Author: vdebolt

Photo Editing in Flickr Goes to Aviary

Flickr recently announced that Picnik (set to disappear completely from Flickr by April 19) will be replaced with the HTML5 based image editing tool Aviary. In case you missed the subtle nuance of the phrase HTML5 based, I remind you that means it will work in iOS.

Aviary is a plug-in that works in mobile devices and in the desktop browser. Aviary also works with Facebook. Flickr promises it will be faster than Picnik.

Some Flickr accounts can see Aviary in place right now. Using it is similar to the way Flickr worked with Picnik. Here’s a look at how to use Aviary from inside Flickr.

Step by Step with Aviary in Flickr

Here’s a photo I took of Leslie Jensen-Inman and Jeffrey Zeldman on the stage at SXSW in March. It’s on Flickr and ready to edit with Aviary.

Step One: In the Actions pull down menu, select Edit photo in Aviary

Edit Photo in Aviary menu item
Image ©Virginia DeBolt

Step Two: Agree to give Aviary access to Flickr

agree to aviary
Image ©Virginia DeBolt

You’ll only have to do this the first time you use Aviary.

Step Three: Edit

edit window in Aviary
Image ©Virginia DeBolt

The image opens in Aviary’s editing window. You see a row of tools across the top of the window. The options include such things as enhance, crop, and brightness. Note the arrows. Click the arrow and you find additional editing tools.

menu 2 in Aviary
Image ©Virginia DeBolt

With these tools you can do things like hide redeye or blemishes and sharpen.
You can even draw.

Step Four: Save

save in Aviary
Image ©Virginia DeBolt

When you save, you can choose to change the photo’s title, add new descriptions or tags, determine who can see the photo. Most importantly, you decide whether or replace the existing photo with the edited one or to save a new copy of the image.

After you click Save, you are right back in Flickr, ready to move on.

Are You Happy with the New Photo Editing Tool?

I’ve used Aviary for a long time and watched it grow. I’m happy to see it integrated with Flickr. It’s a good replacement for Picnik – easy to use and robust enough to do the job. I’m pretty happy about this development. Are you happy with it?

Note: This article is cross-posted at BlogHer in a slightly different form.

Integrate Your Social Media Approach and Set a Trend

It was almost two years ago when I wrote about the innovative social media campaigns run by Old Spice and by Sarah McLachlan, the singer. The early genius of those stories still shines, but this week’s news shows a trend toward integrating absolutely everything into one big social package.

OPRAH
Photo by Ruby Goes via Flickr

How Oprah is Revolutionizing Social TV in Real Time at Mashable details how,

She is incorporating social media and interactivity into every episode across various platforms, from Facebook and Twitter to Skype and Instagram. For example, Oprah encourages viewers at home and in the audience to live tweet responses to the topics mentioned on the show and then discusses them in real-time with her guests.

Oprah doesn’t just mention tweets on the show. Viewers might Skype right into the show to make a contribution. That’s pretty amazing, in my opinion.

Go to sleep!!!
Photo by Linxbas via Flickr

Also at Mashable, 110 Trending Topics in 5 Hours: How WWE Wrestlemania Body-Slammed Social Media talks about what happened during Wrestlemania.

Behind strong pushes on Twitter and YouTube, WWE Wrestlemania XXVIII laid the smack down on social media last weekend, teaching a digital engagement lesson to the sports entertainment world.

The five-hour pay-per-view broadcast at one point had seven of the top nine worldwide trending topics on Twitter. It generated 110 worldwide trends over the show and pre-show’s five hour period . . .

There are so many examples of folks who train wreck their careers or their business because they don’t understand social media. Clearly, individuals and companies alike need to learn how to make social media work for them rather than against them. These two stories show there are some who can lead by example.

Useful links: CSS3 updates, teaching programming, e-bikes, Hacker School Scholarship,

The W3C released updated working drafts for CSS3 specs for transforms, animations, and transitions.

If you teach a programming language, you should check out The Female Perspective of Computer Science. There are frequently interesting posts about innovative ways of teaching computer science, such as this one: Lecturing for a First Year Programming Class.

Two environmental activists are riding electric bikes cross country – New York to San Francisco. They are sponsored by an electric bike company (of course) and have a blog. Pedal, Forrest, pedal!

Future Tech Women: Etsy is Looking to Sponsor You. Check out this  a scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology, hosted in conjunction with Hacker School in New York City.

Copyright Symbols You Need to Know

When you are planning on using or creating content for the web, it is important that you have a basic understanding of copyright law. That doesn’t mean you have to take a legal course on the subject. You just have to be aware of the fundamentals that make it less likely that you get into trouble.

copyright

Here are a few things you need to know: the different between a copyright and Creative Commons and how to assert or recognize each.

Symbol # 1

copyright

Any time the © symbol is present, the content is owned and cannot be used for commercial or sharing purposes without proper permission and credit. If you fail to meet this criteria, the content counts as being plagiarized. This could lead to lawsuits, fines and other consequences, depending on the context in which it was used.

Symbol # 2

While a © stands for a copyright, there is also a ™ for trademark and ® for a registered trademark. They are made with ( c ), ( tm ) and ( r ) in Windows, minus the spaces.

