You may know this, but this post is for those who may not be aware.

A big part of Flickr is the community, the action of sharing your photos means literally sharing them. This is where Creative Commons comes in.

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

When I write a blog post, I search Flickr for photos licensed with a Creative Commons license. This allows me to use the photo, but still give credit where credit is due.

Have a look at the different versions of Creative Commons licenses available. Then in Flickr, choose the one that’s right for you and make it your default setting. I use Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons, unless I am including photos of my kids.

Now you can easily let people use and share your photos, while also receiving credit and traffic back to your Flickr profile. Cool, eh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BESbnMJg9M

Photo from Flickr by: Franz Patzig

I’ve been working on transitioning the Nashville Geek Breakfast Facebook Group to a Community Page instead. I wanted a way to grab the photos from my group on Flickr, so I could upload them all to the new GB page. Facebook is a great place to share your photos too. It’s actually now more popular than Flickr.

How to download your Flickr group photos

I recommend doing this from time to time, so you can backup your Group photos elsewhere too. Never depend on one place to store anything digital.

Head over to Malarkey Software (great name!) to download their free Photo Grabbr software (Mac OS X 10.4 or better).

Once installed you’ll need your Flickr group ID number.

Visit idgettr.com and enter your Flickr group’s URL. For example: http://www.flickr.com/groups/nashvillegeekbreakfast/
Copy the full number that idgettr spits out.

In Photo Grabbr, choose Look Up Group ID and paste in your Flickr group ID. Hit Search and you’ll get a message at the bottom left corner. Hopefully it’s a good one, then click Download All Photos.

It’s worth chipping in a few bucks to thank the Mr. Malarkey for such a cool piece of software. Cheers.

UPDATE:
Paul Nicholson raised a good point about use, credit and ownership of photos that you may download from a Group. Please read his comment.

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

I just read an interesting post on Read Write Web about the number of Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr declining.

The growth rate for CC-licensed images on Flickr is slowing, however. The growth rate has slowed down from 13% in April 2006, to 4% in November 2008. Currently, the growth rate is holding stable at 4% per month.

The post mentions that according to a new study, most Flickr users opt to license their images under the most restrictive CC license.

I fully support Creative Commons, but there is something I am noticing these days. When I search for an image to use for a blog post, I see family photos available. I have a feeling that the photographers of these baby photos don’t realize they are making them available. Personally, I would not be comfortable with people using photos of my children in their work, certainly not without my permission first.

Have a look for yourself.

My permission settings automatically make my photos available under Creative Commons first, I go back and change the settings on the photos of my children.

If you want to make sure that all of your photos are covered under a Creative Commons license, just head to the Privacy & Permissions tab in your Flickr account settings, where you will find a Defaults for new uploads section. From there, you can change your default license. If you never changed it, it will currently mark all your new uploads as “all rights reserved.”

What do you think? Do you think these people realize they are making their baby photos available? Would you share photos of your children?

Photo from Flickr by: DonDiego

I recently posted about being upset that I was missing the third annual Podcasters Across Borders (PAB) conference. Unfortunately circumstances did not allow me to head to Kingston, Ontario to re-connect with my fellow podcasting brothers and sisters from home, I miss them.

Luckily in this day and age we are privileged enough to have simple tools to experience the next best thing to being there.

The picture in this post illustrates how I was able to create my own PAB control center. I could watch and listen to the conference, see pictures  during and after the sessions, interact with the attendees, and even ask a question to a speaker (thanks Eden).

Here’s five things you must have to attend conferences from your couch:

1. Ustream live video: Ustream is a free video streaming service that allows you to broadcast, in real-time, straight from your computer. I need to give a special mention and thank you to Chris Penn for setting this up.
2. Meebo Chat Room: Meebo is one of a few different free chat room hosts. It is very simple to set and to embed directly into your blog, like Chris did on Marketing Over Coffee. I embedded the chat room into Dave Made That (as seen above). This way I could view the photo slide show as I interacted with the users. The chat also was a “back channel” for the attendees to interact with one another, and with the visitors who were not fortunate enough to be there in person.
3. Flickr Slideshow: Flickr is the most popular photo hosting service online. It’s free to use with a Yahoo account, plus you can pay for a pro account now, and upload videos too. Although, I’m not sure why you would want to with countless other free video hosting sites out there. I pay for a pro account to have plenty of space to host my images. Photos “tagged” with PAB2008 automatically feed into the slideshow. I used the following code to get this to work:
   • <iframe src=”http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?group_id=&user_id=&set_id=&tags=pab2008” align=”middle” frameborder=”0″ height=”300″ scrolling=”no” width=”325″></iframe>
     <small>Tag your photos: <strong>PAB2008</strong> </small>
4. Twhirl: This is a Twitter client that runs on Adobe Air. Twhirl takes my Twitter account and makes it available on my desktop, without the need of a browser to view it in. This is very handy to have multiple items open at the same time. It updates in real time (with a slight lag), so I can see when I have new messages, or when there’s new messages from PAB.
5. Friends: What’s the point of all of this interaction if you don’t have friends at these conferences? Having friends there sure helps when you need a camera’s audio repaired (thanks Chris), or you have a comment for a speaker (thanks Eden), or you simply want to see how everybody looks this year (beautiful by the way!).

Feel free to ask me any questions should you have them. If you have items you can’t live without when attending conferences from your couch please let me know.

See you next year for sure Pabsters.