Isn’t it marvelous and wonderful that we live in a world of technology where you can wake up in the morning and find that, without permission, your charming mug has been advertising, say, a dating site for lawyers with herpes, all over the hottest business site in the world?
Golly jeepers, what could be better?
How about: not even getting paid for it?
Welcome to LinkedIn’s new Social Advertising program. Congratulations: you’re not just a personal brand; you’re a model!
If you’re having flashbacks to Facebook, congratulations, the anorexia hasn’t gotten to your brain yet. Yes, they pulled this two years ago, so you should know the drill by now; if not, here it is, straight to you from Steve Woodruff at BrandImpact:
1. Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select “Settings”.
2. From the “Settings” page, select “Account*”.
3. In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising” .
4. De-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising” .
And, with quite impressive rapidity, LinkedIn has dialed back on some of the other “social sharing/advertising” options they just dialed you in on:
what we’ve learned now, is that, even though our members are happy to have their actions, such as recommendations, be viewable by their network as a public action, some of those same members may not be comfortable with the use of their names and photos associated with those actions used in ads served to their network.
So, we will be changing how these types of social ads look, from this:
Linked In Social Ad Before
To this:
Linked In Social Ad After
Well, there go your dreams of hanging backstage with Marc and Kate.
PicApp has a problem, and so does everyone who uses them. Formerly a benevolent, free photoservice which allowed bloggers of all types access to fresh, high-quality images, over the weekend it morphed into an unstoppable plague, taking over websites all over the interwebs while their owners slept.
There comes a point in every free service’s life when it feels the need to generate income. If you’ve been around longer than ChatRoulette, you know this, and you knew the day of reckoning would come. Well, it came over the weekend in the form of an email to bloggers that if they wished to use Picapp images in the future, they’d have to register and install the Picapp widget on their blogs (or insert a line of code in their themes).
That’s a simple yes/no proposition, and easy enough to make up one’s mind about. But whether or not one agreed to the terms, Picapp went ahead and did something to its existing images already embedded in blogs, with the following result:
- every image on the front page of a blog now links to PicApp instead of wherever it linked to before.
In the case of blogs that give credit to their image sources by linking to them, this is a huge deal. Well, I wouldn’t want some third-party service messing with the actual links and content on my site without specific permission in any case, so PicApp has some ‘splainin’ to do this week.
Yet another example of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
I know we occasionally rag on Facebook here, accusing it of being a sort of social media honey trap from which one finds it impossible to completely extricate one’s self, but it’s not that we’re saying they’re actively malevolent. Just look at some of the things they’ve come up with to make your life better:
Customer Service Manifestos
“You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers—advertisers. Forget this at your peril”
As the internet found out yesterday, the thirty million bloggers who’d staked their digital turf at Windows Live Spaces were rather abruptly informed that they had six months to pack up and leave: specifically, to WordPress.com, which appears to be the only platform to which a direct Export is even possible from that platform.
We’re excited to announce that WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for Windows Live Spaces users. We’ve worked with our partners at Microsoft to create a simple migration service for Spaces bloggers to easily bring all their posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com.
Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.
That is what you call an offer you can’t refuse.
Suddenly, WordPress.com has gone from a relatively pastoral 5 million users to more than 6 times its original size, with the same amount of support staff. AND the exporter has a few glitches, like not taking draft posts along with it, and if you’re a drafty blogger, you KNOW what that means: all heck breaking loose when you find your carefully-crafted words missing from your own blog!
Staff at WP.com report that, as of right now, the import servers are swamped and they advise allowing 24 hours for the import to take place. It is not reversable. It is not really optional either, unless you want to lose everything: although Microsoft will maintain the existing content for six months, at that point the Live Spaces themselves go poof.
Welcome to the world of someone else’s service: it’s up to them when you get traded and what you get out of it; in this case, objectively you’d have to say this is going to be an improvement for those affected, but it could just as easily have gone badly, depending on whom Microsoft made a deal with. Whether you’re traded for magic beans, a pot of gold, or a plug nickel isn’t up to you, nor is where you land, if you’ve been hosted on a platform without a robust exporter.
You’ve probably heard about this “terrific” new Twitter feature called Lists: you can arrange those you follow into groups like “People in Vancouver,” “Family and Friends,” “Colleagues,” “Wise People,” and “Dipsomaniacs.” This is a great thing: for Twitter.
My suggestion is somewhat different: instead of giving Twitter the pageviews when you painstakingly organize a list of people whose streams of thought you find List-worthy, put it on your OWN site, and put that page URL in your Twitter profile. Twitter does not need the pageviews, trust me.
This is an extension of the oft-repeated dictate to Own Your Own Land: put the things that you work on in a space that you control, so that not only do the rewards come directly to you, but nobody can take them away from you by, say, suddenly getting sold to a shadowy oligarch who shuts off that feature or perverts it somehow.
We’ve discussed the monolitic data mining system known as “Facebook” before. Let’s discuss it again in light of the recent change in “privacy” settings and subsequent public outcry. I think this about sums it up.
