The news that Posterous has sold out to Twitter has been greeted with mixed reactions at best, but most are agreed that the time to migrate their content is now. They have promised 'ample notice' before making any changes to the service as-is, but with all the former Posterous staff now working for Twitter there is only one way this service is going.

Although Posterous said in their statement that they will shortly be making it possible to export your content soon, you may be considering making your own move sooner rather than later. In my case, this blog also posts to Blogger and Wordpress anyway thanks to the Posterous tool which makes it a simple matter to cross-post, so the content will not be lost.

You can, however, already move your data to whichever alternative platform you will go to once Posterous does close, which most people are predicting will happen before 2012 is over at the latest.

Please visit this post on Lifehacker for detailed instructions on how to move your Posterous data.

I've found Posterous a pleasure to use because of its flexibility and ease of use; the ability to post via email was particularly attractive and it made adding photos or video very simple - no copying and pasting embed code, it does it all for you. However, rather than let Posterous (or Twitter, now) decide when this blog closes, I'm going to do it myself and therefore future blog posts will appear on Wordpress and possibly Blogger, if I can settle on a similarly simple method to put them on both.

If you've found this post on my Wordpress blog - stick around, that's where future posts will go - otherwise, I hope you'll join me over there!

I did have another blog post in mind to write but the news which broke this evening, that Posterous (the platform I am using to write this post) has been acquired by Twitter, has meant a change.

The post on Posterous's own site appears upbeat at first glance, enthusing about the new 'opportunities' and the 'exciting' future ahead, but it is easy to read between the lines. Despite the assurance that Spaces 'will remain up and running without disruption', they are already promising 'ample notice' if the service changes. That means they are certain to make changes, and when you consider that the motive behind the Twitter acquisition was not to buy the product, but to take on the staff, it's clear that those staff will not be focusing on Posterous in the future. The statement goes on to promise 'clear instructions' for users who wish to back up their content or move to another service soon. That does not bode well for the Posterous service as it currently stands. 

The last paragraph reads very much like a 'goodbye' to Posterous users, thanking them for their support and talking about the 'amazing journey' of the past four years. Once again, the conclusion must be that Posterous will be left to wither on the vine while the energy is concentrated on Twitter. 

The reason this matters is because the Posterous site has become popular due to its ease of use, and its ability to accept content via e-mail or web posting. It also features scheduled, cross-posting so you can submit the content once and it will appear wherever else you choose. For instance, this post will go to both my own site at ronniesoo.com and to my Blogger platform, and it will also appear as a link on my Facebook page, my LinkedIn and yes, my Twitter account. You can have more than one blog too, and run them from one account, and you can also point a custom URL to a Posterous site. In fact, I liked it so much that I recommended it to several of my friends, one of whom was looking for a place to continue writing after the demise of MySpace. In short, it made the Internet much easier for everyone, so it is very sad to think it will shortly be left to die off. 

As for Twitter itself, what they propose to do with the staff they've just hired en masse remains to be seen. It's possible they want the team to do something similar within Twitter, perhaps as a way of breaking free of that 140 character limit, but as the product that's already out there does the job perfectly well in my view, that is surely just reinventing the wheel? 

Whatever happens, I'm afraid it's more disruption and more work for bloggers who are regular users of this platform. For all the assurances of the platform remaining available without disruption, they do not say how long that will last and so it is recommended that users do migrate their content elsewhere as soon as Posterous provide directions for them to do so. 

The only good thing I can see in all of this is that it means more work for webmasters! 

I only became aware of Pinterest late last month when I chanced upon a blog from a former Pinterest user, a lawyer who is also a photographer. She had read the terms and conditions of the site and decided she disliked what she saw so much, she deleted her boards from the site. Her blog has gone viral in the weeks since as people realise their legal vulnerability, hidden in the site's terms. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself: Pinterest - what is it?

Pinterest is a social photo sharing site which bills itself as an 'online pinboard'. A user who registers then can create 'boards', essentially a themed group of pictures 'pinned' to each board. These boards are then available to be browsed by other Pinterest users, who can also comment on the pictures pinned.  However, although you may 'pin' your own photos to a board that you create, the site's own guidelines on etiquette discourage 'self-promotion'. The question then arises, if you are not meant to pin your own photographs, whose can you pin? 

Alarm bells started ringing for Kirsten, the lawyer/photographer who investigated Pinterest's terms and conditions, when she found that some photographers who had their pictures 'pinned' were starting to complain about violations of copyright. Upon checking their terms again, she found that Pinterest users are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder for any photos that they pin on their boards, and furthermore they are solely liable for any work they pin. How many people do you think would email the copyright holder first before pinning their pictures up, assuming they know who that might be? Exactly, and right there the whole idea of the 'online pinboard' falls apart. 

Kirsten had always made a point of crediting the original photographer when pinning anything to her boards, as the etiquette guide says to do, but realised that this is not the same as actually having consent from the original owner to do that, so investigated further. 

She investigated the section on US copyright law dealing with 'fair use'; that is the right to use portions of a copyrighted work without consent under certain circumstances. Although judging what is and what is not 'fair use' can be a grey area, the law states that for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, research, or teaching, a portion of a copyrighted work may be used. 

