An interesting choice of image

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 at 12:34am

Six years ago we moved offices from the middle of Clayton campus to out on Blackburn Road. It took them six months, but eventually they renovated around us enough for most of us to move into a new open plan area towards the back of the building.

On the day we moved I took some photos, including this one of my old desk:

Empty desk

For a few years now I have had a Google Alert setup to notify me of mentions of my own name as well as links to my site. I haven’t received that many alterts, but most of the time I can immediately recognise it as a blog/twitter/flickr/etc post that I have recently made. Other times it is related to another Stephen Edmonds (there are a few around).

Today I got an alert referencing an article by ZDNet Australia titled Govt plans keep RailCorp CIO post empty. I followed the link, to see my i mage of an empty desk. Now, if that were the quality of desk that RailCorp is giving its CIO, then it is no wonder that it is still empty. Yes, yes, I know that my image is just being used to illustrate a point.

It is at this point that some people I know would be jumping up and shouting that they can’t do that, they should be paying to use your image, etc, etc. Bah, this is exactly what I wanted to happen by making the image available as Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike – (CC BY-SA). By the way, regarding those people that would jump up and down, they hand over all sorts of personal info and photos to a US company known for questionable privacy practices, so you can guess what I do with their opinions on this matter…

Now, I wish they were using a better image – not what a camera club judge would refer to as a ‘record shot’ – but this brought a smile to my face as I think it is the first time that an image of mine has been used AND correctly attributed.

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