I stole an image from Dave Winer’s website a few days ago. He didn’t give the source of the image, so I thought maybe I could use it without having to worry.

Drats, I DID worry. Okay, maybe I can find the source of the cartoon. I went back to Dave’s site, did a right click on the cartoon and selected “Search Google for image.” The result was a LOT of possibilities, but three of them near the top of the results were the cartoon we’re looking for! So I looked at those three, which belonged to a travel blogger, a potter and his pots, and Blog Writing Guidelines. Like Dave, the first two made no mention of the source of the cartoon. But in the third instance, along the right side of the image, standing vertically, it clearly says ©gapingvoid.com.

So off to that site I went, which is a website for a Culture Design Group. When I looked at examples of their work, it became obvious I had come to the right place. I soon found some examples with characters much like the ones in the cartoon we’re looking for. See this one. and this one.

All I have to do is look through their examples and I’ll find it. YIKES there are 640 pages, with a dozen examples on each page! But then I remembered our heroes, Google. Maybe I could do a search. I noticed there was a search box at the top of each page of results. I typed in “blog about it” and hit the blue search button. Bingo! There it was, the fifth example on the first page of results. It was the featured image on their blog posting of December 28, 2011, which said the cartoon was actually first published circa 2005. We got it!! And it has some interesting writing. Maybe even better than the Blog Writing Guidelines.

Did you notice that I never did use the image that I stole from Dave Winer? But if you’ve been following along, you’ve seen the image many times. Clever, huh? And legal!

If I wanted to pay some money to make one of my websites more well known, I would head to this gapingvoid place. It’s full of very creative work. It’s a famous website, as I’ve looked through it before. But could I afford it? Probably not, but it might still be cheaper than running a Superbowl ad.