Journalism, attribution and Creative Commons

The Daily Mail posted a story on their website about my friend Andy Stanford-Clark, and used a crop from one of my photos to illustrate it. As it happens, I would have been perfectly happy for them to use it (and even to crop it) if they’d asked for permission. At the time I post this, they are not following the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence and they are also not linking back to my Flickr page per the Flickr terms and conditions.

Thanks to Nick for bringing this to my attention, and for those who have told me that they’ve posted comments (currently not through moderation) or sent emails. We’ll see what happens.

I’ve posted about my approach to CC licensing images before. In this case, it’s arguably more of a concern as it’s a national newspaper displaying what would appear to be significant ignorance about the morality of using user-created content.

Beyond all of this… if you want to learn more about Andy’s tweeting house, he was featured on the BBC News yesterday – it’s a nice piece, check it out.

Photo avatars

Crops which work nicely as my Flickr avatar image

 

A photo interlude

A sojourn in Poland

Since Twitpic is refusing submissions from Tweetie or Twitpic at the moment… I’m falling back on the (new! improved! now with comment moderation!) WordPress app for the iPhone instead.

I think it is 15 months since I was last in Poland. Major observations are the expansion of Tesco and lots of new roundabouts. It’s still very cold in the mountains on the border and more snow is forecast. Oh, and our new niece is just over a week old and really, really tiny!

Shout out social!

My friend, colleague, blogging buddy and Opportunity Australia Ambassador Jasmin (aka the remarkable wonderwebby) is spearheading the social media drive around an event called Shout Out Social:

Shout Out Social is a community organised and created art exhibition to be held 14th -15th March 2009, raising awareness and funds to help women free themselves from poverty.

Jasmin invited me to contribute some images to the Flickr pool. The idea is that you either include a ‘word that matters’ in the image, or in the description, for the cause you are ’shouting out’ for. I’ve contributed a number of photos – here’s my “shouting out for friendship” image

The event itself is in Melbourne which is a little far for me to travel, but I’m looking forward to seeing media and how my work contributes to the cause.

It’s a fantastic campaign and a great idea for an event. Please take a moment to explore Jasmin’s sites and contribute.

Hursley in late autumn

Since these photos were taken on the iPhone I’m not sure they are up to scratch for sharing on Flickr.

It was a lovely morning today so I took a walk around Hursley lawn and tried out PanoLab Pro on the iPhone for stitching a few of the images together (and then fuzzed a few of the edges in iPhoto, which is another tool I wouldn’t usually use).

W2E Berlin sound and vision

Photography

I’ve posted photos from the Web 2.0 Expo in two sets on Flickr.

Images from the Expo itself:

Images from team events, and round and about the city:

I’ve made all of the images Creative Commons Attribution-ND.

A note on conference photography. I decided to travel light as I was only going for a few days, so I only packed my compact digital camera instead of the DSLR. I also decided to take my Eye-Fi card, reasoning that I’d be able to hook up to the conference wifi and just get the images straight up onto Flickr.

When I first arrived at the Expo, I found I couldn’t configure the card to connect to the network. On day two, it finally did connect, so it was obviously just an issue with the wifi. Unfortunately this continued… so the card would sporadically connect, but not always finish uploading an image. As a result the images are out-of-order in my main Flickr stream (partially fixed by having the sets sorted into chronological order). As a note to myself, I might well reduce the image size in future, since I was shooting at full size and the images were ~2-3Mb which didn’t upload fast.

I was also then faced with the issue of editing and tagging. Flickr offers Picnick integration which is OK… but the range of enhancement options is far more limited than I’m used to in Lightroom, so what with the low light and often wanting to avoid distracting presenters with flash, the photos are hardly my best efforts. Tagging also seemed to take a long time, although I have opened the images for tagging by any Flickr member, so other people can help out there… I already started to trawl for other images from the conference, and note that many of them have restricted permissions preventing me from adding tags or notes

Podcasting

When I got back to the UK on Friday I joined the Dogear Nation regulars for a chat about the event and all the latest web news. Episode 73 has just been posted, so check it out.

