David Kamerer

Associate Professor of Communication, Loyola University Chicago

Respecting copyright on your blog or social media page

by

copyright.gifIt’s a new semester, and that means students everywhere are jumping in to digital publishing, either for fun, self-expression or as part of a classroom assignment.

While student work may seem to have limited scope, at some level it’s no different from a page at nytimes.com. If it’s published online, it is a public document and can potentially reach a worldwide audience. So it’s essential that students respect copyright.
The bulletproof way to avoid copyright liability is to create all the information yourself. Your words, your images. If you’re writing a blog post, shoot your own photo or create your own illustration.
But there are sources of images that you can use and avoid copyright liability. You can search the Wikipedia Commons for an appropriate image. The terms of use are generous, but not unlimited, so be sure to read the guidelines for use. 
Under Section 105 of Title 17, which covers copyright law, the United States government does not hold copyrights, so you can generally use images from government websites. 
Copyright has a “safety valve” called Fair Use, which allows people to incorporate copyrighted works into other works. This allows a book reviewer to reproduce a passage from a novel, for example. But be careful – the boundaries of fair use are uncertain. Case law only provides a set of general principles, which include: purpose and character of the use; nature of the copied work; amount and substantiality of the use; and the effect upon the work’s value.
A newer concept for protecting intellectual property rights while accepting that we live in a “Remix” culture is the Creative Commons License. Under this model, online content can be shared under conditions that the author permits. For example, you might be able to use someone else’s photograph on your blog, provided that you credit the source and link back to the original. You can learn more about finding licensed work on the Creative Commons website. The photo sharing site Flickr has a “Creative Commons” filter on its advanced search page to help you find sharable images. 
In the end, no matter the source of your words, sounds and images, responsibility for their legal and appropriate use is yours. So inform yourself, and choose wisely. This prudent practice will also help you avoid trouble when you’re creating messages for an employer.
Additional resources to help locate copyright-free images:

Book publishing in the social age

by

books.jpgHere’s an excellent piece by ReadWriteWeb COO Bernard Lunn on the future of the book publishing business. Think about the forces at work in this swirling vortex: traditional publishers, distributors and bookstores; mega-distributors like Amazon.com; eBooks like Kindle; Google, with its aggressive digitization programs; and self-publishing. 

Do books have a future? Indeed they do. There will always be a place for deep content and ideas that endure. I have books on my shelf that have outlasted my last six computer systems. They have never “checked for updates” or crashed on me. Their very presence is a comfort to me. They smell good.
Take a moment and give books their due. Quoting Henry Ward Beecher: “a little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.”

♫ United breaks guitars; everyone sing along! ♫

by

Good morning class:

For today’s lesson, please view this video:
Now, please take note of the number of views on the video (as of this posting, it’s more than 1,300,000).
Now, please visit Twitter search and see the traffic:
Now, let’s review the ways it pays to “be good”:
1. It’s a nice feeling.
2. The luggage handlers could take better care of their customers’ things.
3. The airline could be nice to the customer, even if it can’t admit fault.
4. The airline could let the musician carry the guitar on board.
5. The airline could apologize and fix/replace the guitar.
The airline personnel could be so awesome that it inspires customers to write letters of thanks, prose poems, even songs of praise.
But no.
And this nice young man doesn’t have to take it like he did in the old days. He wrote a song. He made a video. He shared it with 1,300,000 of his friends. The message is simple: United breaks guitars. It’s a catchy song. In fact, it’s still playing in my head.
What’s the cost of this incident to United (the airline that breaks guitars)? Hint: it’s more than $1,500.
The takeaway: love your customers, when you see them, in the deepest recesses of your organization, and everywhere in between. They were so nice to you: they gave you a job, helped pay for your daughter’s iPod, your son’s braces, and your home, your car, your dinner. 
Give a little love back. Is that so hard?
Class dismissed.

U.S. to Sanford: shut yer pie hole

by

PRNeedebadge.gifEvery so often the news brings us a complete train wreck, the person who can’t help but do everything wrong. Today it’s South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who has been discovered having a very public sexual liaison with an Argentinian-woman-not-his-wife. In so doing, he has given us a new euphemism for sexual misconduct: “hiking the Appalachian Trail.”

Let’s count the ways Sanford has screwed up: Having the affair. Talking about it. Lying to his staff. His family. The citizens of South Carolina. Co-mingling business trips with personal trips. Public disclosure of intimate emails. Talking and lying some more. Feigning remorse. Prattling on about his “soulmate.” Making the painful observation that he would try to fall in love with his wife again. So much talk.
Some free counsel: keep it in your pants, governor. Shut your pie hole. Try something else, I don’t know, how about governing. Succeed publicly and fail privately. Get out of the news, pronto. Keep your schoolboy crushes to yourself. Respect your family. Tough it out.
Be a man.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Shut Up, Mark Sanford
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Posterous is brilliant

by

posterous_logo1.pngYes, I’m writing this article on Posterous using my traditional blogging tool, Movable Type. The irony is not lost on me. And no complaints about MT – it’s easy to use, stable, and very well behaved.

