finished migrating from #trixbox to #pbxinaflash. Still not happy with my AgentCallbackLogin replacement, but it will have to do 4 now

Did a  Google search today for “agentcallbacklogin pbxinaflash” (no quotations on search string) and saw my site sitting at #4. It’s not a huge term so easy to sit at that spot. But does show the value of having your tweets hit at least the frontpage of your website providing fresh content for the crawler.

We need something to fill the void that this will leave! A wiki maybe? I’m starting to itch … maybe it’s an idea … we shall see …

They say a dead blog is worse than no blog at all and frankly, I agree with the ever-elusive “they”, just this once.

Around the time that Mike started his blog, there were only a handful of serious Family bloggers. Since then the number has grown exponentially.

Will this now mark an exodus of Family bloggers? I believe it will – prove me wrong.

Outside of any legal ramifications (which I already covered in the BS III), there are a few topics to consider when posting photos to your website. Once again I will add that this is only my opinion and I’m interested in hearing other opinions and views on this topic.

Permission

When it comes to posting a photo probably the best rule of thumb is making sure that those featured in the photo are okay with having images of them plastered on the world wide web. With friends this is often just a simple understanding. However when you catch someone in your lens who you may not have a “simple understanding” type relationship with you may want to check with them first. Or at the very least remove the photo immediately when requested to do so.

Outside of common courtesy there’s a few considerations:

• You would want them to do the same for you right? (Matthew 7:12)
• Did the person pose for the picture? Or did you catch them in the worst kama sutra position possible?
• Is the picture going to complement your blog or draw ire from your readers.

Children and the WWW

I covered this in a previous post, but it’s worth a mention here. Children are precious and there’s a lot of low life that lurks around the web. Make sure that the parents of the children you post pictures of are okay with you doing so.

Photo Size

Now this is slightly more technical but is a personal pet peeve of mine.

Have you ever visited a website and it took ages for the site to load the pictures? When the site was loaded each picture looked pretty small and grainy and you thought the site owner was nuts for posting such a crummy photo? Often what folks do when putting photos in an article is just upload their nice big 8 megapixel file (2 MB) and then resize the picture using the image tag settings. What you get is a 3264 x 2448 photo displaying at @ 500 x 300. Same download time as the massive version just looking ugly and small.

There’s a few workarounds for this:

• Shrink your photos before uploading. Anything over 1280px (on the long side) is overkill as those visiting your website are probably not planning on making prints. (Hint: Use Shrink Pic)
• If you do have to upload a large image. Make a thumbnail of the image and link to the large version.

Use a Gallery

If you are going to be posting a lot of photos on your website you may consider using a gallery of some sort so that your readers can easily browse through the photos. Having all the photos in a single article makes the frontpage (home page) of your website sluggish and bulky. A couple good examples of websites that utilize gallery software correctly are Steve and Linda / Mike and Nina. (I know there’s others of you but they gave me .10 cents for the back link — so there).

***

Photos is something that can be a blessing or a curse to website. Anything that’s visual is bound to catch attention and if you have a blog you probably are looking for some attention. Just make sure that you are attracting the right folks and secondly that you keep your readers happy by not stepping on too many toes.

12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know

COPYRIGHT

Is defined by Websters as:

The right of an author or his assignee, under statute, to print and publish his literary or artistic work, exclusively of all other persons. This right may be had in maps, charts, engravings, plays, and musical compositions, as well as in books. [Websters 1913]

When you create an original work you automatically own the copyright to it whether you publish a copyright notice or not. [According to the Berne Convention]. However, there is specific criteria that must be adhered to in order to qualify for copyright status:

• a work must be “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.”
• the work must be original — that is, independently created by the author. It doesn’t matter if an author’s creation is similar to existing works, or even if it is arguably lacking in quality, ingenuity or aesthetic merit. So long as the author toils without copying from someone else, the results are protected by copyright.
• The work must be the result of at least some creative effort on the part of its author.

[Excerpted from Stanford Copyright and Fair Use - FAQ]

Generally a website and the majority of posts will fall under this category. So by having the site your work is already copyrighted. So then what’s the big deal? — Well the main reason I’m bringing up copyright is to further my point regarding licensing.

Most blogs automatically put a copyright notice down at the bottom of your page with the current year listed. I will usually edit that to cover the entire period of time my blog has been running. Additionally you could make your copyright line slightly more specific such as:

Unless noted otherwise all content copyrighted 2001-2007 by D. Johnson.

If you do this you should note any time you display excerpts of copyrighted content.

LICENSING

Since we have established that the material you post/display on your blog is copyrighted. We come to the issue of licensing which I think is especially important if you post pictures, videos or editorials on your blog. Licensing is defined as “to permit or authorize the use of”. In many cases if you do not have a license up generally speaking if someone uses your work you should contact them and let them know that they are publishing copyrighted material. However there are times where you may want to be a little more specific about who can publish your material and under what stipulations.

For example say I’d be fine with another personal blog republishing an article of mine, but if a newspaper or other commercial entity republished it I may want them to ask for permission first. There’s a pretty cool site called Creative Commons that provides different types of licenses that you can use, and their site is pretty self explanatory so I won’t get into too many details. But basically you can generate a pretty specific type of license that can include or exclude certain parties.

The reason I personally feel licensing is so important is I have some friends who have had personal photographs which they had up on their website displayed in articles and commercial media. This was done without their consent and of course they were rather annoyed by it. If your website had a straightforward license that excluded all commercial works including news media without your expressed permission this may have been avoided.

Now that’s not to say that by adding a license to your site that you would be free of such scenarios, but it does add an extra safe guard and a way for you to quickly show that you did not consent to the publishing of said material.

There are also times when you may want to release all the works of your website into the public domain in which case you may want to add a copyleft notice to your website so that folks know they are free to use your material under certain more “free” stipulations, though a license that specifies such use is still important.

And remember that if you publish material that doesn’t belong to you, make sure you have permission to do so and provide the required attribution lines, etc. That includes if you are publishing a picture that someone else took. Since, whoever is the one who pulled the trigger on the camera, they own the copyright.

I’ll get a little more into copyrighted material and republishing it a little further along in this series.

As with all posts in this series I do not presume to be an authority on these topics or have covered them in enough detail so feel free to share your opinions in the comments. And if your post doesn’t show up right away, don’t worry I will be sure to approve it.