A full write-up?

It’s coming. Somewhen soon…

Creative Commons and attributions

I noticed Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio) twittering about Flickr and Creative Commons licensing of photos recently.

You can find the photos which I have CC-licensed here on my Flickr stream. This accounts for less than 20% of my total photostream.

I’m a big fan of CC. I use a lot of CC-licensed materials in presentations, for instance. Let me explain the rationale as to how I decide which of my images to make available under Creative Commons.

1. If they are from a social media event, then generally I guess other people might want to blog them.
2. If they are of gadgets or objects, or are quick snapshots, then the likelihood is that I’m going to blog them, and others might want to as well.
3. If someone specifically asks to use an image, I’ll consider whether or not it could / should be CC-licensed. Generally, it’s nice when people want to use one of my images, so I try to oblige.
4. If I find that an image has been used on a blog without the author checking and it is marked All Rights Reserved, and I subsequently decide that the image is generally shareable, then I’ll open it up.
5. If they are family, portraits or landscape shots – i.e. the bulk of my work – then there’s a chance I might want to do something with them commercially in the future, or else there’s a good reason for me not wanting just anyone to use them (plus there may be rights issues outside of my control anyway). In these cases, I generally will not apply a CC license.

The license I most frequently apply is Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. The annoyance is that I seem to find myself having to “police” the use of the images… I have some web search feeds set up which look for references to my Flickr URL, and when I see them used, I’ll take a look at the site. The most frequently-used image seems to be this one of one of my favourite blogging books… but 90% of the time I have to go and ask for the blogger in question to add an attribution or reference back to the original site. I always add a link to the original Flickr page to the bottom of slides, and details of the images used in the notes for any slide deck. It’s part of playing fair.

I like Creative Commons. I just wish that more people understood how to use CC-licensed content.

Update: I just want to emphasise that 99% of the folks I do correspond with on this issue are very polite, helpful, and made the honest mistake of not necessarily knowing the background on CC licensing. The issue is usually fixed without hesitation. In the example I cited in this post, the author did link back to the Flickr page, and the alt text of the img tag very clearly references me – it’s just that many browsers won’t show that even in a tooltip, as the link URL will be shown in preference. A clear credit is usually a better option, in my own opinion.

Photos I’m particularly happy with

Taken whilst in London for the Thames Festival a couple of weeks ago.

Filtering photos from a feed

I sometimes use my Tumblelog to post the odd photo from my iPhone. Generally I don’t want to post iPhone images to Flickr (typically these are spur-of-the-moment snapshots and low quality). There are actually two very nice free apps for the iPhone that let me post directly to Tumblr (called, imaginatively, Tumble and TheTumbler – I’m still trying to decide which one I prefer).

The problem is that I also feed my blog titles and my del.icio.us links to Tumblr, and my Flickr images, and sometimes I will also post a text note there too. Tumblr does not provide feeds on a per-item-type basis, it only gives an aggregated feed containing all the stuff you’ve uploaded there, or pulled in from other sources. Plus, if you then add that to FriendFeed, you get duplicates, even though FF can now work that out to some extent and roll them up into single entries.

Anyway… I put together a quick Yahoo Pipe which filters just the photos that were uploaded directly to Tumblr (ignoring Flickr images, for example). Feel free to clone and re-use, you can just enter your own Tumblr feed URL in the entry box at the top.

Update: well, shoot. It doesn’t ignore the Flickr images at all, does it? Gah. Apparently they are imported to Tumblr as images… which makes me suspect that even when I remove photos from Flickr they will stay on Tumblr. How annoying. And the more I look at the way that the Tumblr feed is constructed, the more I don’t like it at all.

Chapel Porth

Taking a break!

IBM Hackday 5

I just uploaded a small set of images from the local Hackday event at IBM Hursley to Flickr. Feel free to add tags or notes if you took part.