A Picture is Worth a Post (With Attribution, of Course)

My trip to New York, New York in the spring of 2012 was nothing short of amazing. I had the opportunity to attend the 2012 Intelligent Community Forum Summit at New York University’s campus, located in Brooklyn and get a chance to do some sightseeing throughout Manhattan. How can things get any better?

Well, it turns out they can, especially when your journey is shared on multiple websites.

The photo above is one of many shots I captured while I was walking about NYC. After my trip, I decided to throw my pics up on Flickr, just for archiving purposes. Before I finalized the import process, I decided to make it so that all of the rights for my images were set to something less restrictive than the standard “All Rights Reserved.” Thus, I decided to go with Creative Commons‘ Attribution-ShareAlike licence.

Nothing really happened after posting the pics, it seems…until I did my usual Google search of my name, mainly out of curiosity. I was shocked to see that my name was appearing in news articles in the United States ranging from SNL cast announcements, all the way to photo credit for an article about Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.

The one that really stood out for me was WPTV West Palm Beach’s (NBC) use of my photo for their article “Saturday Night Live adds 6 featured players, Cecily Strong named as new SNL ‘Weekend Update’ co-host.” Remember, now, this is an affiliate of NBC (Yes, THE NBC) that was using my photo. How. Cool. Is. That.

My experience in a nutshell: 

• Each one of these sites was giving my work credit, and linking back to the original photo (cool and very cool);
• I get to write an awesome post about this (the chances of this happening again are slim, to none); and
• It is a great example of how a modicum of time just making your content available for others to use and share can yield such exciting results and opportunity.

–> Insert plug for Alec Couros: I attended an awesome lecture by the University of Regina’s Professor of Educational Technology, Dr. Alec Couros a few years ago during my time as an education undergrad. Alec made a point of letting everyone know the benefits of open thinking, such as Creative Commons; who knew I’d be writing about this lecture a few years later?