Following are recommendations for the best sites for Creative Commons blog photos and another just awesome image site. The link provided will take you to Wikipedia to further explain the different levels of Creative Commons licenses. The key piece to remember is to always provide a photo credit and link below.

1. Flickr. By far the largest resource for photos. Note: make sure you use the advanced search options and select the "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content "
2. EveryStockPhoto. This is a license-specific photo search engine.
3. Pixdaus. By far I think the most interesting of the three, but not reviewed for licensed content. The photos shown below are all from Pixdaus. I've linked to Pixdaus and to the user profile that has uploaded the photo. When using Pixdaus be sure to avoid photos with copyrights on them.
   

"Dubai" posted at Pixdaus by Jorge

"They Are Here" posted at Pixdaus by Luke

While there can be advantages to outsourcing your online persona in this manner, there can be possible disadvantages as well. As someone creating an online presence, you should be sure that you understand what you want to use your personal site for (if indeed you even choose to have one amid the sea of social networking sites). Social sites often let you create a profile where you provide links to personal sites--these can help drive traffic to your personal page. Likewise, providing links to these social sites on your personal page can drive traffic to these external representations of you.

Ultimately, these two types of sites--personal and social--can balance each other out and drive more traffic and attention to you than you might otherwise have experienced if you were to forgo one of the options. However, the more you outsource, the more potential for less traffic to your personal site, and if this is where you house the most important content, you might see smaller readership.

You might also want to consider the implications of giving up direct control of the hosting of your content and what it means if these external sites were to change their policies or suffer a major outage. The more sites you sign up for, the more you have to keep up with in terms of updating, which might be cumbersome depending on how many social sites you use.

A reader in the comments of this blog entry did make a good point though in stating that giving out a personal URL somehow doesn't have the same weight that it used to. In a time where virtually everyone has their own Myspace or Facebook account, people want like to respond with like. For the average person, these social sites are sufficient--there is no need to bother with HTML and creating a custom site. It's also that much more effort to remember a personal URL than it is to know that you can look someone up later on Facebook and friend them.

Is there a need for an average person to have a personal site anymore, or is it completely redundant when the info can be found on multiple social networking sites? Should one keep all content in-house, or outsource it to other sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Myspace, Youtube, etc.? I for one have not formulated a definite answer to these questions, but I would love to hear any opinions on the matter!

The cool thing, according to Flickr's Stats FAQ is that the statistics such as number of views goes back all the way to the date you created the account. Referers are only a few weeks back, until activation, at which time you will have data from then on.

I just activated the stats on my account early this evening and the data is already available for viewing. There are the traditional stats, such as most views, search engine referers, and other view counts.

My favorite feature of the stats though, is the Breakdown of Photos. This tells you, among other things, which photos are not tagged, geotagged, or in sets. If you ever endeavored to get all of your photos properly tagged, but lost track along the way of which ones still needed that info, you can now click on a link to bring up the Organizer, populated with just those images.

Everyone in Online Marketing and SEO lives by statistics--they are a way to gauge how your business efforts are faring. Flickr stats are interesting even from a personal perspective, but they can be even more powerful for clients who utilize Flickr as part of their online presence.

Surfing blog sites will often talk about what they have encountered each and every day, and in what spots. Bigger, more commercialized sites, such as Surfline, provide links to webcams, reports, forecasts, and other news that can help a surfer decide when and where to catch their next wave.

Being the sole member of my company who lives in a beach town, I was inundated last weekend by reports of an "epic swell" that was expected to hit the coast of California mid-week. Talk of the huge impending surf popped up everywhere, from localized blogs, to local newspapers, from local news to widely circulated newspapers. Everyone had something to say about the topic, which is interesting considering that I don't believe I've ever heard traditional media focus so much attention on high surf advisories in past years. Certainly one would want to be aware of when it is dangerous to be walking along the beach, but in the winter, the majority of people who would dare venture out in the cold are those who go to partake in the sport of surfing. More likely is that in this increasingly digital age, the media has noticed how much is out there in terms of online resources for surfers, and want to cash in a bit.

Like many other niche groups on the internet, surfers have a lot of resources from which they have formed a community--there are forums, swell charts, video, podcasts, reports updated several times daily, blogs to share experiences, and of course Flickr and Youtube to post all those photos and videos you took to share that perfect barrel with friends and other like-minded individuals. When the swell peaked on Tuesday and Wednesday, photos were almost instantly available--something that validates the hype of the day, while getting to share and compare experiences from all over the coast.

The ease with which one can find information on surfing can easily correlate to the increased number of people out when the surf is at its best. Gone are the days when one had to get up before dawn and see what was in store and then use word of mouth. Now with live webcams, the conversations revolve not around "is it good today" but "what time should I meet you there?"

For example, this past weekend I hiked up to the summit of Bear Peak, on the western edge of Boulder, CO. I snapped a couple of photos of myself up there, and later that evening posted them to Flickr.

HOW TO DO IT: Flickr has posted a couple of short screencast tutorials on this topic: how to geotag your own photos and how to use all the controls for searching and exploring geotagged photos.

WHY TO DO IT: If geography is relevant to your projects or business, and if you're creating relevant photos, your photos should be as findable as possible. Even though this Flickr feature is brand new, it's becoming very popular. Flickr users are avidly searching for photos taken near other pictures they like -- especially for recreation and vacation interests.

Also, it appears that Flickr's geotagged data is getting indexed by Google, which already indexes images and captions from Flickr. A popular photo, or a photo taken near a popular photo, could increase your site traffic and pagerank.

And of course, Flickr's approach to geotagging is dead easy. It only takes a few seconds per photo. Give it a try.

Don't believe me?

A mere 24 hours after announcing the new ability to geotag your photos with the location in which they were taken, a reported 1,234,384 photos were already tagged. The number is now well over 1.6 million, and will surely grow as the word continues to spread and new photos are added.

Flickr is one of the easiest, most intuitive, and popular social media sites currently on the web. It provides users with the things they care about most--storing and sharing photos, and community. It also helps that with the implementation of this new geotagging feature, Flickr has made it extremely easy to go back and add these tags to your old photos. I think the incredible numbers attest to that fact quite effectively.

Social media sites continue to find ways to provide their users with new and exciting features, which allow people to interact like never before. It's very exciting to watch the new innovations, and I am anxious to see what comes next.

Thanks to Techcrunch for being one of the first to report the numbers (before the Flickr blog even!)