Unfortunately for Pinterest and its members, pinning a photograph on a Pinterest board is none of those things. 

According to Kirsten, the outcome of the case of Kelly vs Arriba Soft Corporation is likely to be the one on which Pinterest's whole site relies upon. In that case, a photographer sued a search engine for the unauthorised use of images in its search results. The photographer lost, as the images used in the search engine results were only thumbnails as opposed to the entire work. Again, this is a grey area, warns Kirsten, as thumbnails may or may not constitute 'fair use' and a lot depends on whether only the 'necessary portion' of the image is used or not. 

However, Pinterest boards do not use thumbnails. Pinterest takes the image at the same size and resolution as the original source, and pins it to the board. So - Pinterest etiquette says that you are not supposed to pin your own work up (excessively) as it is 'self-promotion', but legally, you can only pin other people's work if you have explicit permission from the copyright owner to do so. If you fall foul of that, where do you stand? 

Kirsten once again went back to the terms and conditions and what she found there horrified her. 

When you sign up, the terms do state that users must agree not to violate copyright or any other laws, but the section in ALL CAPITALS is the scary part. It says, and I'm quoting directly from their terms:

"YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT, TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE ENTIRE RISK ARISING OUT OF YOUR ACCESS TO AND USE OF THE SITE, APPLICATION, SERVICES AND SITE CONTENT REMAINS WITH YOU."

So, if you do violate copyright, however inadvertently, on your own head be it. It gets better - again from the terms, but not in caps this time at least:

"You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cold Brew Labs, its officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable legal and accounting fees, arising out of or in any way connected with (i) your access to or use of the Site, Application, Services or Site Content, (ii) your Member Content, or (iii) your violation of these Terms."

In other words, if you are sued by a photographer, you must pay both for your own defence lawyer AND for Pinterest's lawyer. If you lose, then not only must you pay damages against yourself, but you must also pay damages against Pinterest. Furthermore, Pinterest themselves reserve the right to prosecute users who violate copyright laws. 

Having sifted through all of that, it is no surprise that Kirsten decided (reluctantly, she says) to delete her boards on the site. Most of us are not lawyers, and most of us are not professional photographers either. She is to be thanked for flagging up such draconian terms and conditions, which the majority of users simply will not see and if they do, will not understand their full implications. 

As a follow-up to this story, only last week, Kirsten was contacted by Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann who confirmed in a conversation with Kirsten that Pinterest were working on a solution and promised changes "in the very near future". She added that he described himself as "a guy with a computer who had a vision", and not an expert on copyright law. He even asked for suggestions, she said.

Despite the hopeful tone of Kirsten's follow-up blog, the question remains: why is all liability loaded onto the user that way and if Ben Silbermann really doesn't understand copyright law, why launch a site that can potentially put its users in a very sticky situation? 

Pinterest is currently getting attention from online entrepreneurs as a way of generating traffic to their sites, it's certainly something I would like to look into. But I won't sign up for a site that loads legal liability so completely onto its users, however seductive its interface is.

I await the outcome of the changes to Pinterest's terms with interest. 

DDK Portraits - Kirsten's photography website and blog

Pinterest

I've been dreading subjecting myself to the ritual of sorting through my lists of Twitter accounts which I follow, because although there are several tools out there intended to help the process along, it is still a big job, especially if your list has grown since last you reviewed it.  

However this time around the job has become much easier, and it is all thanks to Twitcleaner. It is a tool that's been around for a while but has been completely rejigged, in order to comply with Twitter's own restrictions on auto-unfollowing. The current interface is very easy to use, sign in using your twitter account and let it run a report. When it's done (even with over 6000 in my follow list, it didn't take too long) you will get a Direct Message from TwitCleaner to tell you the report is ready to view. To access it, you have to follow them and the tool is set up so that only you can access the report prepared. 

The report is very detailed and groups into several types of 'potential garbage' users, listing how many users are just trying to sell, how many post nothing but links, identical tweets, and those that are using advertising networks. It also gives you a list of dormant users and tells you how long it's been since the user last tweeted, all at a glance. Not only that, but you get to see who is just posting quotes or simply retweeting someone else's posts, and even those who are 'self-obsessed' (the report's words); i.e. referring to themselves in their posts all the time, are listed. 

It makes it much easier for you to see what should be unfollowed - for me, I found about 1000 dormant users who had not posted in over 100 days; the users are brought up in a list of thumbnails and to unfollow all you had to do was click each one. There is a limit to how many you can select per day, because of Twitter's rules the app allows 500 accounts to be selected every 24 hours. 

I cannot recommend this highly enough for those of you who use Twitter regularly, I was amazed at the sheer number of spam accounts I had collected; some had multiple accounts under similar names and posted for a month, then disappeared never to be seen again - yet they were still in my list. Twitcleaner made it easy to spot these accounts, when you see groups of 'people' who had not posted in exactly 320 days, for example, it soon becomes clear they're spam accounts. 