Facebook Privacy
People know that when they post information about themselves to a website they and the website are bound by the user agreement that they signed during the registration process. The problem here is that Facebook (and several other sites to which you should similarly give the side-eye) reserves the right to rewrite their side of the contract at any time. Maybe they’ll actually tell you; maybe they’ll expect you to have Techcrunch on your RSS reader and check it hourly.
Remember: this is a service contract. It’s true that you pay nothing in cash, but you are giving them precious information which they then use to make a significant amount of money. Look at it as a consumer would, for that is what you are. Weigh the tradeoffs and realize that even though there’s no cash exchanged, there is a significant cash value to your information as far as Facebook is concerned, which is why they do not charge you for the service. You are entitled to bring critical intelligence to bear on the issue.
I still have my Facebook profile, one Facebook Group, and two Facebook Pages, and it’s unlikely I’ll join the so-called mass exodus on May 31 (we’ll see how many of them really delete their profiles; nobody wants to get left off a birthday party invitation list!). But it is similarly unlikely that I will actually trust Facebook to keep my best interests at heart, or even keep my settings.
A simple reminder that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Learn from the mistakes of others; as the wise blogger said, you must learn from their mistakes, as you will never live long enough to make enough of your own. You can even learn from my mistake at Diary-X, where I lost a good, solid 400,000 words of blog; that’s FOUR BOOKS WORTH. Did I trust the guy running the site? You bet I did: Steve was a great guy. Did he back everything up? Of course he did.
And he didn’t.
He’d subcontracted the backups out without really reading the fine print about just what was being backed up. It turned out that he’d been paying to back up the technical specs, not the actual blog contents. When the server went kerflooey, you can guess what happened to the thousands of people blogging there: wailing, and the rending of garments.
Ah, there’s nothing like a good metaphor! Without metaphors, we’d be as lost as…well, we’d be just plain lost, wouldn’t we? We couldn’t be fancy-lost if we tried, not without metaphors. And here’s a killer metaphor:
Your data is like the precious contents of an exotic shark tank in Dubai (no, it really is, bear with me here): without its proper support and maintenance, it can leak away so slowly you don’t even notice until it’s too late, to the point where it reaches a critical failure and comes crashing to the ground all at once in a massive and irreparable cascade that will cost WELL over Goliath’s arm and leg to fix. For example:
A friend of mine was once responsible for the computer systems of the government a small, here-nameless Asian country. He insisted his onsite team install duplicate systems in a separate physical location to ensure that in case of emergency they could continue to function, and they did so and reported it back to him. Then there was an earthquake.
And the mainframe computer housing the alpha of the government’s systems fell through the floor onto the mainframe directly below it, which was the one housing the emergency backup systems.
Offsite. It’s a very important word when it comes to backups. And no, the room immediately below is not off enough.
Your backups should not only be in a physically different location, they should if at all possible be on a completely independent system, so that no matter what virus, worm, trojan or act of Gob may occur, you can be up and running with minimal if any downtime. Now, if you’re a Dubaious shark keeper, this is somewhat of a challenging proposition. If, however, you’re a webmaster, writer, photographer, filmmaker, or other creator or packager of information in any form, it’s not so hard at all. In fact, we’re here to make it easy.
Trust your precious data to a specialist who’ll make sure it’s there when you need it and not out there duplicating your content, diluting your audience, and weakening your brand when you don’t.
Copyright’s a heated topic in the internet, and one about which there is a great deal of misinformation (see this example for an adamant, strongly held, oft-repeated, and completely illegal, belief about copyright). Essentially, if you’re using a major platform such as Blogspot, WordPress, or Tumblr, or if the server hosting your site is in a country which is a signatory of the major international copyright agreements (such as Canada, the US, India, China, the UK, all EU members, etc) your post is protected by copyright the moment it is created. Yes, even before you hit Publish.
What happened was this: Miss604 signed a contract with Tourism Vancouver to supply posts for their site. One of those posts suddenly showed up on NBC’s site, contrary to the exclusivity contract in the Tourism Vancouver contract, which was binding on both sides. When Rebecca complained, NBC removed her name from the post, but keeping the content up, as you can see by her tweet above. When this hit the thunderdome of teh intarwebs, meaning Miss604′s thousands of followers on Twitter, and their followers, and all of their blogs, NBC reinstated her name, in a tiny font, with no link. It’s unclear what position Tourism Vancouver takes in all of this; whether they gave NBC the right to repost the content in contravention of the contract is still not clarified, but all parties involved now consider the matter resolved.
If Tourism Vancouver had taken down the post from its site, which sometimes happens in these disputes when companies want to stay “out of the fray,” it would have been difficult for Rebecca to prove her case to NBC or the public, as she’d have had no objective proof that it was her content which had been copied. This is yet another reason that keeping a backup of all your work (and writing that into your contract) preferably at a neutral third party’s office or site is critical to anyone who makes a living from intellectual property. Can you ever have too many?
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