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copywriterstoolbox.blogspot.co.uk

http://copywriterstoolbox.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/bing-image-search-replaces-clip-art.html

Bing Image Search replaces Clip Art - oh, the potential!

Today, I felt a pang. Right deep down in the Memorabilia Pit of my stomach. Microsoft is ditching Clip Art from

Office! Wow, we've had that library since the Commodore 64 morphed into a PC almost overnight. Or at least

Windows 95.

And even though loading Clip Art would cause our 256 MB Ram PC to freeze - often - we still loved it to death.

Posters, certificates, D-I-Y marketing flyers - we used those sidebar images for just about everything.

But, lo! (in festive voice), the library has closed down. Or at least it has in the US. I've just gone to Insert Online

Pictures on my Desktop and Clip Art is still there.

But, yes. You can source an image for your Word

document on desktop, royalty-free and served by Bing's

image search.

As the screenshot prompts, Bing/Office is very clear in the

action you must take next.

Do check that the image is in the Public Domain if you're

going to use it online. Don't just assume that it is okay, just

because it's in the results. Yep, a pain. But better safe

than sorry.

Did Google's Announcement of Advanced

Pixelation Detection Force the Issue?

I suppose it had to follow, though. Only last month, Google

Research reported huge strides in image recognition by

pixelation, only.

The upshot is that 'alt text' may soon become redundant.

What's alt text? It's the textual description of an image

copywriters and webmasters use in a web page's HTML

code.

It tells the page indexer and users with impaired visionwhat the picture is about. Here's my main domain

Blavatar, as an example:

Searchengines may otherwise use alt text as a way to

confirm their algorithms' pixelated assessment of a digital image. This, in my opinion, would make more sense.

The guys and gals at the research lab will keep plugging away. Results aren't perfect, yet - but they're getting

there.

But until Google is confident in the new tool, what an opportunity we have, though, eh?

Image Search - so underutilised

So. what do we know about Bing Image Search that we can us?

Microsoft Office will rely on CC1.0 Universalimages gathered by Bing to replace its Clip Library. That's a massive

http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.htmlhttp://copywriterstoolbox.blogspot.co.uk/http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.htmlhttp://copywriterstoolbox.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/bing-image-search-replaces-clip-art.htmlhttp://copywriterstoolbox.blogspot.co.uk/

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data gathering tool, collecting images from the web.

Those images will then be displayed for MS Office users to add into their

documents. Straight forward, right?

So, what if we could get images from our sites beamed into the offices of millions of,

mm, Office users around the world!? There's no reason whatsoever why we can't, in

theory.

Including an accurate description of your image is even more important following

Microsoft's announcement. But even before this news, people were lax in alt text

implementation and undervalued image search as traffic resource.

Am I just making all of this up? I am so not. Here's why.

This is a snapshot of stats for a WordPress blog post, a site to which I've not posted

anything new in a year, or more. It gets regular trickles of traffic, all the same. And

it's always the same source: image search drawing a huge proportion of the page's

on-page views:

Okay - you can make up your own mind about what users are searching for. I've obfuscated it here, but it is

clearer on the original web page. Swiftly moving on

So, how do you include 'alt text' and a CC1.0 license in your HTML Markup?

I'm everso glad you asked. It's not obvious, because there seems no way to pull it off in HTML5 [citation needed].

But there is a way in RDFa.

There's a full and detailed guide on the Creative Commons Labs website, but this is all you need to know for now.

The rel=markup in HTML tells a web crawler the relationship between the entity you're wrapping in code to an off

site source. We want to tell Bing's crawler that our image is CC1.0 so that it can display the images on our site in

Office, right? Darn tootin'!

http://labs.creativecommons.org/2011/ccrel-guide/

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In WordPress, they also offer the chance to choose a featured image, with a lengthier description for it. This is

perfect for inclusion in the new Bing clip library. See my Blavatar of zebedeerox above for those details.

*On Tumblr, it will depend upon the type of post you're

creating - image, text, quote, etc.

One type will let you upload an image from your desktop.

Others will let you include an image from a URL - that's

using their image upload facility in the dashboard.

If you choose a Tumblr photo post, you have the choice of

upload, URL or even taking a webcam shot to load into the

post.

Of the three, I find Tumblr's visual editor the least user

friendly to work with, so always write my posts in HTML.

Toolbox Tip:You can also set the "e-mail posts" facility to

HTML by default in settings.

Do not see this as an opportunity to SPAM the search engines

One word of caution, though. Don'ttry to use this additional description space as a way to fit spammy keywords

in. They've not said so yet, but if I know Google, they're planning something extra with the new pixelation

technology.

You and I both know that Google wants its customers to have the best search experience, right? That covers all

mediums - web, video, news and images. If you're trying to game search by cramming in keywords or using an

inaccurate description of your image you will get punished!

Oh - and a secondary word of caution. As you've guessed, image search is becoming a lot more accurate.Owners of images and marketers and copyright standards can and do scan the web for illegal use of someone

else's copyright.

As the Microsoft Office blog postwarns us, always check the Creative Commons license on an image before you

use it. Whilst Bing no doubt does everything it can to ensure it only serves Public Domain images, there will be

oversights.

The onus is on you as the publisher of the content to give credit where it's due for any images you use. Now that

Clip Art has hung up its brushes, don't try and pull any strokes, right?

all image credits:Jason Darrell/The Flying Feck

http://blogs.office.com/2014/12/01/clip-art-now-powered-bing-images