There I was, late Monday night, getting ready to leave for Ohio the following evening. My girlfriend and I were going to drive through most of the night on Tuesday so we could miss the Wednesday traffic (sidebar: get it together VirginiaDOT – the 77/81 junction looks like it was designed by throwing spaghetti at a wall and letting a first grader draw the signage). As we both packed she said, “Sucks about that Neflix increase, right?” Check the email. Price increase. Back to packing.

I was worried when she first mentioned it, but really, the extra dollar a month doesn’t bother me. I’ve been unbelievably happy with my Netflix subscription, so the extra $12 a year is like a tip for good service.

On the flipside, though, I wish I could justify stepping down to the streaming-only plan. I would love a streaming video service that could rival my music service (MOG). Give me on demand everything, not just the old stuff. As it stands, I keep the DVD part of my Netflix subscription for those movies I want to watch while I work but can’t find elsewhere. I would love to get it all over the cloud, and would likely pay double my current Netflix fee to do it. Time for an industry shift, folks, and the first service to do it will get a helluva lot of subscribers.

Data milestones can get a little, well, boring. While it is amazing that there have been billions of downloaded songs, and millions of Facebook accounts, and kajillions of whatever else is out there, the zeroes are getting a little overwhelming.

That said, services like Flickr, which are free and provide some very cool features to their users, deserve a bit of celebration. I could never have so clearly imagined the lives of close family members as I can because I can see pictures of where they live, work, and play. That’s why I’m willing to celebrate Flickr’s five billionth photo.

According to the Flickr blog, user “yeoaaron” uploaded image number 5,000,000,000 yesterday. Here’s to 5,000,000,000 more!