Copyright inherently belongs to the author of a work in any medium. You assert your copyright by including the text:

©2007 [your name]. All rights reserved.

Licensing is what other people do to use your copyrighted content. They pay you a fee for the right to use the content under specific circumstances (in N. America, on the web, etc).

You can also investigate a “Creative Commons License” which offers some helpful Web 2.0 tools.

Work for Hire

If you have been hired to create content for someone else, the content belongs to them unless some limitation on teh rights have been negotiated in advance.

So it’s always interesting when someone dreams up a new consumer model as reported in Ad Age:

Consumer Eyes, a New York-based marketing firm, recently released its first collection of data on the subject in a book titled “Karma Queens, Geek Gods, and Innerpreneurs”

The book identifies 9 consumer types:

• Denim Dads
• E-Litists
• Ms. Independence
• Karma Queens
• Culture Queens
• Innerpreneurs
• Middlemen
• Geek Gods
• Parentocrats

Ad Age has put together a chart with archetypes of each group and a brief description. Gotta love a chart that includes Al Gore, Christy Turlington & Johnny Knoxville. Well done!

1. Use hotlink so your blog grabs the image from another site
2. Download the image to your own computer or server

If you said #1, go sit in the corner and wear the pointy hat.

Bandwidth Theft

Putting aside copyright protection, using a hotlink (img src=”_”) puts the bandwidth of serving a picture to your blog on someone else’s server.

This is not a big deal if the picture is some esoteric image you found in the bowels of the internet. But if the picture to which you’ve linked is popular, outside traffic (including yours) can put a major hit on the bandwidth of this other server. Bandwidth costs money.

Hotlinking, once common, is now frowned-upon in Web 2.0 blogging communities. It’s been dubbed “bandwidth theft.”

What are the penalties?

You could be flamed (nasty comments in your blog) or spammed or any number of other counter-productive counter-measures.

Using Images the Web 2.0 Way

In many popular browser, you can simply drag a picture to your desktop. Or, right click and download the image.

Upload same pic to your blog. Done!

Permission to Hotlink

Some images include permission to link. This is usually because the organization hosting the image is looking to generate buzz and is willing to pay for the bandwidth. Here’s an example from WordCamp 2007, the blog-fest this coming weekend:

Copy and paste this code, hotlinking is okay:
<a href="http://wordcamp.org/"><img src="http://2007.wordcamp.org/attendee.gif" alt="I'm going to WordCamp" border="0" /></a>

(Unfortunately, OCDC is not going to WordCamp. Maybe next year!)

But many thanks to WordPress for this good example of “permission to hotlink.” Also thanks to AltLab.

Che Guevara’s ass splintered and raw from rolling over in his grave

The scathingly hilarious post opines the continuing irony of exploliting Che’s image for capitalist purposes. Read it all here.

Why does this headline work?

• It’s original
• It’s provacative
• It makes you want to read more

How do we know it worked? Out over several hundred new posts in our collection of feeds on Bloglines, this one stood out from the pack.

Want to go to a site that’s tapped into the buzz that will be tomorrow’s boom? Try Mashable.

Mashable reports on what’s new in the world of social networking. There’s a post about Yoomba, a service that let’s you make VoIP calls from your email. And Vizu, the free polling company. They’ve just added Google Maps to their service so you can see where your cause is rising (or tanking).

Some is good, some is bad. But to spot tomorrow’s stars today, bookmark Mashable.

I Stole Your Crutches

[Viewer warning - some of the links may use adult language. Don’t click if you are offended by that kind of stuff.]

It’s instructive to peruse the Best of Craigslist from time to time. These are posts that have been flagged by viewers as worthy of sharing with everyone.

The best of the Best share two qualities:

• Headline that promises something (entertainment, enlightenment, a 1973 Strat for $400)
• Body copy that pays off or exceeds the promise

The same principles apply to email campaigns, websites, landing pages and even your own personal correspondence. Could you be writing stronger headlines for your emails? Think about it. And consider these headlines and posts that made it to Best of:

Bad News About the Screeching Bird on Rossmore…

from your pizza delivery girl

Wanted: STONER BOYFRIEND

I stole your crutches

BuzzBoost let’s you display your blog on a website, for example, on your home page. In fact, hooking up a blog like Wordpress or Serendipity and mirroring the feed on your home page is one of the easiest ways to keep your content fresh.

With a blog and BuzzBoost, you can write from any browser anywhere in the world, hit “Publish” and the content appears on the home page. Once this stuff is set up, no technical skills required at all. Just gotta be able to get on the internet :)

BuzzBoost is a free add-on to blogs that are distributed via Feedburner. Set-up is pretty basic - a few clicks, cut and paste some html and you’re in business. The Feedburner website includes lots of helpful instructions (helpfully placed in context as opposed to an index of help topics).

From your Feedburner account, you can activate BuzzBoost from the “Publicize” tab. If you’d like to see an example of re-publishing a blog on a website, go to our home page.

Feedburner syndicates your blog. In essence, it richochets your content all over the web to places people gather in blog-reading frenzy. Places like Technorati, Bloglines, Yahoo and AOL.

Want people to see you blog? At least potentially? Get yourself a Feedburner account and follow the simple instructions to “claim your feed.” All you need is the web address of your blog (url).

Once you’ve claimed your feed, you can activate additional services to increase the visibility of your bloginess.

Next: Buzz Boost

There are 70-75 words in a :30 TV commercial

80 is too many and 6o words feels too loose.

Although a writer may be able to read 85 words in half a minute, that hectic pace doesn’t allow for nuance, meaning or emphasis. Tighten it up and give the copy room to breathe.

After all, it’s the meaning the audience takes away, not how many words you can cram in.

se man tics - noun 1.a. the study of meaning.
- Dictionary.com

When is a particular design choice simple and functional and when does it crossover into being self-absorbed minimalism? We’re talking about web page tabs.

We’ve noticed two schools of thought regarding the coloration of web page tabs:

1. Tabs that show a change to indicate a live page
2. Tabs that don’t show a change to indicate a live page

WMBDB (we may be dinosuars but), we like to know what page we are on. We don’t like to hunt around for basic info - is it in the address bar? in the title bar?

SO: Tabs which change to show a live page are simple and functional. Tabs which leave a viewer searching for the information are just minimal.