Symbol # 3

Creative Commons has its own symbols. These include attribution, derivatives, share-alike and noncommercial or commercial use. Each one signifies that an image can be used if the specified requirements, set by the creator, are met. Content that is in the public domain does not require any special rules to be listed or followed for use. For attribution, you must provide a credit with the content and link or source. Derivative and share-alike both refer to the presentation of similar or edited content based on the original. Commercial or noncommercial will tell you whether you can use it for a profitable venture. The creator may also have some special requirements to meet, such as telling them you have used the image, and where.

Symbol # 4

copyright

Any creative work is automatically copyrighted in the United States under the amended Copyright Act of 1988, as long as the work is created after March 1, 1989. If the work was created prior to that date, the creator or owner must have applied for copyright protection under the new law. This is why so much content prior to that date is within the public domain, as the copyright originally in place expired or it was never placed according to the amended law.

Bonus:  One Tip

It is your responsibility as a creative owner of anything you create to place a copyright symbol upon the work when sharing it. This includes online, where it is easy to steal another’s work. Some websites made for sharing will automatically list it as copyrighted to you to protect themselves from liability. But you should always check, in case your work is plagiarized and you have to show the court that the user was aware of your ownership.

Conclusion

Copyright can be a complicated issue. But as long as you take steps to remember the basics you will be able to protect yourself from the most obvious risks, especially online, where it has become so easy to both have your work stolen and catch instances where it has occurred.

Guest Author is the SEO manager at PsPrint, an company specializing in online printing. PsPrint offers an array of free tools, for example it lets you make your own business cards online.

Image Credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

A Privacy Win

Transparency is everything in the world of ones and zeros where data can be collected and used in hidden ways for not-always-helpful purposes. Sometimes revealing what an app is actually capable of doing – is doing – with your data results in a happy ending.

girls around me screen capture
Girls Around Me screen capture

The story starts with Cult of Mac revealing the truth about an app in This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy. The app is called Girls Around Me. You should read the full story for yourself, it has several screen captures of interest. I’ll give you a highly abridged version. Girls Around Me gives you a map showing where girls are nearby. These are women who checked into locations using Foursquare. Based on that, the app shows their Facebook profile image, tells private details about likes, friends names, jobs and more. The story concluced with tips about how to manage privacy settings.

Creepy is right.

The Cult of Mac story was so creepy that it garnered a lot of public attention. That’s where the good part of the story begins, a turn of events that we can thank Cult of Mac for igniting. (Or, more precisely, we should thank the girlfiend of the writer John Brownlee at Cult of Mac for insisting he write about Girls Around Me.)

Tech Crunch publicized the story in “Girls Around Me” Creeper App Just Might Get People To Pay Attention To Privacy Settings. The story at TechCruch focused on the privacy settings issue, but ended with a short but important update:

Foursquare has reached out to say that the app was in violation of their API policy, so they’ve revoked access. I feel safer already!

Kudos to Foursquare, right?

But that isn’t the end of the story. The Sydney Morning Herald in ‘Stalker’ app pulled after ‘tool for rapists’ outcry, tells us,

An iPhone app that in effect allowed users to stalk women nearby using location-based social networking service Foursquare has been pulled from the iTunes app store by its developer after an outcry.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s ‘Girls Around Me’ Developer Defends App After Foursquare Dismissal, the app is useless without Foursquare integration, which is why it was pulled from the app store. The creators of the app, a Russian company called i-Free Innovations defended the app to the WSJ, calling it,

. . . “unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns. We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the apps’ goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions.”

You can read the I-Free developers’ full statement in The Wall Street Journal’s story. Even though Girls Around Me is no longer available in the app store, it had already been downloaded 70,000 times. Those versions should not work now because Foursquare cut off access.

We Won One

Privacy for women won this one. Yea.

Yet we still have to struggle weekly with protecting our privacy online, with changing settings in Facebook and in apps, with constant vigilance to protect our vulnerability.

One victory isn’t enough. How can we use the momentum of this victory to create changes that will be more useful and long lasting?

Note: This story is cross-posted at BlogHer.

Useful links: Polyfilitis, Erections, Privacy

Stop solving problems you don’t have is about not starting an HTML5 project with all sorts of polyfils built into your basic template that may never be needed or used. I’m calling it Polyfilitis.

Dear Technology World – Please Stop Trying to Give Me an Erection is by Terence Eden. Terence Eden is my new favorite person. Three cheers to Terence Eden!

The Philosopher Whose Fingerprints Are All Over the FTC’s New Approach to Privacy is at the Atlantic and is something everyone should read. Here’s a quote:

. . . it’s important to understand how what she’s saying is different from other privacy theorists. The standard explanation for privacy freakouts is that people get upset because they’ve “lost control” of data about themselves or there is simply too much data available. Nissenbaum argues that the real problem “is the inapproproriateness of the flow of information due to the mediation of technology.” In her scheme, there are senders and receivers of messages, who communicate different types of information with very specific expectations of how it will be used. Privacy violations occur not when too much data accumulates or people can’t direct it, but when one of the receivers or transmission principles change. The key academic term is “context-relative informational norms.” Bust a norm and people get upset.