I fell in love with the internet in 1996. But I really became obsessed in 2004, when I started using Flickr. It was the first Web 2.0 company that really interested me visually, and I became convinced of the effect it would have on my world when I happened to pull a 80 year-old sign out of a dumpster.

Let me explain. I've always had a fascination with signs and graffiti; any kind of letters or pictures on buildings. Not the mass-produced kind – it has to be hand painted.

It's kind of a communication thing, but it's also a style thing. It takes a lot of swagger to paint something visually appealing on the side of a building. There's technical skill involved, whether it's a commercial venture or an illegal one. Signs usually last longer than graffiti, though, and the ones that outlast the businesses they're advertising are called "ghost signs."

One of my favorite ghost signs in the Bay Area has alway been ACME Beer. There's the brand, which has the obvious appeal of an association with the visual genius of Looney Tunes and the animator Chuck Jones. There's the color scheme, which is usually black and red letters against thick, beautiful shades of green pigment that could only be produced before things like lead, base metals, and other toxic elements were strictly regulated.

But the best part of the ACME logo is definitely the "A." It's more ornate than the rest of the lettering, and it's a bright red that really pops against the green and black.

So when I drove past a demolition site in 2004 and saw workers pulling old green siding with fragments of black and red letters off of the building on the corner of Octavia and Hayes, I pulled over. The workers were piling the boards into a huge dumpster, so I climbed in and started pulling them out. One of the guys had a chop saw on the sidewalk, and without a word, he began cutting the boards into compact-car-sized pieces and handing them directly to me. My Mazda was tiny, so I tried to be strategic, and only grab the pieces that looked like they would form complete words, but since everything was so jumbled up, it was a lot of guesswork. I did make sure to take fragments with thicker letterforms, especially ones with red paint, but my car was double-parked, so I only had like 5 minutes max before I was bound to get a ticket.

With my car jammed full, I took another quick look in the dumpster for any red paint, and took off. We had an apartment with a toddler and no real outside space, so there was no way I was bringing that stuff inside. I crammed the boards into the small storage space we had next to the garbage cans, and it was a few weeks before I got the chance to put the puzzle pieces together.

When I did, I was thrilled to discover that I was putting together most of the word "ACME," but I couldn't find any traces of the letter "A" – all of the red pieces I had grabbed were fragments of something else! I kicked myself for missing the best part of the sign.

This is where Flickr showed me the power of collective interest through photo-sharing, documentation, and the social use of metadata: In the very short span of time (hours) between the sign boards being uncovered and being taken off of the building, someone had taken photos of the whole thing. When they posted them on Flickr, they tagged them with "ACME," "ghost sign," and "San Francisco." Since I had alerts set up on the site for that exact combination of tags, I got a notification as soon as the photos went up, and I could see that clearly, the "A" had been removed from the building a long time ago, and I hadn't missed it in the dumpster.