Your images are a virus. They are EVERYWHERE on the Internet
This is a silly little story of a silly little image. An image whose original conceptual source isn't me. Well, I made the image, I made it in PowerPoint with Smart Art in about 12 seconds over 4 years ago. But per my G+ friend James Saull, I know now that the concept is called "The Hedgehog Principle" or "The Hedgehog Concept" by Jim Collins. You'll find it everywhere but it started in 2001 with the book "Good to Great." I likely absorbed it at some past point and when I got the job I drew three cricles. It's one of those "duh, that's awesome" concepts. It's just a Venn Diagram with three circles with the intersection, the middle bit, being the most awesome ideal part. This isn't about the original of the concept, it's how one image is found everywhere on the internet, spreading like a virus. Once you put an image on the internet, you'll never be able to take it down.
I made the circles for a blog post when I took the gig at Microsoft in July of 2007. I haven't thought about them much since, although I've used them in some presentations a few times. They are unimpressive and rather pink.
Yesterday at lunch I was on Facebook and commented on a friends photo. Her friend "liked" my comment, and I clicked to see who that friend of a friend was. Then just scrolling down, I saw my circles on this stranger's wall. Cool! What an amazing coincidence.
This image was shared from another page within Facebook. I followed the rabbit. The photo had hundreds of likes and many shares.
I then started wondering how far this thing went. Well, it spread long before this funny Facebook coincidence. Kyaw Zaw suggested on Google+ that I put my original image into Google Image Search.
Googling with a custom date range shows the first instance of my image, on my blog in 2007. You can also search for images with images using TinEye Image Search.
I can't see how to reliably hotlink to Google Image Search results, so go to http://images.google.com/, click the little camera icon and paste in the URL to the image, like http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/2dc61d7e4a66_13443/image.png
Widening the search dates to all dates, I can see there are 228 different places this image appears, mostly on career and inspirational/aspirational blogs.
Image search systems are a fascinating way to see how your images find their way around the web. If you had some intellectual property embedded within your images, presumably you could watermark your images but I suspect intuitively that heavily watermarked images might not spread as freely. There's just no easy way to "protect" (if you wanted to) your images these days. So they spread!
What images of yours have spread around the internet?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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What IS amazing in many cases is the completely dissimilar images that are considered visually similar to some of mine. LOL
I find that if I post a photo on the Internet that is really worth posting, it will likely be lifted by someone. To their credit, I generally get emails from presenters or bloggers who use some of my better photos asking permission or thanking me.
Interesting that he's selling it as a poster though.
I rather thought so as well, but it seems to have been in demand. I'm not familiar enough with where the form of the idea comes from to judge that either way.
FYI, a trick to making google images searching easier:
Assuming you have an image visible on a webpage in your browser, open up second browser window, go to images.google.com, then from the first browser window, just click and drag the image, and drop it onto the search text box in the second browser window.
Also check out the Src Img bookmarklet for another easy way of searching for the uses of images.
I attached it to the Wikipedia article on the history of mobile phones and then over the years it has made its way elsewhere.
An interesting article, I have had to write a couple of 'cease and desist' letters in my time but equally I have been able to agree licensing terms with a few people that used my images and earned a small amount of unexpected income.
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I like its focus on "we."