medillinteractivepublishing.com

A very well-done video on the evolving nature the Internet and our relationship with it

this website is an experiment by the Institute of Interactive Research.  The site is a practical test around the central theme of not clicking on any part of the interface.  The developers use games, interactive histories and recorded content showing you the last 20 visitors to the site and how confused their interaction appeared to be.

While this method of interaction might not take-off mainstream, it is interesting to consider how quickly we become dependent on one way of doing things.

Copyright laws are a slippery area, especially when it comes to “borrowing” other people’s photos for your blog or Web site. Check out the Creative Commons Web site for a rundown of the various ways that work can be protected and shared. The icons representing each license type are fairly standard and you will frequently see them on Web sites that contain original content. If you want to borrow from a site, try to find their Creative Commons policy to ensure that what you’re doing is legal. You generally shouldn’t have to look too far to find this information.

For example, if you look at an image page on Flickr, you can find the copyright type under “Additional Information.” This image has “All Rights Reserved” and legally cannot be re-purposed on your blog. I took it and you didn’t. On the other hand, this image only has “Some Rights Reserved” and the Creative Commons license says that the photo can be used with attribution.

For an entertaining (and thought-provoking) take on copyright law, watch A Fair(y) Use Tale:

Now that you understand what kind of content you can and cannot use, check out the following 10 Places To Find Free Images Online.

There is also a previous post on finding usable images from last quarter’s Interactive Storytelling class.

Several of you have asked for more guidance on how to find images you may legally use on your blog.

Here are some ideas:

• Search the Web for “public domain images“
• Wikipedia maintains pages (intended for use by Wikipedia authors) on public domain images and free images (no, I don’t know exactly what the difference is - presumably the idea behind “free” images is that you should give credit while you don’t need to do this for “public domain,” but I suspect the distinction is artificial at best).
• You can use some Creative Commons-licensed images posted to Flickr. My friend Amy Gahran provided a how-to on the E-Media Tidbits blog.
• istockphoto.com doesn’t have free images, but they’re very cheap — $1 or $2 for the size you might want to use on your blog

Back in September, Northwestern’s media relations office interviewed me about the way YouTube is affecting the presidential campaign:

Rich Gordon’s interview about YouTube and politics

For more Northwestern podcasts, check out Northwestern Newsfeed.