![[elephants of flickr]](http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/08/elephants-of-flickr-720x2430.jpg)
Why? Because the internet needs a page with 648 elephants. You may not have realized that, but now that I say it, you’re thinking, “Of course! Where are my elephants?” I got your elephants right here.
Once again, here’s some high-quality 4320×6480 (20″×30″) posters suitable for printing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. In case you were wondering, I really will print one of these on poster paper and find wall space to hang it. Probably in the kids’ room, although my dogs of Flickr poster is hanging in my office upstairs.
Here’s a 30″×20″ landscape poster for good measure. And an elephantine 40″×60″ poster. Yeah, that’s 8640×12960. Use it as your desktop wallpaper in 20 years. You think I’m kidding, but 20 years ago my state-of-the-art Apple ][e had a resolution of 280×192, and now it sits next to dual monitors that are each 1920×1200. You do the math. No, really, you do it; I’m cross-eyed with elephants.
All collages are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
Here’s a “to the fairest” kind of question for the portion of my readers that like to quibble about licensing. The above image is a clickable image map; each thumbnail links back to the original Flickr page, with the original image title in the alt attribute. Is that enough to satisfy the attribution clause of CC-BY-2.0? Update: added photographer’s name along with the image title.
Previously: the butterflies of Flickr, the dogs of Flickr.
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I don’t think that’s technically enough attribution. If the photographer’s flickr page is taken down or gets a new URL, there could conceivably no longer be a way (an easy way?) to even figure out the name of the photographer.
— Aaron 
The issue is one of the “permanence of fixation” of the attribution.
It’s fine in this online forum since the attribution is fixated and navigable as much as any other link. Mark can not be held liable for the permanence of the Flickr service.
Additionally, if the photographer were really concerned about attribution at that level of detail, he or she would’ve included a steganographic watermark in the image itself and/or some identifying tracking code as part of the varied image file format metadata features.
There is the additional concern regarding the loss of attribution when the conversion to print is done since both of those would be lost. I suppose to conform to the spirit of the CC license some sort of picture -> photographer legend would need to be created and “bound” to the rendered piece, but at any reasonably legible size it would spoil the artistic merit of the piece. Fine-grained policies are always brittle anyways. Just look at the U.S. tax code.
Eh, I say go for it. If anyone carps, you can always re-render it sans said carper’s pachyderm(s).
— keith
If you change alt="Title of Image" to alt="Title of Image by Authorname", I think you’re kosher.
give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied
Supplying more info in the alt (and perhaps title) attributes w/r/t attribution would surely be enough, for the ‘web’ version. For the print version, yellow dots. Or just print, at the bottom, a link to the web version.
Where do you do your 20″ x 30″ (or larger) poster printing?
Are you making this pictures with a script that grabs the pictures by tag (you check them) and put them all together or are you just bored?
— Rafael
This is a really random comment, but it’s fun to look up things like this with translated tags, though I just found a few results for this term:
Wouldn’t title be more useful than alt? The former obtains a tooltip, the latter obtains no UI.
> Wouldn’t title be more useful than alt?
Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!
…
Oh I’m sorry, but this is dive into mark 2007. You want dive into mark 2003, just along the corridor.
— Mark
> Where do you do your 20″ x 30″ (or larger) poster printing?
Ironically, I import them into iPhoto and print them through Apple’s online printing service. I tried the local Wolff camera but they only go up to 10×15″.
I don’t actually have any way to print a 40×60″ poster. I just threw that in there to celebrate the fact that I don’t pay for bandwidth overages.
— Mark
> I suppose to conform to the spirit of the CC license some sort of picture -> photographer legend would need to be created and “bound” to the rendered piece, but at any reasonably legible size it would spoil the artistic merit of the piece.
This, by the way, is why the open source community did away with the 3-clause BSD license that required attribution of every intermediate contributor. It’s fine at the scale of posting a single photo on a web site (I do this frequently), but it gets ridiculous as you scale up. So naturally, the CC foundation dropped the non-attribution licenses entirely in the 2.0 series, since the 1.0 non-attribution licenses were “not popular” (or some such tunnel-vision nonsense), and CC-*-2.0 are the only licenses that Flickr offers. Let’s not even talk about the fact that they’re now 2 generations behind, with no upgrade path.
