A Spork in the Road

The photo at left is a photo I took at Belvoir Castle, a Crusader fortress overlooking the Jordan Valley in Israel.

Two thoughts converged yesterday as I pondered my blog post for today:

First, I love the open source movement, which I think represents humanity’s best impulses toward intelligence, generosity, and optimism. Whether it’s open source software or creative commons licenses for works of art and literature, this movement gives me hope that humanity just might choose beneficial collaboration over greed and violence.

Second, Tom Johnson’s superb post, 20 Usability Tips for Your Blog, inspired me to continue evolving A Spork in the Road to match my vision of what this blog should be. I decided one of the easiest tasks to tackle first is to add more visuals to the blog.

Now, I have a couple boxes full of photographs from my travels: the mid-Atlantic, the Southwest, Israel, Peru, England, Scotland. I’m no professional, but I thought other people might be interested in some of these images, and I’d initially considered uploading some of the better pictures to iStock (despite the Graphic Artists Guild strict opposition to royalty-free images — more on that topic in another post).

Yesterday, however, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and start to release these photographs on a Creative Commons license. (I’ve watched with admiration as other folks apply the CC license to their works: for example, Kelly Link released her brilliant debut anthology Stranger Things Happen on a Creative Commons license.) And if some of these images turn out to be useful illustrations for this blog — well, two birds, one stone, n’est pas?

Here’s a link to the Creative Commons license under which I’m releasing my photographs: