last post

I've had a lot of fun this semester writing this blog & sharing things with the world. I hope that anyone reading this has enjoyed it as well. Blogging can be hard because without comments, you don't know if you're being heard. But I think most bloggers write as much for themselves as for anyone else, at least at first.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and have a wonderful Christmas, New Year's, 2011, etc.

Photo: Patrick Emerson

Getting Started with Google Reader

I just finished making a video tutorial on using Google Reader to organize your online reading. Check it out!

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Feeling Overwhelmed?

I recently learned about a free online service called E-Couch. It's a online system for helping people with anxiety & depression if they're unable or unwilling to visit a specialist in person. It's based in Australia, funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, but anyone from anywhere in the world can log in & use the system.


E-couch is more suitable for people with mild depression or anxiety symptoms, or as a first step towards professional help that can include talk therapy or medication. There are surveys you can take to assess your symptoms, little cartoon stories about how depression can make you see life situations as being worse than they are, and a lot of encouragement that anyone can get better if they use the tools provided. Part of the aim of the program seems to be to destigmatize mental illness, and convince someone who is struggling that it is a common problem, and doesn't reflect badly on them as a person.

Sample page from e-couch program

podcasting

Our next class assignment is to create a podcast. My podcast is on the website Mint which is a financial organizer that is internet-based. My podcast is about my experience with Mint, which has basically been awesome. I have all of my accounts linked to it, such as my student loans, my mortgage, as well as my credit cards & bank account. That way I can see the whole picture of my finances and where all the money is going, so I can see where I need to make changes and where my weak points are.

I had never used any kind of budgeting system before, so Mint has really helped me to keep track of things & feel less worried about money & more in control. I recommend it to anyone.

If you're interested in listening to my whole podcast, the link to it is here.

better, greener printing

I have a pet peeve, and that is when you try to print something from the web or your email, and it uses twice as much paper as it needs to. The worst is when it prints everything you wanted on the first sheet and the second sheet is just the copyright date or something, which wastes the whole sheet of paper! I try to be sure to ask it to print preview before I actually print, to make sure there is nothing funky going on, and then tell it to print at 90% scale if it will save that extra piece of paper. But sometimes I forget and it makes me so mad because it just takes a few extra seconds, and if everyone could eliminate their extra "oops" prints it would save probably thousands of trees. Or, a lot anyway.

So, I was happy when I found out about "Print what you Like." It's a bookmarklet that lets you print ONLY the important part of the page. A bookmarklet is basically just a magic link that goes on your bookmarks toolbar. It looks like this on my Firefox:

Go to Print What You Like to get yours. Once it's installed, you just click it before you print, select the text you want, and there you go. I especially love it for printing out recipes from sites like allrecipes.com with no ads!

P.S. Today there's a Groupon for gourmet chocolate! Did I buy one? Um, yes.

multimedia & blogging paper

This week's assignment was to write a paper about using multimedia in blogs & then to also summarize the paper on our blogs. So that is what this post will be.

For my paper, I wanted to narrow down the topic to something manageable in 5 pages, so I decided to focus on a topic I already know something about, which is library blogs. Many libraries have blogs, Twitter feeds, and Facebook accounts as a way to reach out to their communities and inform people of events happening in & around the library. I decided to look at some libraries' blogs to see how they were doing at incorporating multimedia.

The two I liked the best were 24 Frames a Second (the New York Public Library's film blog) and the blog of Ohio University. They both did a good job of adding photos and incorporating different techniques to make the blogs readable and more importantly fun & interesting to read.

Another blog which seemed to be a pretty well-done example of a blog with little to no multimedia is the blog of Yale University Library. I decided that there are lots of different types of blogs that can be successful; some will be very media heavy and some won't, it just depends on what kind of look and feel the institution is going for.

If anyone is interested in the other blogs I used in my paper, you can check out my Delicious links.

Groupon mania

Yesterday I walked out of the Gap with two sweaters without paying a dime. So, what is the secret? Am I a kleptomaniac? No, I used a Groupon!

What is Groupon? Well, I knew you would ask. Groupon is this amazing new invention that creates a win/win situation for shoppers & businesses. Every morning, they email you a deal for one business in your area. Usually it is a local business like a restaurant or salon, but they do national companies like the Gap as well. The deal is usually 50% or more off your purchase. The deal is only available that day only, and it's like buying a gift card, but paying half the price. So once you buy the deal, you have up to a year in most cases to use it.

The reason I call it a win/win is that in addition to allowing the consumer to get some great deals, it also is a great way for small businesses to get new customers in a depressed economy. People might be going out to dinner less, so they want to go to a familiar place that they know will be good rather than trying out somewhere new. A 50% discount helps give people an incentive to experiment & maybe find a new favorite.

So, the deal that I got for the Gap was that I paid $25 for a $50 Groupon. When I went to the store, they had this sweater on sale for $25. So, I got two of them and after the Groupon was taken off at the register, I owed them nothing! So, they weren't actually free, because I paid $25 up front for the Groupon, but $12.50 per sweater is still an awesome deal. So, it seems like the Gap lost out on the deal, and they did in my case, but thousands of people participated in the deal and I'm sure at least some of those people spent more than they intended once they walked in the store.

