Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today presented a good bit of material on how to find free, legal content for your blog at WordCamp Dallas 2009. Here are some key points that he covered.

Creative Commons Licensing:

• Creative commons is a collection of 6 licenses.
• All creative commons licenses require attribution, allow a choice for commercial use, and derivative use.
• Creative commons licenses include machine, and human readable content.

Content Sources

• Google provides a creative commons search. You can use this search to find content by license type.
• Article sites have some strange rules for use so be sure you understand the terms before you use the content.

Image Content Sources

• Flickr Advance Search
• Photo Dropper WordPress Plugin – creative commons compliant image search tool
• Zemanta – an automated plugin for discovering image content for your blog. Pulls from multiple image sources.
• Wikimedia – a media resource provided by the Wikipedia folks
• Sxc.hu – free stock photo library that has a liberal licensing policy

Audio Content Sources

• CCMixer – a library of creative commons audio content
• Internet Archive – not very organized, but a hug amount of creative commons audio content
• Jamendo is another CC audio content source

Video Content Sources

• YouTube
• Flickr and Blip.tv have creative commons video content, but Blip does not have a search for video and Flickr does not let you download video content.

Alternative Sites

• Voxant Newsroom – news content with text, images, audio, and video. You must register and they only use JavaScript embeds.
• PicApp is a WordPress plugin for news related content. The images embed by JavaScript so you don’t get the SEO benefits and special needs browsers won’t be able to read the content on your blog.

Jonathan also talked about some advanced topics like Fair Use. Be sure you understand what this term means and how it relates to the use of content of your blog. A good rule of thumb is to be conservative and use only what you need. Don’t strip content and pretend that it’s yours. Give attribution and don’t make your readers guess.

More on all this later…

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com