The internet amazes me

I'm still kind of amused at the way I send an email across the room to a coworker with the same nonchalance that I contact a friend living in Kosovo. Pretty cool stuff, and I came up with another story this morning about it.

Images that I upload to flickr I have set to be Creative Commons licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons, specifically.) What that means, basically is that anyone can use the images I post as long as they're not making money of them, and they credit me. I've only had one photo used before, a picture of the Incline Village Library used in a Schmap travel guide to Lake Tahoe. (Hover over the icon at Incline Village for a minute, and my photo will scroll by in the upper right corner.) I believe in that case, since it was kind of a commercial use, they requested my permission to use it first, and I granted it.

I also have a Google Alert set up for my name. Ant time Google's web indexers come across a new page that has the search terms I entered (in this case, my name) I get an email with a link to that page. It's kind of fun, a lot of times what I get are library program announcements or running race results. This morning, though, I got this:

Blogs, Wikis and eLearning Week
... Slide 20 – Right tool for the right purpose | Wrong tool for the job by Turi Becker| cc by-nc-sa http://www.flickr.com/photos/turi_b/697794899/ ...


I had to follow the link to see what it was about. With a little looking around, I found that a guy at the University of Singapore used one of my images in a slideshow about blogs and wikis - a picture from a trip to Alaska in which my friend Jeff was using a tiny backpacking hatchet to try to split a giant log. He was using it as an illustration of when to use the right tool for the right job.

I think that's just awesome. That a moment of hilarity on our camping trip in Alaska might be of use to someone teaching about blogs and wikis in Singapore. That it was OK for him to use because of how flickr encourages people to set up their Creative Commons settings. And how I only found out about it because of the Google alert on my own name. What a crazy place, this internet.