Avoid text-heavy blog entries and/or dress up your website with multimedia used according to the creators’ specifications.

Here are free resources you can use, including some of my favorite go-to sites such as Everystockphoto, Stock.XCHNG, and Creative Commons-licensed images that can be found using search engines and Flickr.

I hadn’t seen this wiki before of copyright-friendly resources from teachers and librarians.  It contains a number of government and non-profit organization sites.

See Mashable’s post for the complete list including a number of free audio sources such as the Internet Archives’ open source audio.

I was exploring Flickr, mostly making sure I had all the mobile options I wanted so I could post photos to Flickr from my new T-Mobile MyTouch, when I saw a new Flickr Blog posting.

The Flickr search results page has been redesigned to help us find our way through the billions — count ‘em — of photos and videos now on the site.

At the blog’s suggestion, I tried a search of my own and selected the new “View” controls that “allow you to display the results in different sizes and formats.  Both small and medium views have an ‘i’ icon on every thumbnail — click it to see more detailed information about a particular photo.  We’re also doing some whiz bang stuff in the small view to take advantage of as much space as you have on your screen, just try resizing your browser to see,” they say.

You can see a summary of the information used for a search just above it.  In the large image, I have searched for “sunsets” that have a Creative Commons license (go to advanced search and scroll to the bottom to select this option), and here I am showing the small thumbnails.  You can select other options to narrow your searches, for instance to a date range.

In the smaller image you can see what appears on the right side of the search results page — there are links, depending on the search, to groups, photographers, tag cluster, and places.

Video uploads for all Flickr users
Flickr now lets all users, whether they ride for free or pay $25/year (Pro accounts), upload brief video clips.  Those with Pro accounts can upload high-definition videos, but video length is capped at 90 seconds for everyone.  Flickr videos can be geo-tagged to indicate location.

Approximately 3 million pictures and videos are uploaded daily to the site which is visited monthly by 73 million people worldwide.

New iPhone app for Amazon’s Kindle
iPhone has introduced the Amazon Kindle iPhone application which can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store.  If you are out and about with some time on your hands and want to keep your book — or book collection — with you on a small device, this app will make you happy.

If you don’t own a Kindle, you will need to buy ebooks from Amazon through a web browser on your computer or iPhone, says Mathew Miller at ZDnet.   Check out the post for his video showing ebooks on both Kindle and iPhone.

FCC Chief nominee is Net neutrality backer
President Obama has nominated Julius Genachowski as the nation’s top telecommunications regulator, picking a campaign adviser who has divided his career between Washington, D.C., political jobs and working as an Internet executive.

Genachowski is likely to continue the Democratic push for more Net neutrality regulations, which are opposed by some conservatives and telecommunications providers.  He was a top Obama technology adviser and aided in crafting a technology platform that supported Net neutrality rules. [via Slashdot]

New Zealand, New Street View
“Street Viewing” is a favorite pass time of mine which I can now combine with a favorite country – New Zealand.  I have been wanting to return to the country since I visited a number of years ago, but haven’t made it.  At least now I can zoom around on Google Maps Street View for a visual tour.

The imagery includes everything from major metropolitan areas like Auckland and Christchurch to the scenery of Lake Wakatipu; from the sub-tropical north to the mountainous south, says Google Lat Long Blog.

 
Oslo Opera House
Another interesting place to visit and learn about is the Oslo (Norway) Opera House which rises from the Oslo Fjord.  Designed to speak of the sheets of ice that formed the fjords of Norway, the huge white slab of angular building could almost be mistaken for an actual ice floe, claims Google Sightseeing Blog.

The opera house, opened last April, features Italian marble and granite, accounting for the striking whiteness of the exterior.

The satellite images on the blog were taken before project completion, but you can see more views on Flickr.

It seems like there are a growing number of places you can create online presentations.  Technology Bites points to 280 Slides, an online tool for creating and sharing presentations on the web.

The good part of the tool is that it allows you to pull the data from various online services and to share it using SlideShare, they say.

Upload from Flickr, upload videos, or pull them from Youtube.  Shapes, layouts and themes for presentations are supported and the presentations can be saved to a .ppts, .ppt, .odp or pdf file.  280 Slides is useful to create and share presentations on the fly if you don’t have PowerPoint installed.

