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.