But Posterous is innovative in some important ways. If you have held off on blogging because it just seemed like too much work, or seemed too limiting, you may want to jump in with Posterous.
Here are some of the cool things you can do with Posterous:
You can blog via email. Just attach a photo, write an email and send it to Posterous. It magically appears on your blog. The subject line is your blog post title. The body content is the entry. The photo is sized automatically. Full links are clickable.
You can blog on your mobile device. Let’s say you’re at an event with your iPhone. You take a picture, write a cutline, and email it to Posterous. You’re liveblogging, now, baby. Grab an iPod Touch and blog your way across Europe. As Ram Dass might say, “Blog Here Now.”
It’s rich media friendly. Email an MP3 to Posterous and the tool knows to wrap the file in an MP3 player. Record a voice memo on your iPhone and send it. Email a YouTube link and it embeds automatically.
Posterous lets you scrape the web. Drag the Posterous toolbar to your browser. Then, when you find content online that you want to blog, click and it opens a window. Choose from available images on the page, write a title, write your comments, and click – you’ve blogged it, and you’re back to your web trawl.
Posterous ignites your networks. Your post is auto-magically distributed to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or any other popular network you choose.
You can still blog the old-fashioned way from a control panel – useful if you want to clean up a mobile post, for example. Some other features: It’s easy to point your Posterous blog to your web domain, if you wish. You can install Google Analytics with one line of code. And Posterous has a Tumblr-like network feature that keeps you in touch with other Posterous bloggers.
I do have some concerns: Posterous accelerates our “Remix” culture, and probably runs over some copyrights by making it ever-easier to repurpose protected content. From a design standpoint, Posterous is clean and effective, but there’s just one theme. I have to believe the service will soon allow its customers to reskin their sites.
I first learned of Posterous when Steve Rubel moved his work (formerly Micropersuasion) to the tool. He’s changed his blogging style since the switch; shorter posts, more web scrapings, more frequent updates. More interactive. As he says, it’s lifestreaming, a bridge between Twitter and a blog.
Here’s a nice guide on using Posterous, courtesy of Old Media, New Tricks.

Porous social networks aid democracy

by

“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”


 – John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

The elections in Iran have yielded fierce protests worldwide over the validity of the outcome, electing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over popular rival Mir Hussein Moussavi. While the results certainly look fishy, I’m not qualified to assess them. However, protests in Iran and worldwide continue to put pressure on Ahmadinejad’s regime.
While Iranian citizens are protesting and fighting in the streets, they are also communicating with the world on popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The New York Times reports that one virtue of Twitter is that it’s harder to block than other networks because members can access it from mobile devices, cell phones and computers.
Outside of Iran, people are aiding the protest, too. They’re:
• setting up proxy servers and making them available in Iran, helping citizens escape government censorship of the web;
• launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against the Iranian government’s web infrastructure;
• instructing people outside of Iran on how to help, not hurt, the opposition. See this list of instructions from Boing Boing.
• talking, blogging and tweeting the news, putting pressure on mainstream news outlets to continue or increase coverage. Tweeters are turning their avatars green in a show of support of the resistance.
Reporters have been banned from sharing news from Iran with the outside world. If you would like to read news from participants and citizen journalists, try these resources, as suggested by PC World and others:
The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, contains videos and commentary
On Twitter: Twazzup has created a mashup of relevant Twitter resources; check it out. Or search for the hashtags #iranelection or #gr88
Images on Flickr: mousavi1388, parsaoffline, sharif
Conversation is a powerful tool to fight fascism. And social networks give conversations about Iran a media-rich megaphone. The whole world’s watching – and talking.

Dear graduate,

by

annagrad.jpgI’ve been looking for the right words for some time now, but it always comes off preachy. So instead I will rely upon the words of others, and keep things short. My gift to you!
Paul Hawken gave a brilliant graduation address to the students at the University of Portland. I urge you to take five minutes to read it. You may know Hawken for the company he co-founded, Smith and Hawken, which started out selling durable tools for living (today they sell stuff like patio furniture). I purchased a wonderful English garden spade from the company in 1983, and still use it regularly. Hawken is an investor, entrepreneur, environmentalist, a do-gooder in a world that needs lots of good to be done. Here’s hoping that some of that rubs off on you.
Richard Edelman is President and CEO of Edelman, a leading international public relations firm. Read his advice for gaining entry to the public relations business. And while you’re at it, grab the RSS feed for his blog, 6 A.M.
Pictured above: my daughter, Anna, 2009 graduate of Wichita East High School

Tools to turbocharge your blog

by

• Web browser FireFox is gaining ground with power users due to its powerful extensions. Here are 15 tools to streamline the workflow of blogging, from CNet.

• Transport your Flickr images and slideshows to your blog or website with simple embed code generated by PictoBrowser.
• Want to get into blogging and not sure where to start? Thinking about trying a new blog tool? Check out Alina Yeisley’s My Yellow Umbrella blog, which has a roundup of the major content management systems and some advice on hosting.

What’s another word for plagiarist?

by

Our culture is generating more messages than ever, as we email, blog, Tweet and text our way through each day. Everyone can communicate using multiple channels, and that’s a good thing. 

But there’s a cost: all of these pipes are filling up with junk. Junk people writing junk messages, junking up the channels of communication. Junk, junk, junk. So good luck finding an original thought:

thesaurus.gif
“What’s another word for Thesaurus,” by the way, is attributed to comedian Steven Wright. The Tweeters above seem unconcerned about stealing his words. All they care about is to look smart, to be in the game. This, of course, is why so many people hate Twitter, which The Ad Contrarian says is how the narcissistic keep in touch with the feckless.
Good manners – and that includes academic and journalistic training – suggest that when we use other peoples’ words, we attribute them. Our copyright laws reinforce this. But as a culture, we are increasingly ignoring these norms.
So fight that urge to retweet someone else’s wisdom without attributing it. Think of that other person for a minute. Think about the rules of discourse that you learned in school. Think about copyright, so important to the production of knowledge that it’s part of our Constitution.
Are you really adding to the conversation? If in doubt, maybe you should stay out. Try thinking more and speaking less. More signal, less noise. So when you do speak, people might actually listen.