Ben’s Photo of Me in a Robot Costume Shows Up as a Twitter Ad for Ruxit

October 27, 2014

I learned today from Justin S that an old photograph that Ben took of me in my “Free Robot Hugs” costume showed up in his Twitter timeline!

Since the image was posted with a Creative Commons license – anyone is free to use the image, with the stipulation that they provide attribution.

A company called Ruxit did just that, using the image to promote their application monitoring services (and also attributing the image to Ben, in the lower left corner).

What a crazy thing to come across! And how awesome that someone who knows both me and Ben happened to see this thing?

Of course, Ben is no stranger to this kind of thing happening. That robot photo is a very popular one (and it got me on the front page of Gawker once). Hell, I liked the photo so much I used it myself on a blog post.

Oh, and there was also that one time when Ben and Allison went to Iceland, and then later Flickr contacted Ben to use his photos in a commercial for Flickr’s Photo Session service.

If you liked the photo Ben took of me, you should go check out more. He’s got a lot of great photographs on Flickr.

And now if you’ll excuse me… I have some applications to monitor.

// Update 1: Fun conversation between Ben, me, and Ruxit on Twitter.

// Update 2: Liz did some random Google searches, and found Ben’s photo appearing in a variety of places, including:

Fast Company
The Atlantic
American Journalism Review

That photo really gets around!