Creative Commons Search Engine
An interesting tidbit from Pandia.com, which incidentally looks to be an interesting resource on search engine marketing:
There are probably not many that are familiar with the new search engine for finding material online that can be used without paying royalty or clearing copyright issues. With a Creative Commons license you can allow others to copy, distribute, quote or develop what you have made available online .... Since September a beta version of a Creative Commons Search Engine has been available that lets you search for just this kind of thing. The results pages display symbols signifying which kind of license applies to the different hits.
The author, Lars Vĺge, goes on to note that the Creative Commons search engine has a prominent place in the newly-released Firefox 1.0 browser (grouped in the search box along with Google, Yahoo, eBay, Dictionary.com and Amazon). Since Firefox is taking at least some market share from Internet Explorer, I wonder if there is an opportunity for us as Christians to make important evangelistic works available.
According to the Creative Commons search engine help file, the search engine “finds web pages with metadata indicating a Creative Commons license or public domain dedication.” So all we would need to do is choose a Creative Commons license and then use the appropriate metadata on the relevant page(s).
I am far from being an expert on Creative Commons licensing, so if anyone has any corrections to what I’m saying, please feel free to comment. Also, any brainstorming ideas regarding use of the Creative Commons search engine would be appropriate in the comments as well.