Of course it is necessary to review your Twitter followers periodically, since if you do follow a lot of accounts you need to keep the ratio of followers to followed accounts within 10 percent; i.e. if you are following 5000 users and only 4500 follow you, then you may be disallowed from following any more until you unfollow some accounts. When you collect spam followers as most people do, they're effectively stopping you from following users you DO want. Twitcleaner makes the whole process of clearing out your list far easier than it has ever been before, so I recommend all Twitter users make use of this tool.

Oh, did I mention it was free to use? (That said, you are invited to donate if you have the wherewithal!) 

Twitcleaner is available at:

http://thetwitcleaner.com

Homework students and general trivia buffs the world over were greeted with a blacked-out Wikipedia screen this week; the protest by the online encyclopaedia was a reaction to the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) bills currently going through the United States Congress. 

Opponents to the bill were trying to raise awareness that if it passed, the Internet as we know it would be drastically curtailed. Of these, Wikipedia was by far the highest-profile website to protest and its action gained press coverage the world over. The reason is of course that Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites on the Internet; no matter what the topic you are searching for (no doubt using Google, probably the most-visited site) a Wikipedia page relating to that topic will very likely appear high in the search results. 

That ranking comes from the authority Wikipedia has gained over the decade or so that it has grown, it is the first point of call for most of us when looking up a given subject. Wikipedia argues that the SOPA bill, although intended to combat online piracy such as illegal file-sharing (a battle that has raged almost since the Internet became generally available), would have consequences that are further-reaching than merely stopping the ability to access copyrighted content illegally.

One of the original proposals was to compel Internet service providers (ISPs) to block their own users from accessing sites that were deemed to be in breach of copyright; this was revised after it was pointed out that the very structure of the Web would be compromised if that happened (effectively, all the Web is, is a lot of computers connected together). However the bill still would require ISPs, as well as advertisers and sites such as PayPal to cease trading with anyone who is alleged to have breached copyright. In addition, search engines would be compelled to remove from their search results any sites that are accused of copyright infringement.

That would seriously impact on Google as well as other search engines; Google has attained its present dominant position because it was so much more effective at giving relevant results than any other search engine, when it first came on the scene in the late 1990s. Google would have to alter radically its own algorithms and if that includes inserting artificial means to filter out what authorities deem is unsuitable, the trust factor of Google's search results is forever lost. 

Wikipedia claims that its own integrity would be compromised also; the ethos of the site is that it is both accessible and editable by anyone. The site's integrity is maintained by a team of administrators whose job it is to ensure that entries are factual and neutral. This team works on a voluntary basis and were the SOPA bill in place now, the site would either have to hand its adminstration over to a team authorised by the United States government, or be blocked altogether. Once again, trust would be sacrificed. 

The protest by the online encyclopaedia was effective in so far as it made everybody aware that the Web as we know it is under threat, and lawmakers in the United States are now making noises about backtracking on some of the proposals. Ironically, the blackout itself was actually quite simple to circumvent (one way was to use cached pages from Google), which, if nothing else, illustrates the drawback of rushing through laws without sufficient understanding of the technology. Content can be and is cached on many more servers than those which are shut down by authorities, so the logical conclusion would be that access to the Internet itself would ultimately be restricted only to those 'authorised' to use it by the powers that be. 

For those of us who use the Internet for marketing, this is something we must all be aware of. Internet marketers themselves are more interested in getting the word out there about whatever business niche they are promoting, but if the tools to make that possible are placed out of reach by a draconian bill which has consequences far beyond its stated purpose, the way for people to take back control of their own lives is in danger of being taken away from us.

For that reason, it is the responsibility of all of us to oppose this bill - although they are backtracking, the danger remains that measures will come into effect while attention is diverted elsewhere, when it is not so newsworthy.  

If you use Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other social media site to promote your business, this affects you. 

A link is provided here for those who wish to register their disapproval.

I hope everyone has had a very happy Christmas and New Year.

The start of any new year is always a time for looking forward, and perhaps making plans for the coming 12 months. Most of you will be returning to work after the holiday, to the traffic jams, the crowded buses or trains, and the daily grind. You might even find that the bus or train fares have risen, eating further into your salary.

The past two years have seen severe economic turmoil and 2012 promises to be just as turbulent. Many more people are waking up to the realities about the global money system, and much of what is unfolding now has been foreseen by many of the experts that I am currently studying under. At a conference I attended in Las Vegas, my eyes were opened by what I heard from some very eminent speakers, some of whom came from an investment banking background.

If you are working for a monthly paycheck and finding it is having to stretch further and further, if you are burdened by debt, taxes, if you are finding that planning for your retirement is getting tougher and tougher, or if you have been looking at a franchise business and found that the start-up costs are prohibitive, the business of financial education could be for you. One thing is clear, a storm is brewing and when it comes there will be two groups of people: those who are financially educated and those who are not.

The company I am with (Wealth Masters) offers several levels of financial education; from a multimedia course encompassing audio, video and the Internet, to conferences held in locations worldwide.

I would like to invite you to watch the video presentation which I have linked here and if you have any questions, please contact me.

For further details please see the site linked at the bottom of this post and I look forward to seeing you on the inside!

Map Your Life