Buying the rights to use photos on your site can be an expensive proposition, starting from dozens of dollars and going into the hundreds per photo. Luckily, there are a lot of websites out there cataloguing photos that can be used for free. The official term is royalty free photos, and usually there are some restrictions as to their use, such as the sensible

You are not allowed to use any of the images found herein for the purpose of spreading hate

The quality of some of these photos is amazing. Here are a couple of the most popular sites with royalty free photos. I chose them for the amount of photos and the fact that you can use them for commercial purposes:

- The Stock Exchange (100,000 photos)
- morgueFile (1,000,000)

morgue: a term used by traditional artist and publishers as a place to keep reference material

Almost every week there seems to be a great new application of technology on the Internet. Here are some recent examples to do with uses of an Internet wonder in its own right, Google Maps:

forest fire in Louisiana

Google Sightseeing: blog made up of photos of the Google Satellite site, with detailed aerial views of the entire continental USA. They list photos of natural wonders, famous landmarks and more. By the way, Google Satellite is an awesome feature of Google Maps which allows you to see a satellite photo of any map. Here's an example of a Google Satellite image of where I live:

satellite photo of Palo Alto (where I live) from Google Satellite - note Stanford in the lower left and San Francisco Bay in the upper right

HousingMaps: using Google maps again to provide the geographical data, this site allows you to pin point which places are for rent and for how much, and as you can see below you can click on a pin to see price and photos. The image below represents the same area as the one above.

this is the same area as the satellite map above with pins for rental housing

Yahoo Maps now also shows traffic: at least in the US, you can find a map and get a good idea of traffic conditions. You can also find information on road works and accidents.

And as a bonus check out the neighblogging map on the righthand column (towards the bottom) which maps out all the blogs in my neighborhood. There's at least one I recognize, my friend Enoch's medmusings

If you look at the bottom of this blog's right hand column, you'll see this box:

It means that you (and anybody else) are free to copy and distribute the contents of this blog, under the following conditions:

Attribution: You must give the original author credit (that would be me).
Noncommercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes, like selling my yoga photos to Yoga Journal without permission.
Share Alike: If you alter, transform, or build upon anything in this blog, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

This is different from the default copyright law where no one is allowed to copy your stuff without your permission, even if it's for educational or nonprofit purposes.

More and more content is appearing on the web under various guises of the Creative Commons license, which you can download and use for free. You can search for it on Yahoo Creative Commons Search (beta). Here are some notable examples:

Books: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (how appropriate - a free book on free culture) and We The Media by Dan Gillmor (about grassroots journalism)

Video: MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 seconds ads

University Courses: MIT's OpenCourseWare with subjects ranging from Anthropology to Women's Studies

Music: The Wired CD including the Beastie Boys and Gilberto Gil

The Wikipedia is a free web-based encyclopedia with content written by an army of volunteers. It's a fabulous resource and gives me hope for humanity. Wired magazine reports:

In 2005, the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.

Wow. This is the modern equivalent to barn raising. Since anyone can contribute, I thought it would be neat to post a new entry just to see how it works. I went to the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga article and noticed that there was no article on a style of yoga I teach, Mysore style. So I wrote one and posted it (with 3 year old twins, this counted as an exciting Friday night for me). There was no need to register, login, enter my email or anything. You just create an entry and post it, almost as if it is your own blog.

21st Century version of Diderot's Encyclopédie

Given how easy it is to contribute, it sounds like it's a recipe for anarchy and chaos. On the contrary, it's turning out to be one of the world's most democratic institutions. The group of contributors is self-policing, and even the rules are collaboratively drawn up and amended over time.

Such an open culture is vulnerable to abuse and vandalism. One way they have found to reduce this problem is that you can watch a page and be notified as soon as anyone modifies it, in effect becoming it's guardian. Certain controversial pages (like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entry which has an extensive discussion subpage) get “edited” several times a day sometimes. Its guardians usually act within minutes of any offending corrections.

Both the contents and the inner workings of the Wikipedia are fascinating. Here's a great article in Wired to find out more.