Flickr on Wednesday announced Nikon's sponsorship of a Flickr site, the Nikon Digital Learning Center. The site provides online tips and tutorials and lets photographers chat live with pro shooters Rosanne Pennella and Cliff Mautner as well as Nikon School instructors Reed Hoffman and Bill Durrence.

A quick look around the Nikon Digital Learning Center on Flickr and I see that it's really not much of a "center" at all and really more of a menu page that leads you to either Nikon groups on Flickr (including a new group specifically for the Nikon Digital Learning Center) or to pages on Nikon's photographer education site Nikon Digital Learning Center. So the Nikon Digital Learning Center on Flickr isn't so much on Flickr as it's linked to by Flickr. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I wish the Learning Center actually was on Flickr though. I think if it were it would have a more simple look and higher level of usability and user friendliness. Thats not to say that the Nikon site is bad it's just that I really like the way things work at Flickr and would probably find the Nikon Digital Learning Center really useful if it really was part of and integrated with the rest of Flickr. That's not the case though. It's a completely separate entity and I think it's a tiny bit disingenuous to say "Nikon Digital Learning Center on Flickr" when really it's just a link page and a yet another Nikon group. That being said I think if someone was unaware of the Nikon Digital Learning Center previously and through this affiliation with Flickr she finds it and picks up some good, useful information for her photography well then that's a-ok.