Eric Newcomer's Weblog

Update 12/6 - Number 1 on Google images today! "One little Christmas tree" really did light up the world, at least the world wide Web!

Here in Tokyo the Christmas decorations are up, as they were back home near Boston. It is certainly something shopkeepers seem to agree on around the world, Christmastime is good for business.

A couple of weeks ago I recieved the second formal request for publishing rights to a photo of the family Christmas tree I posted a couple of years ago, along with a list of "why can't we all get along" type wishes in the spirit of the holidays.

The first was from someone publishing a safety brochure. Apparently they wanted to warn everyone not to do what we did and put too many lights on. But I'm really not sure - they did not really give a good answer. But I figured what the heck.

The second was from a family Christian organization. Apparently they wanted to show what a nice family Christmas tree might look like. They both said they'd credit me and cite IONA as the copyright owner. I actually have no idea who owns the copyright in this case. I would have thought it was me, but perhaps by uploading it to the IONA sponsored blog site I implicitly turned over the rights. As I said, I have no idea.

But this time, I started wondering what was going on. I suspected a subtle scam, maybe some new kind of phishing. As anyone with a blog knows, blog spam is out of control, and maybe this was some new way to get some links to a nefarious Website. But I really didn't see how it could be. Finally I thought of checking Google.

Sure enough, there was the old photo of the family Christmas tree, popping up at number 4 (at least today) on an image search for 'Christmas tree.' After a while it struck me that my photo was the only one on the page that didn't look staged, or professionally done. What I still don't know though is how many times the image has been used. If I got two formal requests, how many just downloaded the photo and used it, without bothering or thinking to ask?

ps Happy Christmas

pps Can we keep working on those items? Or maybe we need a new list? For example, now we have OSGi EEG and Java EE 6 to reconcile for 2008