Subtitle: Taking a little creative license… literally.

Last week I laid out the multimedia dilemma that faces many small and medium business sites - basically, your site needs great photos, but traditional good photography can be prohibitively expensive. So this week I would like to lay out another great way to beef up your visual offering on the cheap. The creative commons license.

Creative commons is a great non-profit organization that specializes in clearly, quickly, and efficiently disseminating all sorts of information, while respecting its author’s ownership and intellectual property rights. Creative commons provides forums, software, and resources which is equally valuable to both author’s and the general public, but the linchpin to their offering network, is their creative commons licensing system.

Roughly, anything published under a creative commons license is available to be rebroadcast royalty-free with varying degrees of freedom. For example, the most basic right, given to content published under creative commons is the attribution license - simply that the author must be credited for the work in the republished form. There are various other criteria that are optional for the author like, whether or not the work may be modified, or how it can be shared once altered slightly. The biggest item of interest for most website designers is whether the piece can be used commercially. Obviously, a lot of work is tagged for non-commercial purposes, but there’s plenty of great stuff that isn’t too. To read more about, creative commons visit them at their website at creativecommons.org.

Of course this is all well and good, but without a search interface we are still blind to all of this great content. Fortunately for us, we have flickr (pronounced flicker). Flickr is a simple web photo-sharing service. More or less, it provides it’s members with free hosting space for pictures of all sorts, to be viewed by others or kept private. Hopefully, most of you reading this already know about flickr, but those of you who don’t might already be signed up and don’t even know it. Flickr is a Yahoo! service, so if you have a Yahoo! account for anything such as Yahoo! webmail, Yahoo! stocks, a Yahoo! homepage, or even if AT&T is your DSL provider, you already have a flickr account. All you have to do is start uploading pictures, but no worries for the rest of us either, their basic service (which is more than enough) is free, free, free.

Best of all, when anyone publishes to flickr, he or she is given the option of publishing their work under a creative commons license, and believe me lots of people do. The best way to find them is to do an advanced search at flickr.com. If you don’t have an account and don’t want to create one, just punch in a search for anything on their visitor homepage and that will get you to their higher functioning internal interface. From there right next to the search bar you will find an “advanced search” link. This will allow you to customize your search criteria to match your needs more exactingly, but also at the bottom you can signal that it should only return work under the creative commons license that you are looking for. Then, feel free to download and put any of the pictures you find with the appropriate license up on your site, just make sure to give credit to the author with a byline or the like. (Of course, although unnecessary, it would be courteous to inform the author of your intentions before publishing, and at the very least to send a link of the finished product. You know proud parent stuff.)

Once you have gotten the hang of things on flickr, their are many many other similar services. Even google’s advanced image search allows for the specification of licensing conditions. Another source, which in my opinion has less to offer for small business as far as pictures are concerned is wikipedia.org. All of their pictures are published under a gnu license which operates more or less similarly to creative commons.

As always, check it out, see what works best for you, but remember if you are going to use creative commons material, make sure to feed the system and publish your things under creative commons when you can, too. Until next week, feel free to take a look at this dork’s flickr page, what a loser.

-Benn