Let’s all say it together: the Internet is a pretty public place. But not everyone seems to understand that, and now some teens who posted questionable pictures on Facebook have seen those photos resurface in their high school yearbook.
Yet, even if those teens should have known better, the yearbook staff is also to blame - the pictures were reprinted without asking students’ permission, and the yearbook didn’t mention any of the original photographers. Plus, well . . . there’s a certain laziness factor.
“Downloading pictures from Facebook proved more efficient than roaming campus with a camera,” states Daniel de Vise, a reporter with the Washington Post. “Some students used pictures from their own Facebook pages, while others used images culled from the pages of friends and classmates.”
I’ll admit to having a Facebook profile, but in terms of photographs, the site only contains a few pics of my car (with the license plate dutifully blacked out). That’s one way to avoid this problem; another would have been for the yearbook committee to receive more oversight, but de Vise notes, “The yearbook adviser . . . told students to avoid Facebook and MySpace at the start of the academic year but subsequently went on maternity leave and was replaced by a substitute, according to an account published in the school newspaper, The Pitch.”
Ah, well. This incident likely embarrassed some students - and angered some parents - but it’s not the worst thing that could have happened. Hat tip to Techdirt’s Mike Masnick.
Source:www.webpronews.com
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Facebook Photos Show Up In Yearbook
YouTube Crushes All Video Competition
Video sites have been ground into the grooves of YouTube's virtual tires on the information superhighway, in terms of online traffic.A 60 percent market share that is 50 percent greater than the next 64 video sites combined makes for a dominant position in the online video industry.
That's where Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott places YouTube, Google's $1.65 billion video acquisition.
Said Prescott:
YouTube's growth has not begun to slow yet this year. Hitwise traffic data shows that the market share of US visits to YouTube has increased by 70% when comparing January 2007 to May 2007 (this only includes site visits, not streams or streams from views on embedded videos).
Those 64 other video sites, in a custom category measuring US visits, grew by only 8 percent during the same period.
MySpace videos picked up 16 percent market share, good enough for second behind YouTube. Google, Yahoo, and MSN Video rounded out the top five, respectively.
Much of the traffic arriving on YouTube and other video sites comes from search engines. Prescott said about 20 percent of their traffic starts at a search engine result. "Clearly, optimizing your videos for search is just as important as getting your videos up on the web," said Prescott.
Yuntaa Launches Virtual Desktop for File Management
Yuntaa is an online desktop application that lets you store and share your digital media from a central location. Yuntaa is a hosting service, so you’ll have to pay to use it based on the amount of space you’d like to have. There is a free plan for you to use, though.
With this service, you can upload your images, music and videos, share items with the community, and manage all of your files. Yuntaa is designed to mimic your desktop, granting you a few desktop widgets for things like the time and your account info (which can be moved, but not deleted), and easy access to your files. The Yuntaa Manager is a downloadable application that lets you drag and drop items from your computer to Yuntaa, and also select files from your hard drive to be backed up on the site. These files can be automatically updated with the sync function and scheduled to occur on a regular basis.
There are a few community features within Yuntaa as well, giving you access to public files and other user profiles. You can make friends, comment on other media, save copies and download public files as well. The community functions of Yuntaa are not very developed though, and it wouldn’t be fair to say this is much of a social network. For example, sharing an item only gives you the option of sharing it with the community, or with Yuntaa friends.
It would be interesting though, to enable Yuntaa users to leverage this service as a collaborative file management tool, similar to Egnyte. Allowing Yuntaa to be used in a similar manner to sites like Zoomr, as a file hosting service for those that display media on their social networking profiles, including MySpace, hi5 and Piczo, wouldn’t be much of a stretch either.
Source: www.mashable.com
Monday, June 25, 2007
Fairtilizer Launches Basic Search and Discovery Music Site
Fairtilizer is a new music community that launched today.
The purpose behind fairtilizer is mostly for search and discovery, and not so much about the promotion of new artists. There are several ways to filter through songs, as you can search by artist, album, keyword, geographical location, username and genre, among other things. You can preview songs from your main search results page, as well as from the song’s profile page. Add songs to your favorites by voting for them, or add them to your playlists. These sections of your profile are available for other users to see as well.
Like YouTube, the fairtilizer rules say to follow copyright laws, but there is plenty of copyrighted music that’s been uploaded by users. The downside to this is that it makes it more difficult to search for music by artist name, as it would depend on the user to include the artist’s name within the tag words.