280 Slides says of itself:

• Take It With You — We store your presentations securely on our server so you can take them anywhere in the world where there’s an Internet connection.
• Download to PowerPoint — With a single click you can download a copy of your presentation in the Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 format.
• Built-In Media Search — Add photos and movies to your presentation directly from popular web services like Flickr and YouTube.
• Publish to the Web — Put your presentation on SlideShare, e-mail it to a friend, or embed it directly on your own website, all with just a few clicks.
• Stunning Themes — It’s easy to make a great looking presentation with our professional quality built-in themes.
• Run in Your Web Browser — 280 Slides runs right in the browser, with no download and no installation, and it works just like the desktop applications you’re used to.

These 25 free places to get photos, templates, and images are a great find at Librarian in Black.

I am a frequent user of a couple of these, but was happy to discover new ones.

By the way, you can search everystockphoto to also find photos on stock.xchng, morgueFile and Flickr.  You can also add everystockphoto to your search engine menu (see image on right).

You’ll need to check out the licenses, especially with Flickr, before you use them with impunity, buy many have few restrictions.

If you are looking specifically for Flickr photos to use, try a search for those with a Creative Commons license, either at Flickr (one of the advanced search options), compfight, or Flickrstorm.

Idee Multicolor Search Lab has a color matching search engine for 3 million “interesting” Flickr images, as well as a front end for Alamy Stock Photography if you are in need of royalty-free images.

Check out the FAQ for more information.  [via Lifehacker]

Do you remember when Flickr teamed with Moo to introduce mini calling cards with your selected photo on one side and  your contact info on the other?  Now Moo is getting ready to bring you regulation size business cards to relieve the boredom of the ordinary.

You can sign up for the newsletter and receive 20% off your first order when the cards are launched.  See what it is all about in the clever video “Introducing Moo Business Cards” below.  [via Web Worker Daily]

Introducing MOO Business Cards. from Moo Crew on Vimeo.

Upload Picasa photos to Flickr
A new and improved version of Picasa2Flickr has been released, according to Lifehacker. 

For those of us who use Picasa to store and make edits to photos on our hard drives, but like to share them on Flickr, this is good news.  Picasa2Flickr is a free Windows-only plug-in that sends selected photos directly to Flickr Upoadr 3.0.

YouTube Annotations
YouTube added a new feature for video creators: video annotations, reports the Google Operating System blog which shows some interesting examples.

“Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. Use them to add background information about the video, create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene) or link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video.”

When you have videos uploaded to YouTube, you can add annotations by going to your list and clicking on “Edit annotations,” or by visiting one of your videos while you are logged in.  There are three types of annotations that can be added while playing the video: speech bubbles, notes and spotlights.

Talk about the world around you with GeoGraffiti
This find strikes me as a unique way to capitalize on our social networking and sharing culture, as well as on the prevalence of cell phones.

GeoGraffiti now has a public beta of a free “verbal bulletin board.”  You can create location-speciific audio notes, called “voice marks,” from any cell phone.  Share them with the world and listen to and/or respond to other people’s voice marks.

GeoGraffiti says its mission is to organize the mobile phone community’s “wisdom of crowds” intelligence, and to facilitate the exchange of that location-specific intelligence by providing a voice-driven platform that is accessible from any phone and any place.

MobileCrunch says that once you have registered, “adding a new location through the site is quick and easy, but doing so over the phone is currently a bit of a chore. If you initiate the Voice Mark over the phone, its placement is only accurate to the zip code. After you record your Voice Mark, you’ll click your way through a series of menus to properly tag your recording – it’s easy to follow, but listening through the options takes a bit too long.”

The video demo shows how you can take advantage of GeoGraffiti.  [via TechCrunch]

Photoshop Express adds Flickr support
When we first posted about the new free online image editor, Photoshop Express, we listed the supported photo sharing sites and mentioned that Flickr was expected in the future. 

Now Lifehacker reports that Flickr support has been added so you can take images from your Flickr account, edit them with PS Express, and put them back, all without downloading anything. 

“It’s not full-on Photoshop”, they say, “but still a great web-based editor for your Flickr photos.”