The Internet Life of One Photo
I wrote about this on my personal web site but thought that the GovLoop community might be interested. In a nutshell, an artist found a photo I took and used it to help him finish a painting. He was able to do this because I had my photo online and I had assigned it a Creative Commons license. The photo (of an Arizona landmark) that I posted to Flickr got picked up by Wikipedia, which led to the painter finding it.
Here's the story:
http://joeflood.com/2009/07/22/onephotolife/
I thought this whole process of discovery was pretty interesting, that a simple photo I took could end up having this interesting life on the internet. When I took the picture on that hot April day, I never expected that a painter would make use of it several years in the future.
How is this relevant to GovLoop? Government has some amazing photos packed away in drawers, or hidden on web sites, that should be made accessible to the public. If we can have a data.gov, why not a photo.gov? Imagine what a great resource that would be to the nation. It could lead to all sorts of unexpected new discoveries and products, like my one little photo did, but on an exponentially larger scale.
Here's the story:
http://joeflood.com/2009/07/22/onephotolife/
I thought this whole process of discovery was pretty interesting, that a simple photo I took could end up having this interesting life on the internet. When I took the picture on that hot April day, I never expected that a painter would make use of it several years in the future.
How is this relevant to GovLoop? Government has some amazing photos packed away in drawers, or hidden on web sites, that should be made accessible to the public. If we can have a data.gov, why not a photo.gov? Imagine what a great resource that would be to the nation. It could lead to all sorts of unexpected new discoveries and products, like my one little photo did, but on an exponentially larger scale.
Comment
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Comment by Janet L Varan on July 31, 2009 at 3:29pm -
As well as the challenges of developing within a single agency! We often run up against "but it's in our Federal grant to develop a separate website" - when the better action would be to beef up an existing website. Why make site visitors visit different areas of our department when the info should be in one place?
It would be interesting to see if usa.gov could incorporate more photo feeds.
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Comment by Joe Flood on July 31, 2009 at 2:25pm -
The usa.gov search engine works very well but doesn't include all photos available. Maybe it could be expanded to be more comprehensive. A friend of mine at NOAA also points out this image library from National Marine Sanctuaries:
https://marinelife.noaa.gov/media_lib/index.aspx
Lots of cool coral reef pics. Having contributed a little bit to this project, I'm glad it's online but fully aware of the challenges of developing a web product across government agencies!
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Comment by Janet L Varan on July 31, 2009 at 12:34pm
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Hey, Joe - Great story! It's similar to acts of kindness. One nice action today may reap benefits somewhere in the future.
I know that usa.gov has a search for images as one of the options in their search box. I searched for arizona and received over 1,000 photos - some from NASA, the military, NPS, NBII and congress.
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Comment by FPrioleau on July 30, 2009 at 7:26pm -
I couldn't agree with you more. My students were very interested in the picture posted by NASA. It makes their work more realistic to urban students. It is difficult finding authentic images of the people and products discovered and created within governmental agencies.
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