Photo by Leposava.

I don’t think this blog would be half of what it is without Flickr. The images included with most posts magnetize the eye to the page and create an atmosphere for the rest of the piece. It’s also one of the most commented-on aspects of the blog — the images are something I think leaves an impression on a lot of people.

A question I get often is: how do you find such great images through Flickr? Most importantly, how do you find such great images that you can use freely?

In this post, I want to share everything I’ve learned about how you can quickly and easily find Flickr’s best images to suit your needs, whether it’s for a blog post, an eBook, a design, an artwork or anything else. Secondly, I want to explain how Creative Commons works for Flickr images — and what that means for you.

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Image by 4_EveR_YounG.

Headlines can make or break a story. With thousands of different articles vying for our attention, web users can afford to be picky.

In an ideal world we’d give articles a fighting chance to prove their worth, but in truth, unless we have pre-existing faith in the author, we often make the decision to read or ignore before our eyes have reached the end of the headline.

Web writers have only recently, it seems, started to realize the crucial importance of the headline. The ascendancy of the headline has been one aspect of Web 2.0 culture which hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

This post is a tour of the key web headline formulas being used today. Some will inspire you, others will make you cringe. All of them are sourced from real examples.

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A few days ago you might have noticed that Skelliewag.org’s uptime was a little patchy. This was because a post I wrote — 110+ Resources for Creative Minds — appeared on the front page of Digg and became popular on del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

I created the post specifically with social media in mind, primarily as an experiment. I wanted to see if it would be possible for me to reach the front page of Digg with a resource post — something anyone with a bit of spare time can create.

If that was the case, I could return to you and outline a model of social media success. The experiment worked, and the above diagram is an attempt to communicate the results.

Keep reading for an analysis of what I’ve learned about social media success.

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