Anyone thinking of using Pinterest should read this post about copyright violations and licensing on Direct Match Media. I'd been thinking of trying it, but now, I won't.
The concept of Pinterest -- an online pinboard -- is a cool one, and I know a number of people using it. It can get unwieldy to keep adding links to browser favorites, especially if you use more than one device to browse. Link sites like delicious are just that, lists of links, though their redesign has gotten jazzy with stacks and images.
Reblogging or reposting is a big thing these days. Tumblr excels at it. But Pinterest, with its policy of claiming the license for what you pin of your own creation and putting copyright infringement on the user for any violation of what you pin is going too far, in my opinion.
It should be no surprise that in social media, the user is also the content provider. I've read discussions of this all over the web -- and no, sorry, can't cite sources because I hadn't planned on posting about it, so therefore, didn't keep track -- and it's been clear to me for a while. We users upload photos to photo sharing sites like flickr. We post prose, poetry, photos, drawings, etc. to our blogs. We write about our passions and we converse with others who share our passions on blogs and message boards and on our social media pages. We swap recipes and craft tips, share family photos, play games, post links, and so much more on sites like Facebook. We share videos we like and even ones we make on YouTube. We need the sites for their software to allow us to upload and organize all our creative efforts and they, in turn, often reward us for using them by showing us paid ads that we can opt out of by buying a "gold" or "pro" or "enhanced" or whatever they call it account, while others simply use our content to interest investors. Not all sites shower us with ads. Blogger doesn't, but Google has other places where they do, using AdSense for example, where the user can also benefit. But if we users didn't provide content, these sites would cease to be.
AOL never really got this concept. They destroyed the community they had on all their various message boards til few remained. They didn't keep up with innovations in blogging, so their journals community died, helped along by having ads rammed down the users' collective throat. To recover market share, they moved to other sources of content, official sources like studios, providing news, weather, entertainment, sports, not dissimilar to what Yahoo! does. And Yahoo! too, needs to keep evolving to stay relevant. Because there are so many ways today to get that official content, including people who blog it or reblog it, post it or repost it, sharing it with strangers via blogs and friends via Facebook.
See a trend here? We're back to user-provided content, even if a LOT of it is repostings (and often of old material!).
So, be wary of what you post. You have no idea where it may end up. If you worry about your copyright, keep your work offline. But I also believe in a free, vital, unhindered, uninhibited internet. It's going to be years still until things sort out re: the internet and copyright, so for now, pay attention and don't assume everyone else is playing fair. Read the Terms of Service before using a new service. And don't be surprised if your precious photo or story ends up somewhere else, no credit back to you. You did release it into the wild, after all.
~~~o0o~~~
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Google's New Privacy Policies
Google is previewing their upcoming privacy policy changes, to take effect on March 1st. They're mailing the info to all Google account holders. In theory, I don't have problems with what they're collecting. It's an inevitability of the social web. This is where things are going. But I'm leery of having this data collected about me, especially through a mobile device when/if I use Google services. There is a bit of Big Brother feel to this, even though tailoring ads and creating a consistent identity for account holders across all services sounds okay.
And it's hard to complain about anything you post publicly or have in your public profile showing up across Google services. It's naive to think public posts can be restricted or have a limited audience. Public is public. I'd opted to not combine my Blogger account with Google+ because I wanted to keep my blogs more anonymous. Now, I'm not sure it it will stay that way.
As for tailoring ads, I'm mostly oblivious to advertising other than the pulsating, animated annoyances and those just cause me to immediately hit the back button. I don't pay much attention to suggestions, either. Sure, sometimes a suggested person to add to one of my G+ circles really is someone I know, but I prefer to discover such connections in person with my friends. I let people know I'm using certain services, they let me know what they're using, and we go from there. I use various services, even within Google, in different ways and I don't need, or particularly want, the kind of consistency and synergy that Google is pushing.
One thing that I'm really ambivalent about is the ability of the Google browser to figure out what you're really searching for based on your likes or previous searches, etc. So, to expand on an example they gave, if you search for Jaguar, Google can figure out if you mean the animal or the car. But what if yesterday, I was interested in the animal, but today, I'm interested in the car. If the search results are geared to yesterday's search and brings them up faster, it does me no good, though it does benefit the person checking the same use of Jaguar each time. And when I search, I would use Jaguar Animal or Jaguar Car, anyway, so I should get mostly relevant search hits and this doesn't much matter to me. But it's the sort of thing that can really start to bug me. Because I kinda resent Google using my likes elsewhere -- ie, if I mentioned liking the Jaguar Car in an email and now want to search the animal Jaguar -- to tailor my search results, as if it knows me and my interests better than I do. And if I want to share something, I just copy and paste the link into the appropriate service, be it email, Facebook, Google+. I usually have those windows open in my browser (Chrome!), anyway. And I'm not much of a mobile user, at least not for sharing stuff. Mostly for looking up things I need to know, reading email, or checking Facebook.
I'm also reconsidering my desire to buy an Android phone. I don't particularly want an iPhone, either, which leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I'm not ready to call Google "evil" as some have lately, but I'm not really happy about all this, either.
~~~o0o~~~
And it's hard to complain about anything you post publicly or have in your public profile showing up across Google services. It's naive to think public posts can be restricted or have a limited audience. Public is public. I'd opted to not combine my Blogger account with Google+ because I wanted to keep my blogs more anonymous. Now, I'm not sure it it will stay that way.
As for tailoring ads, I'm mostly oblivious to advertising other than the pulsating, animated annoyances and those just cause me to immediately hit the back button. I don't pay much attention to suggestions, either. Sure, sometimes a suggested person to add to one of my G+ circles really is someone I know, but I prefer to discover such connections in person with my friends. I let people know I'm using certain services, they let me know what they're using, and we go from there. I use various services, even within Google, in different ways and I don't need, or particularly want, the kind of consistency and synergy that Google is pushing.