Similar to Finetune or MyStrands, there is a way to listen to your playlist independently of your fairtilizer browser window, and you can also embed the FairPlayer widget into another site, such as your MySpace, hi5 or Piczo profiles.. This could prove rather cumbersome. A few more additions to the site that would prove helpful for search and discovery would be the ability to save other users’ entire playlists, links to places where songs can be purchased and downloaded, and offering more information about artists.
Source: www.mashable.com
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Photorgy Uploads Images with an AIM Bot
Send photos to photorgy, and they’ll be displayed on your profile. Images go to a general folder, where you can organize them into albums later on. This organization feature uses drag-n-drop functionality, and works for your user photo and your Favorites section that shows along the right side of your profile. Photorgy uses an AIM bot to upload your images, and this can be extended to a larger group of friends looking to contribute to one photo album. You can upload an entire folder as well.
It’s important to note that you can’t use the Pictures tool on newer versions of AIM. There’s also no way to send photos directly to an album on Photorgy–you’ll have to send them to the general folder to be sorted out later. I also think it’s somewhat limiting that the only way to register and upload photos is by using AIM. Many of the Photorgy’s features are similar to Flickr, and this is definitely the market it’s after. Photorgy is pretty good about letting users know that its service can be used for image hosting, taking a direct stab at gaining Photobucket’s demographic.
Source: www.mashable.com
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Business Reviews Added To Google Maps
Google will tap its users for business reviews to complement the ones they collect from other online sources and display.
User-generated content has been at the core of the success of social media sites. Google will try tapping the desire of people to share their opinions on local businesses through the Google Maps service.
Such user-contributed reviews have been a fixture on Yahoo's competing product for some time. As with that service, Google requires reviewers to login to post their thoughts about a business.
Those reviews and other content as appropriate appear when the "More Info" link for a business has been clicked. For example, a hotel link has an overview of its features, details, reviews, photos, and web pages listed for its additional information.
From the reviews option, one can add their thoughts about the business from Google Maps. The reviewer adds a title and their review, and can select a star rating for the business in question. The nickname in use for the logged-in user can be edited to something different.
When searching for a type of business, people have the option to take a look at existing user-created content. A link at the bottom of the search results for a query leads to the available reviews placed on Google Maps previously.
There are some bugs to work out with the reviews. Searching for a dentist in Chicago brought up about 22 reviews, but not all of the content returned were reviews. One was a job listing for a network development manager with 'dentist' in the description; the listing came from Indeed.com.
Another review was a news story about a 79-year-old would-be bank robber who claimed to have come from a dentist and could only talk quietly. Neither of these results fulfilled what should have been review results.
Priceless Search Engine Marketing Tips
Search engine marketing is nothing but marketing about your goods and services in all major search engines to become popular on the web. Search engine marketing is entirely different from the traditional marketing methods that are used. This is the main reason why search engine marketing tips is very much sought after by any one who is setting up an online business and wants publicity for this.
Search engine marketing tips are not a difficult thing to be found. With so many online sites one just needs a few hits with the mouse and the information will be displayed to you. The only thing which one needs to be cautious is to make sure that they do not end up following and implementing the improper search engine marketing tips to market their goods and services. Listed below is some search engine marketing tips which will help a business in progressing towards the target that has been set.
• Research is vital and there is no two ways about this. As a business owner you must know the competition that is present in the market. Only then will you be able to make strategies that will help your business in succeeding.
• Analyze the market and see the trends that are doing rounds. No business can succeed without knowing what the competing business is up to. Try to find out how successful a particular strategy is and if this is suitable for your business or not.
• Change is the only constant element in the digital market. So you must be updated with all the changes that are taking place. This is the only way and in fact the best way to keep pace with all that is going on in the digital world.
• Determine what aspects are important and focus your attention on that. If getting huge number of customers is your goal, concentrate all your resources toward that. But make sure that you do not neglect the other aspects of your business.
• Each business ahs different requirements, so first you nee to find out exactly what you would like achieve. Setting realistic goals is vital; you must remember that no business can become an overnight success.
Each business wants to be successful, and it is only that the ways and means through which one can become successful that is different. Promotion about this in just the right places is very crucial; you must identify your target audience properly and make sure that the results are fruitful for your business. Search engine marketing tips if followed in its proper perspective has the capacity to propel a business to unexpected corridors of success.
Search engine marketing tips are not a difficult thing to be found. With so many online sites one just needs a few hits with the mouse and the information will be displayed to you. The only thing which one needs to be cautious is to make sure that they do not end up following the improper search engine marketing tips to market their goods and services.