News has reported that the coalition government are proposing that existing laws requiring internet service providers to log communications be extended and that GCHQ (the UK listening intelligence agency) should be able to monitor internet use in 'real-time',  ie at the same time it's being used and without a warrant.

The new law's supporters say that this expansion is necessary to catch up with rogue elements who increasingly turn to digital technology to organise themselves. In The Sun, Home Secretary Theresa May said that "there are no plans for any big government database. No one is going to be looking through ordinary people's emails or Facebook posts. Only suspected terrorists, paedophiles or serious criminals will be investigated."

The law is receiving heavy criticism however, even from within the government's own Conservative members. In that same Sun article, former candidate for the Tory leadership David Davis retorted that "whenever a government announces plans to snoop on British citizens, the argument is always the same - it needs the new law to stop terrorists. But we already have a law that lets the secret services eavesdrop on suspected criminals and terrorists."

If it goes ahead, the new law is expected to be announced at this year's Queen's Speech.

To find out more about some of these issues, why not check out the WebWise guide to the UK's internet laws?

Alex Duin has spent his whole life wading through technology and the media, and in the process has worked and written all over the place, including for Channel 4, and Digital Unite. He divides his time between London and Manchester.

But did you know that people have been talking about Share Take Care across the BBC?

It's true; everyone from CBBC's Horrible Histories to the big dawg himself, Westwood (he's dropped the Tim now) has been spreading the word about internet safety.

Most of the BBC's local Inside Out BBC 1 shows had a piece about internet safety - such as this look into how employers are using social networks to screen candidates, and we've already reported on the Panorama special that showed the effect that cyberbullying has had on pop starlet Cher Lloyd.

It wasn't all doom and gloom though, as that same Panorama episode also included reporter Declan Lawn confronting internet troll Darren Burton (AKA Nimrod Severn), in a clip that has gone viral across the internet, with almost 300,000 views so far.

However, perhaps no one took the message of Share Take Care to heart more than BBC Radio 1, which had talk about internet safety across the whole day, from Chris Moyles to Scott Mills.

 

They even made an hilarious game where you can help protect your favourite DJ's reputation online. Perhaps their crowning glory was a catchy song played on Greg James' show titled Router Has It - based on Adele's Rumour Has It - skip to 2:43 to have a listen!

 

Meanwhile, over on Radio 5 live the breakfast show was dominated by Share Take Care talk with the 10am phone in slot being given over to internet safety calls and case studies appearing in the regular news bulletins.

While this CBeebies film advised parents on keeping their kids safe online, News School Report grilled one of Facebook's bosses on privacy settings.

Everyone at the BBC across TV, radio and online, whether that be local,  regional or national took up the cause for internet safety and carried the Share Take Care message for Safer Internet Day 2012.

Visit the WebWise minisite for Share Take Care at www.bbc.co.uk/sharetakecare or find out what our panel of child safety experts advised in the Ask the expert feature.

It wasn't Avatar. It wasn't a Harry Potter novel, or a lost Beatles album. It was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the incredibly popular first-person war simulation videogame. And the next year, the game's successor, Call of Duty: Black Ops shattered that record by selling 5.6 million copies.

The videogame industry has become a behemoth that is difficult to ignore. What was the sole preserve of geeks and hobbyists in the 1970s is now run by huge multinational corporations, almost as large as the Hollywood studios. As cinemas struggle to secure bums on seats, and TV channels scrabble over a shrinking pool of viewers, most years more videogames are sold than the last.

And games aren't just soulless profit engines. Videogames are regularly delivering experiences more spectacular than anything seen in blockbuster films, and with the added benefit of letting the player interact with them. Just this year, Uncharted 3 showcased a breathless adventure through a burning French château, on Colombian rooftops, and culminated in a heart-stopping plane crash into an endless Arabian desert.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, gives the player astonishing freedom to explore a huge and often beautiful wintry fantasy world based on a Scandinavian template of snowy mountains and fjords. And these two examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Videogames are expanding beyond these mind-blowing epic adventures as well. The fastest growing segment of the industry is that of casual games – simple games of the sort played on social networking sites or on smartphones.

Zynga, the company responsible for the most popular Facebook games, is now reckoned to be worth between 15 and 20 billion US dollars. Games also make up 15% of all the downloads on Apple's App Store for the iPhone - which has total download numbers well into the billions – making them the biggest single app category. And all these games are being sold to a much broader market than videogames' usual young male demographic.

These and other digital distribution technologies have also allowed a new wave of smaller, but often more artistic and cerebral 'indie' games to bloom. One of my personal favourites is Braid, a vibrantly coloured game from creator Jonathan Blow which is simultaneously a mindbending set of puzzles, a metaphor for the melancholy of a lost relationship and an incredibly subtle allegory for the creation of the first atomic bomb.

Less intellectual, but making up for it with amazing popularity, indie game Minecraft's randomly generated, blocky worlds have been so successful that it's made Markus Persson - the Swedish coder who originally single-handedly created the game - a millionaire many times over. I can rather embarrassingly admit that I've sunk far too many hours of my life exploring and mining those bleak, cubic landscapes.

And all this success isn't just money flowing out of the country. The UK is the third-biggest producer of video games in the world (by games sold), and by some distance the biggest in Europe, employing around 9,000 people. Blockbusting titles such as Batman: Arkham City and the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto series are made by British developers.

Ed Vaizey, the government's Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, wrote on the Huffington Post website that 'Anyone who thinks video games are a niche industry is totally out of date. This is an industry that has grown to rival any entertainment business. And it's an area where the UK has some of the most talented and successful developers in the world.'

The unstoppable juggernaut of videogames isn't expected to stop any time soon. At the end of last year, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was released, and again blew away its predecessors' records. This year, the next in the Grand Theft Auto series is expected and will likely sell by the shipload, and a whole new generation of more powerful game consoles are on the horizon.

With so much going on, perhaps you might join in yourself? You'll certainly have company!

Alex Duin has spent his whole life wading through technology and the media, and in the process has worked and written all over the place, including for Channel 4, and Digital Unite. He currently lives in London

For more on the Coggeshall Church's Wi-Fi project watch Songs Of Praise on BBC iPlayer - available until 29 January, or find out more about wireless internet in the WebWise guide.

Alex Duin has spent his whole life wading through technology and the media, and in the process has worked and written all over the place, including for Channel 4, and Digital Unite. He currently lives in London.