Press Release from the NBFP

I was just putting the finishing touches on a post about all my blogging friends who have never been ‘Freshly Pressed‘. I was thinking it would be appropriate to form a group of ‘Never Been Freshly Pressed’ (NBFP) bloggers, perhaps design our own badge to put in a widget on our sidebar – celebrate our status as the underdogs.

I think everyone roots for the underdog.
- Johnny Knoxville

I was going to link to some of my fellow underdogs and the first on my list was Steve at The Brown Road Chronicles. He recently wrote about how he has skirted around accusations that he has used the banned substance called ‘Freshlypresstosterone’ in an attempt to achieve Freshly Pressed fame. I guess the drug finally worked -  yesterday Steve was Freshly Pressed.

A Broken Heart

Congratulations Steve – but as self proclaimed President of the NBFP, I’m going to have to kick you out of our club. It breaks my heart to have to do it, but rules are rules. (Note to the Club Secretary – please get those rules written. Note to Membership – please nominate a secretary.)

I’m sorry Steve, but you will have to remove your belongings from the Club locker room. I’m going to have to suspend your bar and dining privileges too. (Note to Club House Manager – do we have a location for the Club yet? Note to Membership – hire a Club Manager.)

On the bright side, that means someone gets Steve’s parking stall.

Life goes on. Let me introduce you to some of the remaining members of our Club:

• Al at thecvillean.  Al is blunt in describing his feelings about the WordPress FP editors: “When the intellectual powers that be at WordPress FP gather together to beatify a subscriber, please just put away the dartboard and actually read one of my posts.”

• The self described ‘disjointed and somewhat snide’ blogger at Pouring My Art Out is pragmatic: “I have as much chance of being ‘freshly pressed’ as Dick Cheney has of being voted People Magazine’s ‘sexiest man alive’”.

• Christine at The Good Stuff writes, “I just started my 2012 day timer with that freshly pressed paper smell” – In our club, Freshly pressed means different things to different people.

• L8n at Back Road Scholar. L8n is well connected. If anyone can find us a club house, L8n can.

• Me. I wrote about the probability of being Freshly Pressed in a post called So You’ve Never Been Freshly Pressed. I compared it to a lottery, but it isn’t. It is a competition with no fixed rules where there are winners and losers and no one really understands the how or why of any of it. As one Freshly Pressed Blogger said about being selected, “here was a post that was far from my favourite in terms of creativity and flow. It didn’t even contain any of my own pictures!”

Contrast that to all the benefits of the NBFP Club -  no long lines of strangers hanging about your blog hoping to cash in on your fame; no feelings of inadequacy if you don’t get Freshly Pressed again; and no depression when your site stats slip back to normal.

If you are an overlooked, under appreciated blogger and  you would like to join our club, just leave a comment below and I’ll add your name to our roster. You will have to take an Oath of Allegiance… once we get one written.

Reblogging and Image Copyright – Part 2

I’m not going to pretend I have never violated someones copyright. If I was to follow the strictest terms of the law, then I should include the author and source document of each Quotation I use. I should not have  photographed my Daffy Duck shirt and blogged about it. I’m also a bit unclear as to whether the graphics I bought from The Print Shop can be used on my blog or not…

I am, however, a bit touchy about the issue of other bloggers using my Photographs without permission. In a previous post, When Does Reblogging Violate Copyright?, I mentioned that one of my posts had been reblogged. I complained to WordPress about two things:
1. The reblog contained one of my photos, used without my permission.
2. The site that reblogged my post seemed to consist entirely of reblogged posts, without a single word of original content.

I haven’t received a reply from WordPress about my complaint, but when I checked the offending blog today, I saw that WordPress had dealt with the issue by removing the blog:

hello100blog.wordpress.com is no longer available.
This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.
WordPress.com

A WordPress Happiness Engineer, Erica V., (who was on the receiving end of my complaint), also wrote  some suggestions in The Daily Post for finding photos that are in the Public Domain – A Picture’s Worth.

