I’ve been playing around in the Creative Commons for the last couple of days and I’m blown away by the treasures that lurk here. For those that don’t know Creative Commons is essentially a public license to freely use work produced by others, generally with an attribution to the original author/creator of the work. Creative Commons is also a non-profit organisation which is dedicated to allowing others to legally use the creations of others. For a fuller definition check out this wikipedia article.

Now, for the lone blogger this resource is a life-saver. In some ways, I would say we are better off than the mainstream commercial media as we are able to dip into material of astounding depth and variety – for free!

This week I also discovered an amazing search engine dedicated to finding material in this vast commons. It’s called Creative Commons Search and allows you to search Flickr, Yahoo, Google, Blip.tv, jamendo and spinexpress giving us access to images, video, music and other media which we can legally use as long as we play by some simple rules.

I think this is a redefining moment in terms of media. Once of the great advantages that traditional media have held over emerging new media is their incredible archive of historic material which is difficult for lone-rangers such as myself to compete with or offer my readers. But now I have access to an exponentially exploding trove of material of high-quality.

In fact, through projects like Project Gutenburg, Libravox and even the dissemination of historical material from the Library of Congress archives, I can republish books, audio works and wonderfully interesting archive material. I suddenly have an edge over the mainstream who are prohibited from using this material because of commerical rights restrictions. Since I don’t make much of a penny from blogging, that doesn’t apply to me! It’s amazing what people are willing to share.

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