A Culture of Sharing

Tonight I am diving into making a graphical map of my social media experiments and the first thing I want to do is find some cool icons to represent properties like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

This inspired me to share with you my go-to creative source: Creative Commons.

This will be a brief post simply to say that Creative Commons is an amazing Open Source concept for copyright materials. If you want to use original audio, images, video, illustrations – you name it – this is where to find it! And for FREE. Their search includes flickr images, YouTube videos and Jamendo for music amongst other things.

The deal is that artists/content creators can select from a variety of licenses to attach to their creations. The artist determines the level of "sharing" that they want their creation to have... including options for remixing, not-for-profit use, commercial use and more. Then content sourcers like myself and other bloggers, YouTubers etc. can go and find content that meets their needs. It is amazing how much content is out there that you can use for free as long as you credit the user. If you are using it for commercial purposes just watch that the license allows for that. If it doesn't, that usually means you can contact the artist and pay a royalty fee directly to them.

Just go to their website and check it all out... they explain it all better than I do :)

For example this image of Confederation Bridge is mine and I have provided a CC license to allow use & remix but not for commercial use.