Of course, I still don’t have an answer as to whether WordPress thinks Reblogging violates image copyright…

Hopefully everyone understands that it is a big NO-NO to copy photographs and images without permission. Of course, the consequences of doing this are probably about NIL unless someone discovers it and complains… Nonetheless, there are a number of image sources on the internet that don’t violate copyright. In addition to the ones Erica mentions, here are a few others to consider:

1. Wikimedia has an impressive list of  Public Domain Image Resources.

2. Microsoft Office has an Image database that lets you search for and download Clip Art, Photos, Sounds and Animations.

3. YouTube  is a popular source for interesting video, but embedding a YouTube video in your blog is not something you should do without taking a few precautions. The people who upload material to YouTube are expected to abide by the information presented on the Copyright Education page. Not all of them follow those rules, however. YouTube cannot, of course, review every video that is uploaded, so they depend on subsequent viewers to alert them to Copyright Violations.

Before a blogger embeds a YouTube video in their blog, they should also assess whether it violates copyright or not.  HubPages presents a comprehensive Copyright Infringement discussion.

Stanford University Libraries discusses Copyright and Fair Use.  It is very readable, and includes the  fact that Copyright has expired for all works published in the United States before 1923.  Gowlings discusses the similarities and differences between Canadian and American Copyright.

I know it all sounds quite complicated, and I know that now and then most bloggers are in violation of something. But that shouldn’t stop any of us from trying to do the right thing, not the easy thing…

Scanning my Mind for Memories

Do I plug this into my left ear or my right ear?

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film. – Unknown

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could plug one end of a USB cord into your ear, the other into your computer, and download every memory that resides in your brain?  A nifty little software program, like an Access database but far easier to use, would sort the memories by year, topic and any other category you wanted. Then a Scrapbook program would create wonderful photo journals of your life.

I mention this because I believe the memory bank in my brain needs to be defragged. Bits of information keep getting mislaid. I found the date of my next Dentist appointment filed with the trip to Galveston in 1979. And The Car Guys office phone number is mixed in with the cost of my car in 1984. Retrieving information can be a challenge some days. It would be nice to have the contents of my brain on my computer – it has a much better search function than my head does.

I’m not just sitting idly by, though, waiting for the computer industry to fulfill my grand dream. I have piles and piles of other things that I can scan onto my computer. I won’t have to lug out photo albums, slide carousels and file folders full of wedding invitations and birth announcements. I’ll just power up my laptop, click on a year, and scroll down a page of memories.

The 35 mm slides and negs will be fairly easy to scan, as will old prints, cards, and letters. The 110 negs are going to be the challenge. Building my own 110 film holder isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I’m on Prototype 5, and it involves heavy card stock and my sewing machine…

Here are two of the photos I’ve revived in Photoshop Elements. The pictures certainly help me to retrieve the memories in my mind!

1972 – Eldest daughter in a field of flowers

She was seeing life through rose colored sun glasses that day.

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1974 – Middle and eldest children on swing set.

A successful launch sequence, lift off and landing!

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

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My Similar Life Story: Picking up the Pieces – building a life, one piece at a time.

Comment Etiquette – All or Some?

Google the topic of Comment Etiquette, and even if you spell etiquette wrong (which I did – it is a very tricky word to spell), there will be quite a few sites to check out. WordPress weighs in with ‘Are You Well-Versed in Comment Etiquette‘.

I’ve learned a few things about making comments by observation of results. One of them is ‘don’t ever leave a comment on a vegetarian blog if you are not one’. Carnivores are generally not well received, even very polite Canadian ones. Actually, a general rule of thumb is to be very cautious about leaving a  comment anywhere if you realize you are going to be the only one with a dissenting opinion. It is like responding ‘Yes’ when a friend asks you if she looks fat in her new tight jeans. Some things are best left unsaid.

I have a large pile of Blog Ideas that result from comments I refrained from making…

I read quite a few blogs, and often I would like to leave a comment. But if there are 30 or 100 comments there already, I realize I have absolutely nothing new to say. So I click the Like Button. To me, the Like Button is my way of saying ‘This is very good! You are a very talented blogger, and I thoroughly enjoyed this post!” Only it is a lot briefer, and the blogger doesn’t have to say anything back.

I know there are two schools of thought on how bloggers reply to comments:
- Some bloggers think each and every comment should receive a reply, even if all they say is ‘Thanks”.
- Some bloggers think that some comments clearly lead to replies, while other comments are more like someone pushed the Like Button, and no reply is necessary.

Which brings me to the meat of this post which is, how do you reply to comments on your blog? Are you an ALL person, or are you a SOME person? I would really like to know what my readers think, because it will help me to decide whether I am going to continue being an ALL person, or whether I will become a SOME person.

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My Similar Blogging Story: Networking – Awards and Challenges