You’ll Never Stop Googling Yourself

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Is it narcissitic to Google yourself every day? Not that I would be doing such things, but sometimes you have to indulge that attention-craving monster that the wonderful world of blogs, social networking sites, and photo sharing sites have created. One thing in particular that has increased my search rankings is the Creative Commons License. For artists, writers and photographers this could possibly be a good route to pursue when trying to create a presence on the internet.

The Creative Commons license was developed as a way to easily share your work on the internet while providing an alternative to the old copyright model. Think of it as copyright 2.0. With a license you can define who will be able to use your work and how it will be used.

I own a Flickr account and it has been one of best things I have done. It provides a community in to which I can easily share my photography. It also provides a way in which I can easily register my images under the Creative Commons License. Individuals and organizations actually use Flickr quite a bit to gather images and many are searching for photos that fall under this licensing. My images are free for any user to download (even in large size), but when using the images the user must give some credit to me for providing the image. You may think that giving away my photography for free may not be such a great thing. I think of it in terms of a portfolio builder. The good thing about the Creative Commons License is that you can choose how you want to license your images; you can limit your file sizes in Flickr as well. With this you can do it the way you want and reap the rewards.

Here are few sites that are using my imagery:

The Phillyist
Tipr.org
10e20
Michigan in Pictures
idealist.org
National Parks Conservation Association

There are several sites out there that allow you to easily license your images or you can always just embed their tags into your sites, but Flickr is the only one I have used on a regular basis. If anyone else has covered this topic ins other areas, I would be happy to link to your site. Anyway, I found this very useful in making my content more readily available on the web and I hope you might be Googling yourself more to see in what new ways your creations are being used.