HeGeeks.com » Social Media

Creative Commons License Explained

Marko — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:20:41 +0000

I was wondering if there are any copyright issues for using images from Flickr on your blog. I wasn’t completely sure, so I decided to look it up. Most pictures on Flickr are registered under creative commons license.

I googled and quickly found two useful articles about creative commons. A nice article on shoutmeloud.com about understanding copyright and creative common licesing and another post on evolutionarydesigns.net explains what is creative commons and how does it work.

You can also read about creative commons license on the actual Creative Commons website and there’s a big article about it on Wikipedia and on Flickr.

What is Creative Commons

“Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright.”

License Conditions

Creators choose a set of conditions they wish to apply to their work.

Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike means:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

What have I learned?

You’re not allowed to use any photo from Flickr (or from anywhere else on the internet for that matter) on your blog. Make sure it’s licensed under creative commons. If you did not find a copyright symbol or a creative commons logo, it is copyrighted.

Share photos and videos on multiple sites from your mobile phone

7 Social Media Widgets That Will Increase Your Blog’s Traffic

Marko — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:09:52 +0000

Social media’s growth is virtually unstoppable and with that, many social media sites released widgets or plugins for blogs and websites. With social media dominating the world, you simply must have at least one social plugin installed. Having one of these widgets on your blog makes it easier for readers to share the content with friends and it will improve your blog’s SEO too.

Social Media Buttons

Tweetmeme or retweet button is one of the most popular sharing tools for Twitter. I have it installed on this blog in compact mode just under the title.
Topsy tweet button is pretty much the same as tweetmeme.
Digg this is similar to tweet button, except that is shares content on Digg, obviously.
Delicious save button provides an easy way for your site visitors to save content to Delicious.
StumbleUpon button submits your content to StumbleUpon.

Having too many of these buttons will make your blog look messy. Choose a couple of these that best suit your content.

Social Media Plugins – All in One

If you want to share content on many social media and bookmarking sites at once, then I suggest that you use one of the plugins listed below. These will let your readers share content without making your blog cluttered with million of buttons.

Share This is the plugin that I use on my blog. It lets you easily share the content on almost any social sharing site.
Add This is almost the same in functionality, so it’s up to you to decide.

Why Do You Need Social Media Widgets

There are many benefits that social sharing plugins bring. They will drive traffic to your blog or website, let your post go viral by multiple retweets, you will get backlinks to your post (which is obviously good for SEO) and that will spread the word about your presence in the community. And since they’re extremely easy to install, it would be a waste not to use them.

Retweeting made easy

Marko — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:49:06 +0000

As a Twitter user i bet you love it, when your tweets get retweeted. Twitter users usually retweet good tweets, but sometimes there is something specific that tweeters just want to be shared, so Twitter users ask for a retweet. I have stumbled upon two very simple web based tools that add a special link to the end of any tweet that, when clicked, will automatically fill in all of the information needed to retweet. Very neat!

Try it out by retweeting this post.

Please Retweet Me makes it very simple to retweet any update. You just have to type in what you want to have retweeted and it will send out a tweet with a link at the end. Clicking on the link will take you to your twitter homepage and fill in everything necessary to retweet the tweet again. There is a downside tho. It requires you to enter your Twitter username and password, although they state that they have no intention of keeping or sharing that data. And a good thing is, you can track the number of clicks and retweets your tweet has received.

Please Retweet is similar, not just in name, but it’s functionallity is pretty much the same too. The difference is, that it doesn’t require you to enter your Twitter password, but it redirects you to Twitter website instead. Unfortunately that means there is no tracking of the number of clicks and retweets either.

Best Twitter Firefox plugins

Marko — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:21:50 +0000

If you are on Twitter and use Firefox, then you should have a look at these Twitter plugins for Firefox.

Twitbin is a firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar. Send messages, receive messages, share links, and more from Twitbin, the best twitter addon for firefox out there.

Twitter Search gives you quick access to the real-time Twitter search.

Twitterfox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ status on Twitter. It adds a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their status. Also it has a small text input field to update your status.

Tw-autocomplete adds autocomplete support for @-messages and d-messages to Twitter.comIf you are following many people then it’s not easy to remember the name of everyone and this plugin will help you in suggesting as you type in Twitter. I wish this was in Twitter by default.

TwitterBar allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small unobtrusive grey icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.

Bit.ly bookmarklet isn’t exactly a Firefox plugin, but it is a nice addition to a browser. It lets you shorten URLs from your browser’s toolbar, so that you can post a tweet with the short URL directly to Twitter.

Share photos and videos on multiple sites from your mobile phone

Marko — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:32:08 +0000

If you use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other services to host your photos and videos online, then you know how annoying uploading one by one to each can be, especially from your mobile phone.

Yesterday i just found this application that makes it possible to upload your media to multiple sites at once. It’s called ShoZu. I’m a Nokia user, so i’ve only tested it with Nokia, but it should work with other recent smart phones, too.