Other Groupons I've gotten include Koto Buki (it was delicious & wonderful not to feel guilty about ordering the fancy sushi rolls) and Skreened (I haven't used this one yet, it might end up going towards a Christmas present-- you can get a custom made T-Shirt or hoodie which seems like it would be a great present.) I have used Groupons at a few different businesses, in person & online, and I've never had a problem getting it accepted or not getting the deal I was supposed to get. So, so far I can completely recommend Groupon for anyone looking for a deal. But watch out, it's kind of addictive!

In the interest of transparency I should note that if anyone uses the link in my blog to sign up, I get a $10 referral credit. But I would still be just as excited to share my sweater deal if that wasn't a (remote) possibility.

As promised: Fair Use

When I was writing about copyright before, I ran out of steam before I talked about fair use. This was really terrible of me because talking about copyright but not fair use is like talking about hell but then not mentioning heaven. Well, maybe not that drastic but fair use is a very important exception to copyright law.... if you use someone's copyrighted work you'll burn for eternity EXCEPT if it meets the definition of fair use. Which is really complicated and open to interpretation, unfortunately.

Basically, the law (the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107.) says that a use might count as fair use depending on

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

So, what does that mean? It means that if you're making posters of a photograph that someone else took & posted to their Flickr account, and selling them, it's not fair use (#1, because the use would be "of a commercial nature.") It means that if you are copying an entire blog post, and posting it on your blog, it's not fair use (#3, because the amount would be too much. You could quote a couple of sentences and then add a link to the original post). And if you are taking material from behind a paywall and posting it where people can access it for free, it's not fair use (#4, because it means the people who are trying to charge for their site will no longer be able to).

An example of fair use would be: a professor photocopies a chapter out of a book and posts it to their Blackboard for their students to read. This is generally seen as fair use because 1) it's for educational purposes 2) it's only a chapter, not the whole book or a substantial portion and 3) it is only on the Blackboard site, so it isn't affecting the ability of the author of the book to sell their book to other people by giving the book away for free.

Another example of fair use would be reading a book by a political figure you can't stand (I won't name any names) and quoting their book on your blog in a post about how terrible this person is and how wrong they are about everything. This is fair use because it's for purposes of criticism, which the law is fairly lenient about, because criticizing other people's ideas and having debates is part of democracy. You wouldn't be able to quote so much of the book that people felt that they don't have to go out & buy it because they had already read the good parts, though. That would break rule #4 by affecting the potential market for the book.

Unfortunately, the law doesn't give any clear definitions for how to interpret fair use. The examples I just gave were pretty clear cut, but there are TONS of gray areas in discussions of copyright. You just have to look at the four factors, decide whether you believe that your use meets these four qualifications, look at what judges have decided in the past about similar cases, and go from there. When in doubt, it is usually safer to not do it, and stick with options like linking to the text rather than publishing the text yourself, or using photos that you have paid for or acquired permission to use.

Bloglines closing down

I was looking at the new things that have been posted to my Google Reader today when I saw a new post that disturbed me. (Google Reader is a service that allows you to store RSS feeds from any website that provides them & notifies you when the website has been updated.) In a post by Alex Chitu about the similar service Bloglines shutting down, I saw this:

Most Bloglines users will probably migrate to Google Reader, which is now the most popular web-based feed reader. Unfortunately, Google Reader is still a niche service and this won't change in the future, so Google will eventually discontinue it. 

 WHAT???? Discontinue Google Reader? But... they can't! How will I keep up on anything? I love using a feed reader because it allows me to bookmark any blog or other website that I like, but in a way that brings that content together with everything else I might want to read. I sign in a few times a week & read through the new posts, spending more time on things that seem interesting & skipping the rest. If I notice that I'm finding hardly anything from a certain blog interesting, I can quietly drop it. But the important thing is that it lowers the bar for how interesting a site has to be to win me over. If I like one post on a blog, I add it to my reader with one click. If I wasn't able to do that, I would read the post & enjoy it but I would never remember what the blogger's name was & I would probably never remember to go back. And even with sites that I like that are updated regularly, like PostSecret... I would probably forget to check it out on Sundays if Google Reader didn't helpfully remind me.

Chitu's theory is that more and more people are finding out what to read by following the Twitter streams of people they think are interesting, people who post links on a certain topic & get conversations going. I think that that's true and it's an important way for new voices & ideas to get out there, but I can't imagine Twitter replacing the service a feed reader provides. How do the people who share those links on Twitter find them? By following hundreds or thousands of blogs via an RSS reader, and combing through daily to find the most interesting ones. The internet is just too big to randomly click around... you need a starting point & I think an RSS reader is the logical one for me for the foreseeable future. Then again maybe I'm just like people who still think a typewriter & some White Out are superior to a computer with a delete key :)

photo by Helga's Lobster Stew 

Copyright law

If you're publishing on the internet, it's important to know about copyright law & how to avoid breaking it. Copyright law is covered in Title 17 of the United States Code; follow the link to read the whole text, but it might take you a few days! But I can describe the basics, because copyright is something we run into a lot in my work at the library. For example, if it wasn't for copyright law, we could buy one copy of a book and photocopy or scan it & provide an unlimited number of copies for free. Obviously, we can't do that, but we need to know what we are allowed to do to provide the most access to our materials (books, media, online resources) that we can without breaking the law.

