ResearchBuzz

After watching major search engines develop way to search for Creative Commons images, it’s no surprise to discover that there’s a search engine dedicated exclusively to Creative Commons and public domain images. It’s called Sprixi and it’s available at http://www.sprixi.com/. What it finds is rather limited (at the moment it finds only items from Flickr and OpenClipArt as well as any images that are uploaded to Sprixi) its presentation is excellent.

The site has a basic keyword search; just enter a couple of words that describe what you’re looking for. I did a search for snow. Sprixi divides its search results into two panels: the first has thumbnails of the results and the second has a larger version of a chosen image, with even more data if you hold your mouse over the image.

Along with viewing the image, you have the option of specifying whether you think the option is a good result for your keyword search, which will help Sprixi give better results over time. If you click on the larger image in the right panel, you won’t get anything. But if you look at the bottom of the second panel, you’ll see there are direct links both to the image and to the Flickr user who uploaded the image. Beneath that you’ll see a notice of public domain or the picture’s Creative Commons license, as well as the original dimensions of the image.

If you like what you see here and find a picture you want to use, the next step is to click on the image, then click on the green “Use” link at the far right of the search results. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

As you can see you’ll get a link to the image, an option to download the image (and when you download the image, credit/attribution information will be added to it) and details about the use license in plain English. (“you must give credit to the author / commercial use allowed …”)A “more options” link lets you download the image without the credits/attribution text, as well as get image HTML and credit text.

I really like the presentation of this search engine. The two panel results make it easy to browse results as well as provide feedback on the relevance of the images to the keywords. And the “Use” link makes it easy to get the images and the attribution and use information you need. Nicely done.

I have three concerns, however. The first is the name — I thought initially “Sprixi” might be hard to remember. But I never misspelled it once in this writeup, so maybe it’s all right. Next, the direct links to Flickr image pages do not open in a new browser window. This means a lot of flipping back and forth unless you can remember to consistently open interesting Flickr pages in a new window. And finally, Sprixi might get run over by the large general search engines offering much bigger pools of CC and public domain images. Hopefully the site will expand what’s available via this great search and presentation.

I’ve always kind of liked Yahoo! Image Search because its variety of search options let you REALLY narrow down what you are looking for. Need a black and white, 200×300 picture of a barn owl? No problem! Yahoo has recently added another search filter: the ability to find Creative Commons images. The good news is that you can search for commercial-reusable items as a subset of CC material. The bad news is that you can only search Flickr content at this point.

Y!IS’ advanced search is http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/advanced. The Creative Commons filter is near the bottom. Note that you can specify two types of CC content: “Commercial use,” and “Remix, Tweak, Build Upon”. While the Flickr-only restriction is a bit of a bummer, there’s enough Flickr content to keep you busy for a long time.

Back to the barn owl search. Searching for barn owl in all CC content found me 854 pictures — wow! Even limiting the search to those pictures which allowed commercial use found me 236 pictures. And thanks to Yahoo’s extra set of search options on the results page, I could easily come up with several large creative commons pictures of barn owls. And while you often have to accept some goofiness in image search results, I found only a couple of images in my search results which weren’t, well, barn owls. (your mileage may vary, of course. Be sure to be as specific as possible.)

It’s frustrating, once you’re playing around with Y!IS, to note that Google’s image search can’t do the same thing. And Google’s advanced image search has some crazy options — find clip art, faces, line drawings, specific colors, etc. But no creative commons filter. I did find that if I ran a query for image keywords first, then the phrase “this work is licensed under a creative commons”, I had some luck. At the very least I found blogs which were CC licensed and were either using CC images or gave image sources. I think I’ll use Y!IS for my initial CC image searches, with Google search and some unique phraseology as a backup…

In the midst of all this talk about the price changes for iTunes, music costs at Amazon and Wal-Mart, etc., I thought it would be nice to cover the Free Music Archive, which recently launched in beta. A project of radio station WFMU, the Free Music Archive currently has over 5000 tracks and is available at http://freemusicarchive.org/ .

A lot of the front page is bloggish but look on the right hand nav for a list of recently-added songs (with RSS feed), a list of the most interesting songs (again with RSS feed) and a list of genres for browsing, from country to international to jazz to pop. The subgeneres on some of these listings were amazing — Sludge Rock? Post-Punk? No Wave?

At any rate song listings include artist, track, album, and genre. There’s a button for quick play of the song and another for quick download. You can register on the site but you don’t have to.

As for the music itself — well, it’s all over the map. Some of it I listened to and left after a few seconds, some I hung around for a few minutes, and some of it I quite liked and downloaded. I enjoyed Max Tundra, So Cow, Hayvanlar Alemi (Ever listened to guitars that just made you feel happy? “Bahar Patlatan”.), 8 Bit Weapon, and Edith Frost. I’m sure I’m not even scratching the surface here — there’s a lot of music I didn’t even get to because I wanted to finish this writeup.

Bands have their own pages, with biographical information, tour dates (for some), discography information, external links, registered users who are fans, etc. Some bands have just one song available while others have albums and albums and albums. (A button on the band page lets you play all the songs on the page; handy.) Songs also have their own pages; the page for Al Duvall’s “Poppycock & Tommyrot” contains language, bitrate, and genre information as well as the Creative Commons license under which you can use/reuse the music.

I could try to give you some kind of summary here, but I think the fact that it took me over two hours to do this entry because I kept finding more artists to listen to pretty much says it all. Take a day off from iTunes and come over here and explore. Recommended.