After the suggestion of Iain Watson on Twitter I decided to turn one of the photos I took recently into a desktop wallpaper. It’s the first time I personally deem a photo suitable for this so here is the premiere:

1400×900 - 1280×960

• Understanding CSS positioning part 2 • CSS & (X)HTML • Kilian Valkhof - Interesting article by Kilian Valkhof on positioning in CSS
• Call the expert: A refactoring story - A 5 part story on how to do refractoring, and what to refractor, in an average symfony project.
• Amplified 08 Network of Networks - Great new meetup for all the networks in London. Still in the works though.
• Remote TextMate Projects - Want to work directly in textmate with files on a remote server? How about using MacFuse and MacFusion to solve your problems. Actually a good solution for many more problems, but this is definitely one of them.
• CSS Table - Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong - Interesting little article about CSS tables. Quite interesting as IE8 will be the last and most important browser to support it. Unfortunately still not usable because so many people will stick with the browser they have.

A while back I played with a little browser extension called PicLens that allowed me to intuitively browse the photos on a Flickr page. I knew that the app was in development and trying to include more and more sites into their system, but at a certain moment I probably reinstalled my OS and never installed the extension again.

Today I stumbled upon CoolIris, which I then learned was the new name of PicLens. The application has really grown a lot since I last tried it. It now has a very intuitive semi-3D UI, it can load photos from various sites, videos from YouTube, allows you to browse Amazon, and even has an iPhone app. 

Here is a little video that shows what it can do within Flickr. 

The app is freely available, and totally worth installing.

I shot this photo last Sunday and didn’t intend to capture the bee in mid-air. This was the second time though that I caught something in mid air (first time here) and I thought it might be a theme worth sticking with. So I created a “caught in the air”-set on Flickr and will be trying to add more stuff in the future.

Last week a few people pointed me to this news item on the BBC news site about the London Girl Geek Dinners. I love the Girl Geek Dinners and the BBC, but was amazed to see my photos accompanied with the news item without any mention of my name. This is surprising because my photos are licensed under a Creative Commons “attribution” license.

After a few tweets and an email to some people at the BBC, the BBC told me that they did attribute to my photo in the ALT tag of the photo. Soon realizing that this might have been a bit of a relaxed implementation of attribution they quickly added my name under the photos.

I though that this was where this story ended until this morning Paul Downey wrote an interesting article “On The Vanity of Demanding Attribution”. He has some interesting views on the CC licenses, photographers requiring attribution, and the reasons we ask for attribution. I found his article interesting and added an extensive comment on my view of the situation. The main gist of my comment was that if the BBC had asked to use my photos without attribution, I would probably have let them.

I came to the conclusion that for most people, attribution has two sides: an external ego building factor that brings you link traffic and better Google rankings, and an internal ego factor that says you want to know what happened to your photos.

In my case I put the attribution license with my photos because this is the “common denominator” license that fits with most people using my photos. This does not mean that I’m not open to give a different license when requested. In the end though I want know that someone used my photos, no matter what. Not so I can keep control, but simply because I want to know. Notification for the sake of internal ego pleasing, not external.

So maybe there is a place for a CC license that requires notification, not attribution. We could maybe link Flickr up with some trackback system to make this easier, who knows. I hope that in the future people will read my Flickr profile page before using my photos as it really clearly states how I think an attribution should be done.