I really do want to “do right” by the license, but whenever I try to actually *do* something with CC-licensed works, I get the feeling that I’m breaking new ground. Maybe that’s not fair, but there it is.
— Mark
See, so what we need a web service of some kind which says “This person owns this”. The obvious thing to take as input would be a URI, and then allow people to “claim” a base URI somehow. So someone could come along with their fancy-pants http://flickr.com/@4356843843 and say “I own everything down from that”. And obviously there would need to be some way to “prove” that, to some extent.
And then, the next step would be to collect some user info (including contact details, and how they’d like to be attributed). So then when that dastardly Mark Pilgrim comes along he can provide attribution to all this stuff, by linking like so:
http://fictionalwebservice.com/?uri=location the content can be found at]
and you could serve attribution details like:
http://fictionalwebservice.com/?return=alt&uri=location the content can be found at]
which would return something useable as an alt tag.
Does this exist yet, implemented by anyone reputable? If not, I left it as an exercise for the reader ;)
Wow, I just found a new worst case usage scenario for Opera Mini 4 :)
(and yes, the imagemap works)
I don’t think that’s technically enough attribution.
— Art
Based on?
And in addition, you would recommend…
— Mark
Based on the HTML 5 specification, according to which user agents must present either the alt text for image map areas, or the image itself, but not both. Displaying credit for a work only to those readers for whom the actual work is not displayed doesn’t seem, in the words of the license, “reasonable to the medium or means”.
And instead, I would suggest the list of credits you were using in the previous episodes of this series, but including the authors as well as the titles.
And yes, I know you’d rather I was saying this to the 2003 guy just down the hallway. But I can’t, because the hallway is blocked by some sort of velvet, paisley-covered Chesterfield.
— mpt
My count of the total elephants in those 648 pictures is 1009, anybody cares to prove me wrong….aha
How about you, Mark?
:———–D
— Economics
My count of the total elephants in the room is 1: Mr. “Economics” left an off-the-wall comment with a spammy signature link. On the previous thread too.
Some places can make photos into room wall papers, size of the whole wall. :)
— Parisuhde
You didn’t came up with the conclusion that it’s a spam comment by the mere fact that I had the general term ‘Economics’ as the anchor text of my link, right, Mr. AP? Or you just slapped on the face of every programmer who’s trying their best to distinguish all spammy comments from friendly ones, because the only holy logic of yours is that simple!
I believe it is by no means a spammy comment in that I had made an interesting point here that no one has thought of thus far. I can, of course, further the discussion of licensing from here, but I chose not to and started something of a bit more spice. If you are smart enough so as not to count the elephants one by one, one picture after another, to prove that 1009 is not the correct number, please post your solution or script here. (which is very unlikely because some pictures are too vague to make out) If you can not, or should I say, not as smart as I, who has just the logic to prove himself incorrect, am, please, it never hurts not calling other people’s names. I beleive you are an educated man, and a man like that doesn’t do things in this rash way.
My point is clear. I had an interesting point of view concerning this post and made my contribution, I deserve the backlink with the anchor text I had chosen.
— Economics
I deserve the backlink with the anchor text I had chosen.
Sorry, no; the presence of your link or indeed your entire comment is a privilege that the weblog owner is free to grant or retract, and the criteria for doing so are entirely up to him (or her, on other sites).
On the site you linked I see no indication that it is somehow associated with an individual, much less that it might be the personal site of the individual that left the comment in this thread. Nor does that site have any relevance to the thread. On many sites where I follow the comments there has been a significant uptick in comment spam of precisely this form: messages individually written by (usually paid) humans, with usually off-the-wall but on-topic content, signed with a link to a site that shills services or products. Therefore, with as few cues as you left I’m disinclined to give benefit of doubt. In Mark’s shoes I would be inclined to remove the link and leave just the comment.
It’s his weblog and his call, of course.
I like the way Jeremy Zawodny handles this on his weblog: comment signature links must point to a personal weblog; linking any other kind of site gets your comment dropped on the floor.
Now I think your argument is fair enough and got the point, Aris. I’m sorry for the mess.
Never did I think that much commenting on a blog before.
— Economics
648 elephants are sweet.
But 649 would have been definitely too much.
— Rene Kriest
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