One of the unique features of imgur is that, while you can create an account for hosting your photos, it’s not necessary. Anyone can go there and upload photos without logging in at all. Needless to say, these photos were uploaded anonymously.

You can pretty see for yourself what the life of at least one Chinese gangster looks like. Porsches, piles of cash and puppies to for one. There’s also a few slightly disturbing images of what appears to be a few possible associates roughing up an older man for some reason. Strangely the roughing up session ends with the poor man being forced to pose with a shoe balanced on top of his head, another on his arm and an old plastic water bottle in his mouth.

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I’m allowed to post this because Ashley Tisdale posted this on Twitter using Instagram, both of which are tech companies which I write about.

So yeah, can you believe this? She posts this on Twitter saying, “What a beautiful day”. I know every time I want to share a a photo of a beautiful day that I’m experiencing I pass the camera to someone else, give myself a wedgie, turn around and say cheese.

People are flipping out because Tisdale is a Disney actress but the chick is almost 30 years old! She’s only like 2 years younger than Kirsten Dunst. It’s just that one’s been successful for a while and one was in High School Musical.

Ashley’s website claims she’s one of Hollywood’s most sought after “young” talents. Sought after by pimps apparently if this pic and the rest on her website are any indication.

Fifth Avenue hotels north from 51st Street.

Another great, old photograph from early NYC. This one is from the early 20th century. It’s also a great contrast to this photo taken barely more than a decade earlier that shows the slums of New York in the downtown area.

Photo via Shorpy

Jacob Riis was a crime reporter in NYC in the late 1800′s and spent much of his time in the seedy parts of old New York. Many of his photographs are also used in a wonderful book called ‘Lowlife‘ (affiliate link) by Luc Sante. Sante does an excellent job of capturing the hardships of living in NYC during the late 19th Century while accentuating his point with this brilliant photographs by Riis.

Sadly, Riis never truly understood the importance of the images he was capturing and always viewed them as superfluous to his main work which was crime reporting.

You can take a look at some more of his photographs in this Daily Mail article but if you’re interested in seeing his a much larger collection of his photographs you can visit the Museum of the City of New York.

Imgur's choice for #1 image of 2011

For the second year in a row Imgur released a best of list of all the images hosted on their site. There are a lot of great ones. My favorite is probably the rage comic made by the 86-year-old man that took part in the D-Day invasion.

Imgur is the best, free image hosting site around. How can you not love a company that was founded specifically to combat the spammy, ad infested image hosting sites that were, at one time, your only option for hosting images to share online. Imgur offers completely free image hosting with minimal ads and doesn’t even require you to create an account (although you now have the ability to create one if you’d like).

Imgur gained prominence when it became the defacto image host for the extremely popular site reddit.com.

Click here to see the top 11 images of Imgur of 2011.

For a minute I wasn’t sure if I was reading Reddit or the Daily News.

A couple more for reference sake of course.

This little girl can't catch a break. First she's miserable at the Royal Wedding, then she's miserable watching bin Laden get Black Opped

Call of Duty: Osama bin Laden

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

via White House Flickr

Tired of that boring old New Tab page? Spruce it up with beautiful high resolution photos hand-selected by Flickr’s visivo.

** Update: Links to photo page when mouse is moved (a la google fade in) **

There is a calming sense when you’re slammed with work and open up a new tab and see a beautiful photo staring back at you. Even if you only take it in for a few seconds, it definitely gives you a change of pace and gives you a chance to explore some great photographs while you’re working at the same time.

You can download the VisivoTab extension here.

I can only a hope a year from now someone else will come across it here and share it. The plight of the literally invisible homeless is one we should keep in the public eye.

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.