Photosharing Video/Tutorial

For those of you on Thing #17, here is another of those great tutorials on what Flickr and Photosharing is all about.

Thing #17: Give Flickr a Shot

Description:

Flickr is a photo sharing tool. You can create an account and upload photos (which can be made seen by public or made "private"). You can have a list of "contacts" on your account, so that you can see your friends photos as they upload them. You can even add little notes to your pictures that can more easily describe what is going on in the photo.

As with Library Thing and del.icio.us, I would like you to just "try it out." What that means is up to you. You can get an account or just look at the photos. Just let me know what you thought of it on your blog.

Hints:

• One of the more interesting sections of Flickr is the Creative Commons, which is a repository of photos with licenses automatically offering permission to users to copy them, with certain restrictions (usually related to attribution -- ie. giving the photographer credit).
• Flickr is a Yahoo! product, so you may need to get a Yahoo! account in order to use it. As I think of it, del.icio.us is a Yahoo! product too.
• Flickr utilizes RSS as well -- so you can grab feeds of your favorite collection of pictures and have any updates sent out to your RSS aggregator.
• Next week you will learn about tagging which will definitely make these tools make more sense as you go along.
• "I tried and I failed" works as a successful completion for Things #s 14-20. Just give it a shot and if you don't understand it, try it when you are interested.

Resources:

• Flickr + Libraries = scary, scary, scary to some (Michael Stephens)
  

Copyright, Copyleft and Hyperlinking

1. I added an RSS feed showing comments as they come up. Pretty much all of the comments are really helpful, so I thought I'd try as hard as I could to make them accessible.

2. Sara had a question about copyright and using other people's information. I'm no lawyer, but here is a summary of what I know:

• Hyperlinking -- linking to other content is pretty much legal, unless you are pointing to illegal content for the explicit purposes of disseminating the information. Don't point to illegal content and you are safe. Here's a good resource for this.

• Fair Use -- you can use portions of other people's content so long as it is to make a separate point, such as in a review or a parody of a work. The key points here are a) don't copy all of the work b) have a point other than the one illustrated in the work -- you have to be adding to the conversation. Here's a great comic on the subject of copyright and fair use.

• Common Knowledge -- you cannot claim a copyright on factual information. Things like gas prices, weather facts and the like are not copyrightable. Recently, a court case declared that information like batting averages, and hockey point totals are also not copyrightable.

• Licensing -- many blogs, wikis, and photo groups offer Creative Commons licensing on their writing, art and/or photos. This means you can copy without asking so long as you follow certain conditions depending on the license. Flickr, for instance, has a collection that points to photos that have applied a creative commons license to their works. An artist can choose to add any or all of the following four restrictions to their license:

• Attribution -- you must give the originator credit for the work.
  
• No derivs -- you cannot change/re-purpose the work.
• Non-commercial -- you cannot use the work to make money.
  
• Sharealike -- you have to include a similar creative commons license on your work.

There's a quick summary. I hope this is helpful for any of you who are concerned about what you can or cannot put on your blog. In general, if you are in doubt -- ask permission to use the item. And if you are told to take something down for copyright reasons do so right away unless you are absolutely sure you are within your rights to use the item.