Tom’s Two Cents

Today I saw a tweet from Andy Carvin (of NPR fame) that got me involved in a quick Yahoo Pipes project to aggregate Gustav-related volunteering and housing posts from craigslist. I didn’t do much, but now there is a big long feed of housing offers and volunteering opportunities on the Gustav Ning site. If you are interested, join the Gustav Ning community to see what else needs to be done. Three years after Katrina, there are new tools we can use to help folks who will again be displaced by Mother Nature.

You can help too. Gustav wiki needs volunteers to edit pages on aid agencies/donations, govt contact info, etc: http://www.gustavwiki.com. They have migrated content from the Katrina wiki, but many things need to be updated. If you can adopt a page, please do — use the “talk” section of the wiki to claim your particular page and avoid duplication. This is a way you can help folks evacuating from affected areas get the info they need.

What if you don’t have Internet or a laptop? There’s also a mobile-based guide to Gustav resources and information here: http://ventana.cerado.com/gustav08, for those in the path of the storm without internet access. If you have loved ones in the area, please pass this along.

Recently, I wrote a post called Letting your Flickr photos wander. Someone saw this post on reddit and asked me if I had a trick to detecting when people reuse my photos on Flickr. The truth is that many people are good enough to send me a note on Flickr to let me know they used my photo. I also set up a Google alert for my flickr username: caswell_tom. That way if someone gives me attribution I get an alert. Here is another case of reuse I found via a Google alert. I’m not a pro, but it’s always fun to see where my photos end up.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Flickr lately. I like seeing the different ways my photos get reused. From Wikipedia to Schmap.com to an online women’s magazine. Just for fun, I have added a “reused” tag to each of the photos I know has been reused somewhere. Here’s what I have so far: http://flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/tags/reused/

This is all just anecdotal, but it seems people really started reusing my photos around the same time I changed all 1500+ of them over to an Attribution-only Creative Commons license. It could be that more and more Flickr users are enjoying the same kind of content reuse fame and glory regardless of what license they choose. But I think it has something to do with my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. In fact, I think it’s kind of neat to see what happens with them. In a way they take on a life of their own. And you never know where they will end up.