Blogging, as well as almost all media, is become much more mobile. Not only are people reading and consuming news on the go, but they are also recording, writing and photographing it as well.
This move stems directly from the rise in both smartphones, which often include high-definition video/still cameras, as well as other portable recording and Internet-connected devices. From Flip cameras to laptops, you can run an entire multimedia empire without ever sitting in an office.
However, all of this mobility comes with it a series of new legal questions and issues that desktop-only bloggers don’t have to face. When you’re recording audio and video on the street, you have some additional concerns to worry about.
Fortunately, they are legal questions that you can easily address and deal with, so long as you’re aware of them and take steps to avoid them before you step out the door. read more
Copyright is a notoriously confusing and complicated area of law, but one that also impacts nearly every part of our daily lives. As such, it is pretty much inevitable that well-intended people are going to make mistakes.
However, with copyright law, blunders can be very costly. In addition to the threat of a lawsuit, one can have their site shut down, access to some of their favorite services revoked and lose a lot of credibility. Even if none of those things comes to pass, a copyright dispute is still a major headache and one that most, if given the choice, would prefer to avoid.
As such, it’s important for bloggers to be aware of some of the more common copyright pitfalls that come from blogging and, more importantly, how to avoid them.
With that in mind, here are three of the most common copyright blunders bloggers make and what can be done to prevent yourself from falling into them. Fortunately, all are easy mistakes to see and avoid, if you know to look for them. read more
Photo sharing site Flickr has been on a roll in its support of mobile operating systems and their accompanying browsers. A Windows 7 App that fully integrates in to the OS and presents a clean interface was released recently. Shortly after Flickr turned its sights to iOS and released an iPad optimized version of the site.
The new iPad friendly addition is a change to the light box. When browsing the site on your iPad you’ll be able to access a full screen photo viewer and initiate a slideshow:
We’re happy to announce some big improvements to the photo light box for iPad users! The light box is a handy, full browser photo viewer available from any photo page. From a photo page on Flickr, simply tap on a photo to view it larger (if available) and on a clean, dark background.
While Flickr has a native iPhone App that taps in to the power of iOS and the hardware, no native iPad exists yet. Flickr may opt to focus on its site and continue improving it for iPad users instead of releasing an official App. As fellow Blog Herald author Darnell Clayton mused, Yahoo’s growing commitment to the service and expanding features to mobile devices hints Yahoo! doesn’t want to shutdown the service like it’s doing with Delicious.
Social Media played a huge part in helping the Egyptian populace coordinate a revolution that the whole world followed. Despite the new defunct Mubarak’s attempts to silence the people by disconnecting all internet connectivity in the country, updates were still sent out by Bloggers using old school mediums such as faxing. Following Mubarak’s fall, we’re still receiving updates on the Egyptian revolution thanks to the brave Bloggers, Journalists and Photographers giving us an intimate view of a country going through a massive change.
Many photos were shared through Flickr but the photo sharing network has acted to take down an Egyptian Blogger’s photos of the revolutions.
Everyone knows that almost any blog post is better with images. However, getting them can be a difficult matter. With a maze of licensing and fair use issues making it hard to decide what is and is not legal to use, many bloggers don’t wish to use images that they have not taken themselves.
But while using your own images is always the best way to go, there are several great sources to help you find and locate images that you can use as part of your blog posts. In fact, there are some very neat tools designed specifically to help you correctly license and use other people’s photography, art and more.
The best part of all is that these tools are free. They will not cost you a dime to use and, if used correctly, can let you fill up your blog posts with as many images as your heart desires. read more
This has got to hurt. Yahoo have lost Flickr founders Caterina Fake, who left last Friday, and Steward Butterfield, who’ll be leaving on July 12, according to a report on TechCrunch. When reading this, I quickly surfed to Valleywag with hopes of some juicy rumors or just plain fun nastiness, but alas, they make a poor pun on the fact that it took the husband/wife Flickr founder team less time to give birth to a baby, than to get the video features rolling.
If you’re looking for content for your site but don’t want to create it yourself or pay money for it, there are a lot of options available to you. Whether you are looking for images, articles or multimedia, there are many sites on the Web that make available a library of work available for you to use.
If you know where to look for what you want and to make sure that your site complies with the licensing requirements put upon it, you’ll find that there are plenty of people eager have their work become a part of your blog.
To help with that, I have compiled a list of seven of my favorite sites for obtaining free, high-quality content for your site without any worries of copyright issues down the road. read more
Syntagma Media announced Syntagma Photographic, what John Evans calls a satellite business around Syntagma Media, a while back. There’s still no website or anything, but that is surely just a matter of time. The idea is to snap photos for the sites in the network, and offer them for sale as well.
All our photos will be flagged Copyright Syntagma Photographic and will be appearing here soon.
We haven’t had a major expansion of the public business for quite some time, so it obviously gives us great pleasure to start growing again in the midst of this dangerous downturn.
I think more blog networks should shoot their own photos when possible. Creative Common pics from Flickr is all well and good, but original artwork is always better.
Last year, Virgin Mobile Australia decided to use Creative Commons-licensed images in an advertising campaign. The campaign, dubbed “Are You With Us Or What”, featured photographs taken from Flickr, which were overlayed with taglines and a plug for Virgin’s cell phone service.
The problem was that, while the photographer had allowed commercial use through his license (though he later claimed to be unclear about the terms), it only covered the copyright of the work itself. Chang nor her parents had signed a model release, meaning the use potentially violated her right to privacy.
The result is that her parents sued on her behalf in a case that is still ongoing.
So what went wrong and how can others avoid a similar misstep? The answer is actually fairly simple. read more
I’m reading that Google is closing Hello, which apparently was (and is, as I’m writing this), a photo sharing service that came with Picasa. I guess they feel it doesn’t fill a purpose anymore.
On May 15, Google can begin doing something really cool with hello.com, a truly premium domain name. Too bad for the users of the defunct service though.
Blogging, as well as almost all media, is become much more mobile. Not only are people reading and consuming news on the go, but they are also recording, writing and photographing it as well.
Copyright is a notoriously confusing and complicated area of law, but one that also impacts nearly every part of our daily lives. As such, it is pretty much inevitable that well-intended people are going to make mistakes. 