Things that are covered by US copyright are any work, such as a music recording, a book, or a photograph, that is fixed in a certain form, & that was produced by a US-based individual. (Other countries have their own copyright laws which can vary.) Once a novel is written, it is considered "fixed" even if it's never published. If you have an idea for a book and you verbally tell your friend and he writes a book based on that idea, he isn't breaking the law. It has to be fixed to be covered but that doesn't mean it has to be published.

So, we know what can be covered by copyright... now how do we know if the specific thing we are looking at is protected? Usually you should assume that any work is protected. That is because registering the work or putting a little "c in a circle" symbol on it isn't necessary to copyright something. Also, copyright does expire eventually and very old works are the considered to be in the public domain (meaning they can be copied by anyone, freely), but this doesn't happen for a long time... for things created since 1998, their copyright expires 70 years after their author dies. So, for most things, you can assume that the copyright is owned by someone.

Which brings an interesting question for anyone who spends any amount of time on the internet. If you go to any blog you will see that the posts are illustrated with photos & feature YouTube clips & other media. Are all of these blogs breaking copyright? Some of them are, and if they're small they might never get caught. But here is one example of a blog post on a major blog that is illustrated with a photo. We don't know where this photo came from, but Lifehacker has such a big readership it's quite possible that if they owed someone money for using that photo, word would get back to that person & they would be getting a letter from a lawyer. So the options for using the photo fairly are:

• they could have already paid the owner or gotten his written permission
• the blogger could have taken the photo himself, so he would be the copyright owner & could give himself permission
• they could have gotten the photo from a stock photo site like iStockPhoto that provides photos for a fee or for free & takes care of the payment to the artist
• they could be using the photo by claiming a Fair Use exception

Fair use? What is that? It's a big topic & so I will save it for another post.

web comics yay!

So, one really good example of how the internet has changed how people communicate & consume media is... web comics! I love to read the comics in the paper but there are also several that I love even more that are strictly available online. The newspaper has the classics, but web comics have several advantages over print comics...

• they aren't subject to censorship (newspapers can stop printing comics that their readers object to)
• they can be in color every day!
• the increased competition means that each artist has to be on top of their game every day (Wikipedia says there are over 38,000 web comics being published!)
• they can be in whatever format they want... a single comic could be 10 or 6 or 1 panel long depending on how long it takes to tell that day's joke/story
• because they can have a niche audience as opposed to comics in the paper that have to appeal to a wider audience, they can be more specialized. 

 My two favorite examples of well-written, funny, interesting web comics are: Dinosaur Comics & Achewood. They are both pretty popular so I apologize if I'm not telling you anything new, but they are my two favorites so I wanted to share them. Dinosaur Comics is written by Ryan North, a charming young Canadian who writes witty observations about modern life in the voice of a neon green T. Rex. Sometimes they are super funny. Here is a good one.  If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see a black-lined box? That is a list of other comics that Ryan thinks are worth publicizing. Web-based artists frequently depend on that kind of reciprocal advertising to build their audiences & find enough readers to make a profit.

The other comic I wanted to talk about, Achewood, is in some ways the polar opposite of Dinosaur Comics. It's still funny... hilarious actually... but it's darker & more pessimistic. Also, instead of a one-off joke in every strip, author Chris Onstad often creates elaborate story lines. This comic is the end of a story about little Phillipe going missing & the daring rescue. It's a good example of just how weird & random Achewood can be, but at the same time the world created in the strip has perfect internal consistency. Achewood is a good example of an awesome comic that just never would have had a chance to be picked up by the newspapers...it's just too WEIRD. and also dirty, plenty of the strips are not child-appropriate. But so wonderful! Achewood makes me happy when nothing else can.

Hello world

Hello world & fellow CMPT 1700 classmates! This is not my first time blogging but it is my first time blogging for a grade. I'm a little nervous but I think it'll pass.

I should tell you all something about myself. I work at the Carlson Library at the University of Toledo. (Side note-- can we talk about how much we hate the new design of the UT website? And how it's impossible to find anything from the front page?) I have been working for UT since April 2006, 2 years at the health science campus, 2.5 years on main campus. I love my job & one of the perks is tuition assistance, so I decided to broaden my horizons with a certificate in Web Design. I'm very excited about learning more about technology, I have been a blog reader since way back & I've had my own personal blog but I would like to know more about publishing on a professional level & how to do some of the cooler things like... make money through advertising. :)

So, that's why I'm here... welcome to all of you & I hope to have a productive class together.