I was at a small thing today, with Tom Coates of Yahoo!. More on the thing early next year (right, Mark?), but conversation over the couscous turned to Flickr, and use of images.

I use a lot of images in my presentations and, except when showing screenshots of web sites, my main source tends to be Flickr. I always go looking for the Creative Commons-licensed content, but need to take several extra steps to be able to search only for these re-usable images. From the Flickr home page, the ‘easiest’ way to find Creative Commons-licensed content would appear (surely not) to be…

• do a search for the topic you’re interested in
• largely ignore the page of returned results, heading straight for the ‘Advanced Search‘ link that has now appeared next to the search box
• Click through to the Advanced Search page, select the relevant options and do the search again.

OK, so I should probably just bookmark the Advanced Search page… but I tend not to bother to bookmark anything these days…

Anyway, I was suggesting to Tom that it would be better (for me) if Flickr searches were restricted by default to those suitable for re-use, requiring people who wished to see any image on a topic to select some appropriate switch.

Whilst certainly not averse to the idea of making it easier for people to re-use images from Flickr, Tom made the very good point that such a move toward explicit encouragement of re-use might fundamentally alter contributors’ perceptions of the site and their part in it. At present, he suggested, Flickr contributors see themselves as sharing their images with their friends and peers. There is clear reciprocity at work, as Flickr contributors gain value from similar contributions by their peers.

Feeding the voracious appetite for images to illustrate presentations might be perceived as exploitation of the community by those who do not sufficiently contribute back to it in return. Even raising the profile of such uses might, conceivably, damage the very community that there is such value in for those like myself.

In response, I argued that the way in which I use images must surely serve both to advertise Flickr and to play to the ego-stroking need of Flickr’s participants (they’re human, after all). I quite religiously include a Flickr logo, a Creative Commons logo, all of the Creative Commons license condition symbols, and a URL for the image as displayed on Flickr.

Which led us to wonder how feasible it might be for someone to provide a tool to do this automagically. And that’s the point of the post, so over to those with the skills to allow me to find an image matching my needs (Creative Commons licensed, on-topic, and capable of filling a 1024×768 Keynote slide without having to scale up), click on Download as today, but end up with a version of the image already stamped with the relevant details. It can’t be hard.

And, on a wholly unrelated note, where’s the wiki-focussed equivalent of ecto? A full-featured, user-friendly and multi-client wiki editor. Come to think of it, where’s the wiki equivalent of XML-RPC, which presumably makes tools like ecto possible in blog land?

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Participation, Talis, Web 2.0