Hello, First, an anecdote. I have had on my Google Reader for a while now, a feed from Technorati which picks up any blog posts with the words 'wikimedia commons'. A lot of crud comes through, but also a fair number of real bloggers who use our photos to illustrate their blog posts. And let me say, they almost always get it wrong. They fail to link. They fail to mention the license. They fail to mention the author. Probably we are lucky if they manage to mention the site name. While I look at all these random blogs, I notice the proliferation of Flickr plugins...part of Flickr's success, I feel certain, is due to their API which allows anyone to easily "plug" Flickr into another application - a blog, a website, facebook, etc. And in multiple ways: by license, by keyword, by author(or, close enough: uploader). They also have that Commons could do this, but first we need to standardise. Anyone who actually has tried to write a tool to pick up this stuff will know it is hit and miss. So, I am not really planning to work on this in any big hurry, but I'm just saying it for reference and in case anyone else has a particular interest in it. The two main problems are keywords and licenses. Uploaders at least MediaWiki takes care of. :) first, the easy one: licenses. There is a painful problem at the moment that we have no way of knowing which templates are license templates and which ones are not. New ones are created all the time and old ones may be converted to deletion templates. (ook.) so, my proposal. 1. ask for new License: namespace to be installed at Commons. 2. move all license templates into the License: namespace. 3. separate any template which conflates license and source, e.g. "PD-NASA", "GFDL-GeoDB" (or whatever). Anything which is in the public domain, regardless of how it got there, should have {{License:Public domain}}. Indicating source by text + template is fine. Now I am not sure if there is actually a good reason we have license categories. Is it safe to assume that no one ever searches via license? If so, is there any extra functionality we gain from having the category? If not, we can quit using categories as well as templates to indicate licenses. If it is useful, we should change all license categories to be prefixed with License:. So instead of [[Category:GFDL]] we would have [[category:License:GFDL]]. I know technically "Public domain" is not a license. but close enough. So, the second problem, keywords. Let's reduce this to an easier (although less complete :)) problem: categories. Being able to have per-category feeds would be extremely cool. Imagine such a feed on QI or FP. Totally awesome. So in general we can assume that categories on a file act as describing keywords. There are two exceptions. One is license categories (see above). The other is maintenance categories, such as deletion, cleanup, user. So I propose we rename all these kinds of categories, to "Maintenance:X" or "Meta:X" for deletion and cleanup, and I guess "User:X" for user. I dunno. maybe these don't interfere too much. Sometimes they are useful. This change is not as important as the license one. In general, I think it is good for us to look at Flickr and say: how do they facilitate sharing their content? how can we do that too? cheers, Brianna user:pfctdayelise -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/