RasterWeb!

Hmmm, this seems weird…

Go to this Flickr page: /photos/tags/water/ and this Flickr page: /creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/water/

The first one, which is all photos tagged with ‘water’ regardless of license, has an RSS feed you can subscribe to. The second one, which has photos tagged with ‘water’ made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, does not…

Seems to me that you would want an RSS feed of by-nc-sa license photos, eh?

(Update: I may or may not have heard that RSS feeds for the CC stuff should happen in the future. Yay!)

You know how you search, and you get a results page and it says something like:

12 results found!
Displaying 1 – 10 of 12

And then you need to go to the second page to see the last two results?

This is due to some programmer deciding (or more likely not deciding) that you should always display a list of 10 items per page, and the last page will have the remainder. Why not just round the number of results properly and display 1 – 12 of 12, or 50 – 66 of 66, etc?

Yeah, ok, Rocketboom is nice and all, sort of funny in a geeky way, but really, for a true alpha-geek you need more, you need Geek Entertaintment TV.

I know, people go on and on about Amanda this and Amanda that, but she can’t compete with Irina Slutsky.

The Macworld Expo 2006 Wrap Up is especially hilarious. ("S. Kelly" indeed!)

I have seen the future of videoblogging/videopodcasting/vlogging… whatever you call it! It’s Geek Entertaintment TV…

That Zeldman guy does go on, doesn’t he? This time on Web 2.0 3.0…

Here is my favorite bit:

If Steven created the site with CGI and Perl and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.

But if Steven used AJAX and Ruby on Rails, Yahoo will pay millions and Tim O’Reilly will beg him to keynote.

So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all this time!

There are plenty of comments on the article, but since you can only view 10 on a page at a time, well, blah, blah, something about usability, blah, blah…

I know that 2006 is the year of “User-Contributed Content” but it has come to my attention that we all need to hire our own personal laywers before we submit anything to any website. Ok, if not lawyers, we at least need a watchdog group… failing that, a bunch of know-it-all bloggers should suffice.

When someone announces a new video hosting service in the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group, the first thing someone does is checks the Term of Service to see if it looks good, and by ‘good’ we’re referring to maintaining the rights of the creator. You may be surprised by how many sites that accept user contributions have these little bits about how they own the content you’ve submitted and all rights to sell it to others throughout the galaxy until the end of eternity. Ok, it’s not quite that bad, but it can get a little weird.

The sad thing is, most of these are either written by lawyers who have no idea how the web works, or were just copied from another site, and only the names have been changed. 98% of the users never read these things, it’s the 2% that do and make a fuss about it that you have to thank. And the thing is, if you alert the folks in charge of the weirdness, they’ll often try to accomodate you in some way. Well, that’s what I’ve seen happen so far…

JD Lasica has a nice post about this, with my favorite part being where he cites Ourmedia’s Terms of Service:

You own your own material. Ourmedia claims no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to our service.

Now, Ourmedia is pretty enlightened, and they let you choose the license you want to release your work under (though the seem to favor Creative Commons, as that jives with the whole idea behind Ourmedia) but the blip.tv Terms of Service are also pretty good with words like “…you own or otherwise control all of the rights to your content…” That, coupled with the fact that they’ve had open dialog with the community about the “who owns what rights” issues makes me feel pretty good about them.

So folks, before you sign up with any site that will be using content you provide, check the terms. There are ways around some of the terms as well, which we’ll get into next time. I’m pretty sure we won’t even need to break the law to do so.