The folks at MyST did something cool today - they integrated our search engine directly into their authoring dashboard.

"While creating a new blog post, there are times when you want to find and use just the right image, or video snippet to make the post more interesting. But there are copyright issues when using other people's content regardless of the fact that it is on the public Internet. It also takes time to launch a new browser and begin the search for the perfect image in Google. Integrated into your blogsite is a free content search toolbar that allows you to focus your search efforts on sites that are likely to have images that are free to use or require only attribution to the owner. This drastically reduces the time to locate resources for your blog posts while also helping to avoid copyright infringement mistakes."

Very cool...

There are some really talented, sick, twisted minds out there - and Deviant provides access to them - check these images out.

I've thought about maybe adding a search refinement just for Deviant because, well, they're so deviant. ;-)

I was having lunch with a few of our customers last week and one of them remarked that it was a pain looking through all the free content sites for images, articles, and stories that can be reused for blog posts and articles. I had also experienced this - the Creative Commons directories are wonderful, but not as friendly as good'ol Google's format and layout. And the new Creative Commons filters in Google are excellent, but your searches include the entire web - not always ideal if you're trying to narrow your scope to professional produced images, videos, and text.

Sooo... I decided to build a comprehensive aggregation of all the great content sites that are free (or mostly free) and host it at GimmeFreeContent.com (Note: the DNS may still be propagating). This search engine is still a youngster with plenty of room for growth, but like the content it recommends, it is free to use so spread the URL.

I also have plans to add more free content directories and lots of other resources related to helping you blog faster and better. Be sure to submit your suggestions and comments - I'm sure this could be greatly improved and I'm confident many of you know of some great resources.