[cc-community] for those who want "free only" buttons

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Wed Feb 14 00:20:11 EST 2007


On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 22:42 -0500, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> <quote who="Mike Linksvayer" date="Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 05:27:51PM -0800">
> > http://freedomdefined.org/Logos_and_buttons
> > 
> > I would strongly recommend users (including the Freedomdefined site)
> > linking directly to the relevant CC license deed as this is what is used
> > by Google and Yahoo! to identify licensed content.
> 
> That's a very good point. 
> 
> I thought the RDF data was supposed to handle this?

In theory it could, but search engines are not interested in retrieving
and parsing yet another file.  MozCC will, but it is suboptimal for
other reasons as well -- metadata separated from content for humans
tends to be spam or stale.

So the current best practice (and usable by Google, Yahoo!, MozCC) is to
annotate the visible link with rel="license" (denoting a licensing
relationship; we don't just happen to be linking to a URL that happens
to be a license), which you can think of as the rel-license microformat
or producing a "<> :license <license uri> ." triple if you prefer RDF.

> If not (and it sounds like it won't), would any link in the "paste-in"
> button code serve the purpose or do they look for that particular
> button being served?

Any link, the button is irrelevant.

> It seems that there should even be ways to embed an "invisible" link
> back to the CC site into a button that still allowed to explain why
> they license their works, as they license their works. Would something
> like solve the problem you describe work?

You can always use no anchortext or hide the link with css, but I
suspect given how well exploited these are that search engines are smart
enough to throw away such links.

On freedomdefined.org you have two license links in the footer, so it
would be easy to change just one of those.


-- 
  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Mike_Linksvayer



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