Joi Ito wrote on his blog that Creative Commons was looking forward to receive some examples of how the CC licenses helped reusing photos from Flickr. I already had in mind exactly a story like this, so it took me just a few minutes to put together an email to Melissa at Creative Commons…

I publish all my photos on Flickr with a CC-A (Creative Commons Attribution) license. As long as people credit me as the original author of my work, I am glad for them to take the photos for any possible purpose, and if they have a way to make money through it in the meantime, so much the better!

Photo of Birka island close to Stockholm

I took this photo at a boat trip a couple of hours from Stockholm in Sweden where I went for a few days with my family. These excursions are a lot of fun now in Europe, for just three-four days maybe with low cost airlines bringing you anywhere. Ryanair leaves just a few minutes of bus drive from where I live. It is so cool to be able and hop on a normal urban bus, take the plane, and an hour or two later be in a different climate, country, and culture. The fact that the tickets cost just 10 euro or so, if you plan ahead, help a lot as well!

A few months after I posted the photo, I received an email from a company compiling a travel guide of Sweden, alerting me about the fact that they wanted to include the photo in their new guide, if I agreed. I told them that I was happy, and that given the license they wouldn’t have even had to ask… Now it is funny, as I am writing this, I do not remember the name of the guide: but since they gave me credit for the photo, I know that it is enough to type in Google “david orban sweden guide birka” and yes, it comes back as the first result: Schmap Art and Entertainment, correctly credited, linked back to the Flickr photo page, and to the appropriate CC license!

An other example is the inclusion of my photos of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and physicist Eric Drexler on their respective wikipedia pages.

From my photo

to his wikipedia article:

I like to take photos of people, with or without me standing on their side and these two are among my heroes. The photos were taken and put on Wikipedia without people asking my permission, which they didn’t need, and properly crediting me on the page of the photo. The fact that the photos were both appropriately cropped, to focus on the
subject on the article, and taking me out of the picture of course is also an important positive element of the freedoms that the CC licenses automatically grant to the people reusing the pictures.

It is interesting that exactly because I was so positively moved by the pictures being taken, and that I was preparing to write up something like this, I actually managed to take a before, and after picture of the Drexler article:

before the photo

after the photo

So what is especially cool about these other screenshots? That they are a reuse squared! Because they are not the plain screenshot of the Wikipedia article, but that of the Apple Macintosh Dictionary application, which feeds itself on Wikipedia. So these are a fairly long chain of culture propagating richly, from author, to source, to application, all smoothly, given the automation afforded by the CC license!

And a final example…

All my slideshows on Slideshare are based on CC licensed Flickr photos, and themselves are also CC-A licensed. For example:

| View | Upload your own

I have a fairly personal slide style, where I have typically 10-20 slides, each with three-four words in a sentence, and one photo. I invariably choose the photos through a search on Flickr, always using advanced search and picking CC licensed photos that I can also change, and use commercially. Even if today I release my material without
asking for any payment, or even without placing Google ads on my site, I want to be sure that if I want to publish a book for sale in the future, I do not have to go back and change my images. (Hey, it is annoying that Steve Jurvetson’s photos pop up so prominently in my searches, but hey, it is not his fault, is it? You can also see that I credit the photos on the last page of my slide deck…) Without Flickr I would not be able to create these slideshows, and I would definitely be a less effective speaker (or would resort to Larry Lessig’s style of presentations, which are anything but ineffective!)

So I hope these three examples help you understand why I love Creative Commons, and why you should also always label what you create under the license of your choice.

We Feel Fine is an incredible display of the power of the web to transform the way we think about humanity. Emotions are among the most human of characteristics, and being able to see their power dynamically is astonishing.

We Feel Fine is a website that analyses blog postings to search for those that contain an indication of the feeling of the poster. It also goes and collects publicly available profile information to establish the location, age, and gender. Via elegant and flexible options, the data is represented as a dynamic display of art, but at the same time it also shows the ebb and flow of emotions in such a detail that it could be useful for more practical applications as well.

There is also an API for We Feel Fine, so if you think you can take advantage of what has already been done, and maybe integrate it in your own blog analytics suite, you can have fun mashing up!

One of the games I always play at the start of a new year is an excercise in synesthesia:what color is the coming year? For example to me 2006 was orange, 2005 was yellow, and 2004 was blue. My colors are not necessarily as neat as the basic ones: to me 2000 is bright white (while 1000 was black), so that shades the main color, and it is the same for the digits representing the century, or the decade. You can then ask around, and hear the different answers from the people around you. It is fun!

Wired has a great column on the last page of each issue, “Artifacts from the future”, which illustrate a hypotethical object from the future with very detailed and thoughprovoking images. This month’s is a bunch of crayons on a desk with funky colors, whose names recall various promises, and dangers of the near or far future, as “grey goo”, “yellow cake”, “martian flesh”, and many others.

So now 2007 has its perfect color now: “Red Dwarf”!

What is your color for 2007?

I have been recently contacted be a Museum of the city of Surrey in British Columbia, Canada. They were asking for permission to include my photo of a rather nice, and unusual advent calendar. Of course I complied eagerly, and asked about the nature of their exhibit: it is an interactive where they make 3d calendars, advent calendars, and the like, counting down to Christmas. It is the power of Flickr, and that of Creative Commons to enable so easy and stimulating intercontinental collaboration!

Pong, the classic videogame, has taken many forms, but this one is probably one of the most subtle and elegant. The integration of led technology, and touchpads enrich this object without encumbering it with additional design elements. Both leds, for information display and illumination, and touchpads are becoming significantly cheaper as they are adopted in mass produced consumer electronics items.

fabrica is the design and communications laboratory created by Bennetton, the Italian fashion group. There are a lot of nice ideas on their blog. Jonathan Harris developed 10×10 while at Fabrica. He later went on to create We Feel Fine, a heartbreakingly wonderful dynamic rendering of human emotions, as expressed online.