So Greg makes us all have to go dig up pictures and put them on our blog posts.
Before he unveiled this declaration he said, “Sage, I’m going to make you do something you aren’t going to like.”
He was right. I was not looking forward to coming up with a photo (a full size and a square thumbnail, incidentally) for every single post. What a pain!
Ultimately, I think it makes our blog unique and actually stand out. Search marketing blogs are notoriously boring. These pictures really jazz things up.
In fact, now that I’ve gotten the hang of it, I kind of even like going around browsing for pictures. (Don’t tell him.)
The key, however, is to find pictures that you can legally embed on your site. You want to find pictures that are covered under Creative Commons.
In CC there is a scale that looks like this:
You are able to lock down the use of your images, or any material, in varying degrees.
So, what I would do is I would go over to Flickr.com and start browsing through images. I would find an image that I liked and then I would click on it to see if I could legally link to it. More often than not, I couldn’t.
Well, today that has all changed. I found a site that I’ve never been to before. It’s Wikimedia Commons.
Commons:Welcome – Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all.
Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as the source and the authors are credited and as long as users release their copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.
Finding this site has really opened up my image posting potential. I also feel good about being on the up-and-up and also giving credit to people who have produced some amazing work.
So, if you are blogging give Wikimedia Commons a look. It will really enhance your blog.
But wait! There’s more!
As I was checking that site out, I also was browsing around the creative commons web site itself.
I came across their directory of media that is licensed under Creative Commons. You can see that here. That’s also a nice directory.
So there you go. Two tips for the price of one.
Enjoy!
Photo from here: Creative Commons Birthday Party – San Francisco. on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
This post was written by
My name is Sage Frederick Lewis. My kid's name is Indiana Sage Lewis. I am filled with love and passion for many things in life. The list of things I like about life is MUCH longer than the things I don't like about life. So, since you don't have all day reading about the mundane things I love (some of which, btw, include: Rocky, Indy, SageRock, movies, pizza, cheesecake, running, exploring.) here are the things I don't like:
Driving
Meetings
Zucchini (I like it fine. I'm just allergic.)
I think that's pretty much it.
My Twitter account is:
http://twitter.com/sagerock
My YouTube Channel is:
http://www.youtube.com/sagerock
Most recent posts by Sage Lewis
- The Discipline Of Blogging - May 16th, 2012
- Afraid of the Book - My Phobia - May 15th, 2012
- Social media consulting for a 30 to lifer - May 13th, 2012
- Search engine optimization - 21st Century Public Relations - May 11th, 2012
- A Big Opportunity with U.S. Airport Paid Search - May 10th, 2012
This is an interesting find you have here. I’d also like to say that I’m glad that you’ve taken a liking to finding pictures for your posts!
One thing you mention:
If you are searching for pictures on Flickr and you want to only see Creative Commons photos in your searches, click on the Advanced Search option. There you can set your searching parameters.
http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?q=books
At the bottom of your search options, you can set to only view results that are Creative Commons licensed.
I hadn’t seen that search option. That’s a good find too. Thanks.
Great post. One thing that I noticed in the formatting, however — saw the post initially on Facebook. Clikced over to read it. Thought I was subscribed to the RSS feed. I wasn’t. So I subscribe & the post does not have the image of the CC buttons in it via Google Reader’s RSS reader. Not sure if that’s intentional or not, but shouldn’t the image display in my RSS reader too?
Hey Marc.
Thanks!
These images are part of a custom field application Greg setup in the blog. So, they aren’t standard image inserts.
I think that’s why they don’t come up in the RSS.
I might look into that and see if it’s possible to get ‘em to show up.
Thanks again and take care,
Sage
If you’re looking for Creative Commons images, you might like Ookaboo, which is using information extraction and croudsourcing to catalog thousands of free images a day. What’s particularly cool about Ookaboo is that it identifies things specifically by using “Linked Data” terms — the semantic API enables software to use specific terms to find images with unprecedented precision.
My programmer is trying to persuade me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the costs. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on a variety of websites for about a year and am nervous about switching to another platform. I have heard very good things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress content into it? Any kind of help would be really appreciated!