Everyone knows that almost any blog post is better with images. However, getting them can be a difficult matter. With a maze of licensing and fair use issues making it hard to decide what is and is not legal to use, many bloggers don’t wish to use images that they have not taken themselves.

But while using your own images is always the best way to go, there are several great sources to help you find and locate images that you can use as part of your blog posts. In fact, there are some very neat tools designed specifically to help you correctly license and use other people’s photography, art and more.

The best part of all is that these tools are free. They will not cost you a dime to use and, if used correctly, can let you fill up your blog posts with as many images as your heart desires. read more

This has got to hurt. Yahoo have lost Flickr founders Caterina Fake, who left last Friday, and Steward Butterfield, who’ll be leaving on July 12, according to a report on TechCrunch. When reading this, I quickly surfed to Valleywag with hopes of some juicy rumors or just plain fun nastiness, but alas, they make a poor pun on the fact that it took the husband/wife Flickr founder team less time to give birth to a baby, than to get the video features rolling.

Nothing on the Flickr blog either, but I did find this photo, at least that’s something.

If you’re looking for content for your site but don’t want to create it yourself or pay money for it, there are a lot of options available to you. Whether you are looking for images, articles or multimedia, there are many sites on the Web that make available a library of work available for you to use.

If you know where to look for what you want and to make sure that your site complies with the licensing requirements put upon it, you’ll find that there are plenty of people eager have their work become a part of your blog.

To help with that, I have compiled a list of seven of my favorite sites for obtaining free, high-quality content for your site without any worries of copyright issues down the road.
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Syntagma Media announced Syntagma Photographic, what John Evans calls a satellite business around Syntagma Media, a while back. There’s still no website or anything, but that is surely just a matter of time. The idea is to snap photos for the sites in the network, and offer them for sale as well.

All our photos will be flagged Copyright Syntagma Photographic and will be appearing here soon.

We haven’t had a major expansion of the public business for quite some time, so it obviously gives us great pleasure to start growing again in the midst of this dangerous downturn.

I think more blog networks should shoot their own photos when possible. Creative Common pics from Flickr is all well and good, but original artwork is always better.

Last year, Virgin Mobile Australia decided to use Creative Commons-licensed images in an advertising campaign. The campaign, dubbed “Are You With Us Or What”, featured photographs taken from Flickr, which were overlayed with taglines and a plug for Virgin’s cell phone service.

While most of the photos were of car accidents, graveyards, Christmas decorations or other non-human subjects, one ad found itself at the center of a legal storm.

The ad in question featured Alison Chang flashing a peace sign. The photo, taken by Justin Wong, was licensed using Flickr’s “select a license” feature under a Creative Commons by attribution license, which allows commercial use.

The problem was that, while the photographer had allowed commercial use through his license (though he later claimed to be unclear about the terms), it only covered the copyright of the work itself. Chang nor her parents had signed a model release, meaning the use potentially violated her right to privacy.

The result is that her parents sued on her behalf in a case that is still ongoing.

So what went wrong and how can others avoid a similar misstep? The answer is actually fairly simple.
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I’m reading that Google is closing Hello, which apparently was (and is, as I’m writing this), a photo sharing service that came with Picasa. I guess they feel it doesn’t fill a purpose anymore.

This from Hello.com:

We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello. We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come.

We hope that you continue to enjoy the other sharing products Google offers including Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk.

More over at Google Blogoscoped, with some links to the old version. Matthew Ingram says that Hello was a really cool app, in which case it’s a shame it closes.

On May 15, Google can begin doing something really cool with hello.com, a truly premium domain name. Too bad for the users of the defunct service though.

The orphan works legislation, last seen in 2006, now has the attention of Congress again with two similar bills, one in the House and one in the Senate. These bills, should either of them pass, could have a drastic impact on copyright holders both within and outside of the United States.

But what should bloggers expect from this bill? How can Internet-based authors work to avoid having their work becoming “orphaned”?

The answer depends heavily on the kind of work you do and how much protection you want for it. However, what is clear is that at least some bloggers have a good reason to be concerned and should consider taking steps now to avoid a problem down the road. read more

VentureBeat has a great annotated photo recap of the Web 2.0 Expo - held this past week in San Francisco.

The New York Times takes a look at how Flickr has changed the concept of a photography professional:

Consider photography. As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. Flickr, the wildly popular photo-sharing site, was founded by the Canadian company Ludicorp in 2004. Four years later, amid the more than two billion images that currently circulate on the site, the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site’s members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that “pop” with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

Thomas Hawk weighs in as well:

Today the web is allowing a new breed of photographer as artist. An artist that is increasingly able to bypass the fine art elite and promote their work directly to the public. Although the fine art prices have not yet been attached to today’s new “Flickr Famous” photographer, this too will come in time. Step one is simply getting the exposure.

I’ve found photographs as beautiful and meaningful on Flickr as I have found anywhere else - even in art museums, galleries, or photography exhibits. Every day thousands of new photographs are posted on Flickr - and I’ve never been able to not find what I was looking for through tag searches or just browsing around.

The combination of digital photography and web services like Flickr have completely changed the photography landscape - and we’ve probably only seen the leading edge of this revolution.

Flickr has added a new sharing feature, making it even easier for bloggers to pull great photos from Flickr to illustrate their blog posts. The new Share This menu gives easy access to embed code, as well as the option to nab the link, send to a friend, and blog it. The latter being if you have configured any blogs of course.