One thing that I'm really ambivalent about is the ability of the Google browser to figure out what you're really searching for based on your likes or previous searches, etc. So, to expand on an example they gave, if you search for Jaguar, Google can figure out if you mean the animal or the car. But what if yesterday, I was interested in the animal, but today, I'm interested in the car. If the search results are geared to yesterday's search and brings them up faster, it does me no good, though it does benefit the person checking the same use of Jaguar each time. And when I search, I would use Jaguar Animal or Jaguar Car, anyway, so I should get mostly relevant search hits and this doesn't much matter to me. But it's the sort of thing that can really start to bug me. Because I kinda resent Google using my likes elsewhere -- ie, if I mentioned liking the Jaguar Car in an email and now want to search the animal Jaguar -- to tailor my search results, as if it knows me and my interests better than I do. And if I want to share something, I just copy and paste the link into the appropriate service, be it email, Facebook, Google+. I usually have those windows open in my browser (Chrome!), anyway. And I'm not much of a mobile user, at least not for sharing stuff. Mostly for looking up things I need to know, reading email, or checking Facebook.
I'm also reconsidering my desire to buy an Android phone. I don't particularly want an iPhone, either, which leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I'm not ready to call Google "evil" as some have lately, but I'm not really happy about all this, either.
~~~o0o~~~
Friday, January 20, 2012
Picnik is Closing
Picnik, now owned by Google, is closing in April. The editing services are now part of Google+ and that's what they're going to concentrate on. I understand the corporate decision to consolidate, but I have mixed feelings about it. Picnik was great when I was working. I could easily and quickly edit photos for free to upload on the library's website and Facebook pages by using Picnik. The library wasn't going to give me the software to do it, and the old MS Paint was gone after we got WinXP. Only the graphics department got photo editing software, so to have a good, dependable online service that let me do for free what I would otherwise need software for and didn't require me to have an account there or anywhere else, was really useful. Sure, I guess there are other free photo editing sites out there, but there's only been one Picnik. I'll miss it, even if I don't need it much in retirement since I have Photoshop.
~~~o0o~~~
~~~o0o~~~
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Stop SOPA
In typical "toss the baby out with the bathwater" form, the US government, prodded by lobbyists for studios and other content owners/providers, wants to stop piracy by controlling, even censoring the internet. The internet is dark in places to day in protest. Read about it on Wikipedia.
~~~o0o~~~
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Blogger Gets Better
Blogger now has threaded commenting! I've been wanting this for a long time. It's the best thing about LiveJournal. You need to have embedded commenting and your feed has to allow full posts, but there's nothing else you need to do. Blogger has done the rest. Now to take it for a test run.
~~~o0o~~~
~~~o0o~~~
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
New Way to Search
So, Google has changed search to include "your world." I'm sure this is great for a lot of people. I'm not one of them. I don't care what my friends think of something when I'm searching. If I want my friends' opinions, I can just ask them. When I search online, I want pure data, or maybe I'll look for a review... by someone I don't know, preferably, so I don't have any preconceptions about their opinions. Because, again, if I want my friends' opinions, I can ask them.
So, except out of curiosity, I probably won't use the new search features much if at all. But you might want to try 'em. You might even love 'em.
~~~o0o~~~
So, except out of curiosity, I probably won't use the new search features much if at all. But you might want to try 'em. You might even love 'em.
~~~o0o~~~
Sunday, November 20, 2011
What Scares Me
A friend on Facebook posted a status to remind everyone that no political party is all good or bad, that no police department is all good or bad. And that's true. I never have disputed it. But the majority of Republicans in office right now, especially in Congress, and especially in the House of Representatives, have me scared right now. With some embellishment for this forum, where I can be a bit more verbose than on a friend's FB wall, I posted the following.
I'm not angry. I'm scared. I'm scared of what the country is becoming. I'm scared that a political party is holding the government hostage to hold the president to one term and, I fear, might be disguised or even suppressed bigotry, perhaps unknowingly, by people who just can't accept a black man running the country and are mistakenly of the opinion or are rationalizing their opinions by thinking of it in political terms.
I'm scared that the police in my city are out of control. I'm scared that my freedoms online are being threatened and that many of the sites I enjoy, for free, might be gone, or will charge more than I can afford or would want to pay. Okay, that does make me angry. And I never thought the day would come when I'd be this scared and angry, this fearful of losing my rights, of us all having our rights violated and compromised. What's been going on in recent months is shameful. And I fear the day that I won't be able to post something like this, to voice my opinion, be it anonymously or under my full name. And that would be more than a shame. It would be a tragedy.
~~~o0o~~~
I'm not angry. I'm scared. I'm scared of what the country is becoming. I'm scared that a political party is holding the government hostage to hold the president to one term and, I fear, might be disguised or even suppressed bigotry, perhaps unknowingly, by people who just can't accept a black man running the country and are mistakenly of the opinion or are rationalizing their opinions by thinking of it in political terms.
I'm scared that the police in my city are out of control. I'm scared that my freedoms online are being threatened and that many of the sites I enjoy, for free, might be gone, or will charge more than I can afford or would want to pay. Okay, that does make me angry. And I never thought the day would come when I'd be this scared and angry, this fearful of losing my rights, of us all having our rights violated and compromised. What's been going on in recent months is shameful. And I fear the day that I won't be able to post something like this, to voice my opinion, be it anonymously or under my full name. And that would be more than a shame. It would be a tragedy.
~~~o0o~~~
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