Mullets, Facepalms, and Creative Commons

I was looking at my referrers the other day, and other than a random MSN Search query for "Card for blessing non religious person who has more than her share lately" (got that, Hallmark people?), there wasn't really that much out of the ordinary.

That is, until I saw a hit from Wikimedia Commons for "Wikip-facepalm.jpg."

I followed it back to the Wikipedia entry for facepalm (it's on the Types of Gestures page) -- and there I am:

This, of course, is a spiritual followup to my mullet making it into Wikipedia.

Now, other than the pure showing off/vanity of it, this illustrates one of the primary benefits of forgoing copyright in favor of Creative Commons licenses:

If you make it easy for people to use your stuff, they will use your stuff -- and it's more likely that they'll attribute you for it, than if they simply stole it.

Of course, I'm not a professional photographer, and I don't have any pretensions of making any money off my photos. So I license nearly all of my pics "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic" -- I don't even require "noncommercial" use (whatever that means these days) -- just give proper attribution and adhere to share alike (which, in all likelihood, would really curtail any use except noncommercial use).

I'm not a revolutionary -- I do still think that there is a place for intellectual property (though I feel that the idea of "tolerated use" is fascinating). But when it comes to personal sharing, I've come around to the idea of "What are you saving it for?" (I'll probably talk about that some more later.)

Incidentally, since I wear glasses, the photo doesn't depict my actual facepalm (fingerprints, you know) -- my true facepalm is more of an eyerub:

Tags: flickr, creative commons, facepalm