Recently in Ethics Category

During a ceremony where you're an invited guest do you
A) Snap photos throughout?
B) Take photos before and after the ceremony? Or...
C) Don't take any because you're a guest?

Do you think it's important to
A) Follow "movie theater rules" and turn off your cell?
B) Get shots that the professional photographer might not?
C) Take a picture before congratulating the bride & groom?
D) Respect the couple's decision not to have the ceremony recorded?

If you take pictures/video at a ceremony do you
A) Ask attendees if you can post their photos online?
B) Ask parents if they have concerns about their child's image online and how they would like it handled?
C) Beat the bride & groom to the punch and have the amateur photos online before the professional photos are ready?

Everyone has a different comfort level with these concerns, obviously, but this is what I found myself mulling over at a recent wedding. Thoughts?

Congrats to Dave & Caryn!

What's wrong with this picture? Check the domain in the image and then check the content. Yep. That's Chicago Bites content that's been harvested and reused on another site.

If you go to the offending site, our content is no longer there. That's only because we are diligent in monitoring our content and presence online and proactive in taking action when our content is misused.

How did I catch this and deal with it in under an hour?

1. I had previously set up comprehensive Google Alerts on my name, screen names, site names, and common misspellings. Alerts were set to "as-it-happens".
2. I look at alerts as I get them. At minimum, I scan them daily.
3. I click through every link to see where it takes me. I've found that it's not enough to look at the summary.
4. When I saw the Chicago Bites content on this site, I sent an email. However, I didn't know who checked that email or how frequently they responded to inquiries. It was also doubtful the email went to a decision-maker.
5. So I did a whois look-up on the site to find the site's owner and contact information. The information was listed.
6. I took a few minutes and screamed at the name on-screen. The importance of venting cannot be stressed enough.
7. I called the owner and politely asked him to take the content down. He did. It was all very civil.

There were other options if this hadn't worked out. It's possible to find the ISP of a site even if other information is private. Hosting services are pretty good about enforcing TOS clauses. Additionally, this site used Google Ads. I had the option of contacting them and demonstrating how this site was in violation of Google's TOS. Since I took screen shots, I may still do that as a public service. Ours is probably not the only site that's been harvested.

We put too much work into our site and creating original content to have others take it and reuse it word for word, image for image, mp3 for mp3. I strongly recommend monitoring your on-line presence because you never know if you'll see your site on someone else's.

1) Say nothing substantive about the photograph you're commenting on
2) Use obnoxious animated graphics that make me want to tear my eyes out
3) Advertise your obnoxious site repeatedly in the comment
4) Repeat steps 1-3 over and over again on several of my photographs

Banned!

You may have noticed "the people you may know" feature crop up on social networking sites.  Facebook and Linked In both use it.  In fact, Linked In defaults this to display on your homepage.  What is it?  It's a service that riffles through the connections you have on-line to other people, between other people, and to organizations you have in common with others to spit out a list of probable matches.  I'm not sure the algorithm is the same for every social networking site, but that's basically what it's doing.

I've found this to be a great value-add. Through these services, I've found people from previous jobs that I've lost contact with and casual acquaintances that had vanished.  However, today this service threw my ex-husband into my "get reintroduced" list.   I realize there's no way to program social mores into a networking tool.  It's a dumb beast that will throw people into your path whether or not you want it.  However, I think there should be a customized exclusion list built into the tool to prevent interactions that you know you don't want.

Not that I have anything against my ex. I just didn't want to see his name lurking there or know that I may be lurking on one of his lists.  

As my friend B says, "Social networking is all good and interesting until it bites you in the ass."  Indeed.

I searched through my Flickr stats, and found this photo being used in a way that I like. It displays and has links to the Creative Commons license as well as appropriate attribution. The product that the blogger used to display my image is called Photo Dropper, and it's a Word Press plug-in.

Again, I think Flickr should have something like this within its service.