Web Worker Daily

I write a lot, and a lot of what I write is online. I publish photos, too. This stuff is my intellectual property, even though I’m OK with other people using it as long as they credit me. Depending on your field and your personal interests, you may also have quite a lot of creative content online. Do you know who’s using it and how it’s being used?

A new app called FairShare, developed by Attributor, offers a free and easy way to find out. It takes just a couple of minutes to register a site with FairShare, and you can add multiple sites and blogs once you’ve registered the first one. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s leave aside ethical and moral considerations for the moment and think about what can be gained from contributing to the public domain. At first glance, there does not seem to be much solid ROI to be gained from giving away your work product, via something like the creative commons use license. It’s non-specific, and credit, if given, is not usually highlighted or given primary focus, so many won’t even realize it’s your work on display.

Other types of work, like contributing to the digitization at Project Gutenberg, are even more thankless. Adding to the sum of archived knowledge is definitely helpful in a general, charitable sort of way, but is there a more tangible, immediate benefit to you as a web worker as well? In both examples, the answer is yes.

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