Trying Out Wylio.com for Flickr Creative Commons Images

photo © 2008 Steren Giannini | more info (via: Wylio)


I just saw a tweet from Gwyneth Jones, the Daring Librarian and an awesome teacher librarian, blogger, and tweeter, about Wylio.com. All too often, I bookmark good ideas to diigo to try later, but then forget about them. I decided to try Wylio out right away. Here's what it does: It searches Flickr.com for Creative Commons images, and then lets you size the image and get embed code to include it in a website or blog. There are a number of sites out there that will search Flickr.com for Creative Commons for you - I've used Flickrcc.bluemountains.net a lot - but this has the added advantage of automatically capturing the image, adding the credit and link back to Flickr, sizing, and preparing the image for the web. Pretty cool! This could become part of my regular toolkit. Thank you for letting me know about Wylio, Gwyneth. One thing I don't understand, though, is why the image has photo ©, since the Flickr page shows that it is definitely Creative Commons-licensed. I thought © meant a traditional copyright. Any thoughts? I also need to experiment a bit more with the sizing and placement of the image options -- they aren't coming out in my blog exactly as they appear in edit mode.

This little experiment is also reminding me that I need to put the use of Creative Commons high on the list of what I teach and in the library. I have been seeing when I mention it to teachers and classes that both students and teachers are unaware of how important this concept is as they all move towards becoming publishers of websites, etc. I've also seen when I worked with students at Lindero blogging and completing the Teen Learning 2.0 tutorial that the lesson of not using copyrighted material in published works without permission needs to be reinforced over and over again with most of them before they really incorporate it into their regular practices. We are so fortunate to have great resources like Flickr and tools like Wylio to make these lessons fun and easy.