But there are two problems with the image:
* Though the caption on the photo’s TwitPic page says it shows you what “the ground zero site looked like this evening,” that’s not true. De Guzman took the photo of the memorial a year ago.

* De Guzman doesn’t want people looking at the TwitPic image at all. Even though his name appears via watermark credit on the top right of the photo, he didn’t give “@DesignedMind,” the Twitter user who took a screengrab of the image, permission to place it there. If you’re going to look at the photo, de Guzman asks, please take a look at his SmugMug or Flickr pages.

Hold on. This is the Internet. Where ideas and images and information want to be free, right? If you don’t want someone to see something you’ve made, you don’t put it online, right?

Nope, says de Guzman, via an IM chat: “There are clear ways to share content on the sites I put my photos on: Flickr and SmugMug. I’d be ok if they had used what was offered to them.”

But since they didn’t? Last night, on Twitter, de Guzman was referring to people who reposted his work as “thieves.”

I’m quite sympathetic to de Guzman’s argument, because the digital content I make for a living is supposed to be consumed in specific places, too. But it frequently isn’t — it gets quoted without attribution, or lifted wholesale without links, etc. — and usually I just accept that as a downside that comes with the many upsides the Web provides for information makers.

And in many ways, images seem even more susceptible to misappropriation than any other media, simply because most people don’t ever bother to consider that someone, somewhere, created the image they’re now passing along.*

Add in the concept of “fair use,” which is both crucial and muddy for old and new media alike (de Guzman gave me the okay to use his image in this post last night), and you can see how tough it is for image makers to control their own work.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try hard to do the right thing. Particularly when it’s easy to do so. The New York Post, whose Twitter account linked to the TwitPic image last night and made the thing go viral, has now put up a new tweet linking to de Guzman’s Flickr account. Both the Post and this Web site are owned by News Corp.

* I’ve been just as bad about this as anyone, though I’m trying to improve. For instance: Turns out the monkey avatar I’ve been using on my Twitter profile for several years comes from graphic designer Andy Rainford. Andy reached out to me — very politely — this summer, and since then I’ve been crediting him on Twitter, and now again here.

This is now clockwork: Some kind of calamity happens somewhere. Shortly after, an Internet debate breaks out about who did a better job of breaking and/or covering the story–citizen journalists/bloggers or boring old mainstream media.

The new variation on an old theme: Does Twitter constitutes a “news” source?

If you want to read about that at length, be my guest–there’s plenty over at Techmeme. But Dave Winer has summed it up pretty well in a couple of words:

What you see on Twitter, when: 

1. People witness events that others are interested in; and 

2. They’re posting about it on Twitter; and 

3. The interested people are reading their posts… 

It certainly is news. Whether it’s journalism or not isn’t a very interesting discussion, to me. 

To the user, both extremes, Twitter and the most vetted pro news, require skepticism. The reader triangulates”

The Indian police, meanwhile, seemed to take Twitter seriously, at least according to the Times “Lede” blog, which reported that cops asked that both reporters and Tweeters “do not discuss their movements, because they are concerned that the terrorists in the Taj and Oberoi Hotels are watching television to monitor the situation.”

What I haven’t seen on the blogosphere–or any news outlet–is a reasoned and thoughtful discussion of why India is seemingly beset with terror attacks. But I don’t expect to read or hear that a day after a news event, in any medium, because that’s not fast-twitch material.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what actual Twitter users are actually saying about the Mumbai attacks, head over here (even though Twitter spent some $15 million buying a search engine, it makes its search function inexplicably hard to find).

From what I can see, at this point Twitter is basically a good place to find quick links to other people’s coverage of the event, but maybe I’m missing something. (Click on image to enlarge)

[Image Credit: Stuti, which seems to have lifted the image from NDTV India]