The public speaking blogosphere: a large and varied space with fuzzy edges spanning many disciplines. There are public speaking blogs which focus on speech delivery, visual presentation design, speechwriting, humor, personal development, and interperso…

This is a pretty extensive list you’ve got going here. I’ll certainly hav to keep popping back here as a resource.

A search engine that I’ve recently discovered and found useful was DogPile. It’s a meta search engine and it essentially does what it says on the tin, it’s a “pile” of data from various search engines like yahoo, google and so on. Might be worth a look…?

Cheers
Jason

Also, I’ve been using photos on Flickr that are released under the appropriate Creative Commons licenses for free for a long time now:

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

The bulk of the photos are released under an “Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivations license, which means you can use them on your blog as long as you give appropriate credit, link back to the source, your blog is not a for-profit venture and you do not alter the photos in any way.

But there are also millions of photos where the only requirement is that you give attribution.

And any of them are 100% free to use! I use them 4-5x/week. And it’s great fun finding the right photos.

Here’s the Creative Commons site, which gives you background on the licenses, how the organization came about, etc:

http://creativecommons.org/

These are indeed great sites, and I’d add to the mix http://www.dreamstime.com and http://www.shutterstock.com. These are all what is known in the business as micro-stock agencies – they specialize in licensing royalty-free (i.e. – multi use, no restrictive license) imagery at cut-rate pricing. The benefit to the buyer is, of course, a low cost photo option and the benefit to the photographer is the potential to license images many, many times.

The potential drawback here is that the photo you license from, say, Fotolia (who I happen to contribute images to), may also be licensed to many, many other people. Thus, if you are trying to find something unique to put on your blog, printed materials, etc., an image that “brands” you and makes you both noticeably and memorable, royalty-free photography is not the way to go! There are a couple of prime examples of this where companies tried to save a few cents and ended up shooting themselves in the foot in the process.