It works like this:

Install ShoZu on your phone.
Log in to Shozu on your computer.
Add sites.
Add CC sites.
Go to Shozu application on your phone then Options -> Check for updates.

Every time you upload to a site or email, ShoZu will automatically send a copy to all of your CC destinations. The best part – no matter how many sites or emails you CC, you only pay for one upload!

You can select where you’ll be sending your photos and videos the most. This is called your one-click site. For instance you can set TwitPic as a one-click site, which means you will get an option to upload to TwitPic right after you take a photo or video.

Use Twitter on your Nokia phone

Marko — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:26:10 +0000

Are you one of us Twitter users who use recent Nokia or S60 mobile phone? I’m sure you would like to tweet from your mobile, too. I’ll show you a few ways to use Twitter on a Nokia phone.

Nokia Twitter applications

There are a few Twitter clients for Nokia phones. Two most popular Java based applications are Twim and Twibble. For some reason i can’t get neither of them to work properly on my N95. But from what i’ve seen on my friend’s phone, Twibble seemed better to me. Twim offers all the basic features you need for mobile tweeting and is very easy to use. Twibble, however, has more features, including the ability to automatically update itself on a preset interval, as well as GPS support for location-based Tweets and the ability to send photos to twitpic.

Mobile browser Twitter interfaces

If you prefer using a browser to tweet, then you still got a few options to choose from. The most basic is Twitter’s official mobile web service m.twitter.com, but you can’t see direct messages here and it looks boring. More advanced web interfaces are slandr and dabr. While both slandr and dabr are much better than m.twitter.com, i prefer dabr. It just looks better and got a few more options. You can send tweets, view replies, and check direct messages here as well. This is for you if you don’t want to bother installing anything on your phone.

And how do you tweet with your Nokia phone?

Twitter to begin charging companies for using service

Marko — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:39:31 +0000

It’s amazing how long Twitter has survived without a real monetization, so it was just a matter of time they start monetizing their great service. Don’t worry the service will remain free of charge for individual users. They only plan to charge the brands.

Co-founder Biz Stone told: “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

I don’t know how this will work out, or better yet, how much profit this will bring in. In my opinion it would be better if they would just add some non intrusive advertisements on the website. I wouldn’t mind, and it would probably attract many advertisers and thus more profit than charging only the companies. They could as well place small ads inside the “tweets”, which would make the ads show even to those users, who use Twitter primarily from various Twitter clients rather than web.

Read the original story at marketingmagazine.co.uk.

Most popular Twitter clients revealed

Marko — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:09:19 +0000

What are the most popular clients for the very popular micro blogging service Twitter, which is used by millions of people worldwide? I’ve been wondering that when i was choosing the best Twitter client for myself.

According to TwitStat, a Twitter analytics service, most users post from the Twitter website, but the desktop application TweetDeck is a very popular way to post – more than 10% of the users surveyed were posting from it.

Top 10 Twitter clients

TwitStat’s current top 10 list is below, showing ranking and % of users posting from each service today. Note that where users made use of multiple methods, all were counted. The list is constantly changing, and the Top 100 can be found here.

Web – 29.57%
TweetDeck – 10.58%
Twitterfeed – 5.54%
Twhirl – 4.92 %
Twitterrific – 3.79 %
Tweetie – 3.65%
Text – 3.40 %
Mobile web 3.00 %
TwitterFon – 2.96 %
TwitPic – 2.94 %

An URL shortening service for mobile content

Marko — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 21:55:23 +0000

Since everyone has a mobile phone with internet access these days, it’s been just a matter of time a service like this pops up. Not all sites are optimized for mobile viewing experience, and here comes Delivr into play.

So what exactly is Delivr? Currently in private beta, it mobilizes your web content. Whether it’s a web address, Flickr photo, YouTube video, or street address, Delivr will enhance the content for mobile viewing and generate a unique URL that you can then send to friends via social sites or SMS message.

You could think of it as a TinyURL which makes URLs tiny for sharing, just that Delivr creates short URLs to mobile-optimized versions of content. Yes, it makes content optimized for mobile devices in addition to URL shortening.

Why is Twitter so addictive?

Marko — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:40:20 +0000

I started using Twitter in January 2009. I was a bit sceptical about it before i joined, i didn’t really see any point in it, but i said to myself, if it’s so popular then there must be something more to it. So i joined Twitter. And somehow i became addicted to Twitter. Well, not so addicted that i could not live without it anymore, but i check the tweets of my followers every day, multiple times. I may not post as many tweets myself as some people, but i do read many tweets. It’s amazing how much valuable information you can get from Twitter, i would have never believed that, had i not tried it myself.

Why is Twitter so addictive? Probably because it’s so simple to use, yet brings you a lot of value. Just sign up and off you go. Simply follow the people you want and all the information starts flowing in. Another reason why it is addictive is probably, because the service provides us with real-time updates of the things that our friends are up to. And it provides a somewhat more personal relationship with people who we don’t actually know personally, because we can have a conversation with them without actually developing a real relationship.