Archive for March, 2010

A Blinding Sun

Editorial, Media | Posted by leica
Mar 12 2010

This morning The Sun added credibility to critics claiming the Murdoch media had pitched up at the BBC ready to do battle by running this piece:
BBC blows fortune on Facebook classes

The “article” claims the BBC is offering a Facebook course. Just to put the facts right, the course is actually a tutorial in “Making The Web Work For You” and the description is:

A one day course using PC’s in the training room. It will provide delegates with practical socal media and internet tools they can embed in their journalism. It will enable journalists and producers to find original stories, case studies and pictures using the latest web techniques. As part of the course delegates will learn how to use an RSS aggregator, the power of real time search engines, use their own Twitter account and start social bookmarking effectively.

I consider this article to be deliberately pugilistic at worst and misleading at best.

I work in a technical support position at the BBC and speak to people falling into many different age groups and levels technical expertise. Many people, especially older people, are still getting up to speed with web-based media. After all, they work in television and radio and have done long before there was a World Wide Web. If they don’t get up to speed with “new media” they call us and ask questions and we do our best to help, which also incurs internal charges. Having one tutor teach many people at one time is, in fact, more cost efficient than lots of people calling a few people every time they have a question about using things like RSS or social media.

As the BBC don’t discriminate on the basis of age, they’re hardly going to be sacked for having to adjust to new ways of doing things. The Sun’s condemnation the BBC trying to train staff smacks of trying to spin something beneficial into something expensive and foolish. The course helps people do their jobs more effectively with the latest tools. That’s a good thing; don’t believe the hype.

While I work for the BBC my views are mine alone and do not represent those of the BBC.

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Two Useful Flickr Tips

photography | Posted by leica
Mar 09 2010

Protect Your Flickr Images From Casual Piracy

Promoting yourself and your images on Flickr leaves you vulnerable to casual piracy — that is, anybody who views your images can also download them. This is Flickr’s default setting, so unless you change permissions explicitly, your images could easily be downloaded and used without your permission.

Flickr provides a setting to prevent downloading, but by default various sizes of your images are available for download.

When you prevent a user from downloading, you also disable Flickr’s link to multiple sizes of the image:

allsizes

Flickr’s scripts then also disable saving the image on screen by “right-clicking” on the image and choosing a “save as” option — only a generic single-colour gif will be downloaded instead of the actual image.

To set the default downloading and viewing permissions:

flickrprivacy

  1. Once signed in to Flickr, click on your account name
  2. Click the Privacy & Permissions tab
  3. Click edit

From here you can select who you want, by default, to be able to see all sizes of and to be able download your images.

Create a “Friendly URL” To Make Getting To Your Photostream Easy

Flickr allows you to create a “Flickr Alias” which gives you a shorter URL to your photostream. To do this, first log into your Flickr account.

Click here to find the link and further information about creating a Flickr Alias.

http://flickr.com/YOURALIAS will now link to Flickr photostream.

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