My Digital Notebook

On Tuesday Yoko Ono published a Flickr album with various translations of John Lennon’s famous slogan: ‘War Is Over’.

I immediately liked it. I’ve always been interested in the effect of slogans on popular culture and human psychology (think of the power of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’) and here was one of the most famous of the twentieth century, republished digitally to coincide with the anniversary of John’s assassination and Christmas.

The only problem was that Yoko – or more likely one of her administrators – had issued each of the images without a creative commons license. Her choice, but the strict license seemed contrary to the spirit of the message and in direct contradiction to her invitation to:

“Print & display in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season, and send as postcards to your friends.”

All Rights Reserved – the stiffest of the six creative commons licenses, would have prevented bloggers or website owners from reproducing the image digitally. This, in turn, would have reduced the chances of the images going viral, which I imagine was her intention. The creative commons was, I supposed, just another little quirk of the Internet which needed explaining.

And this is the thing that is wonderful about the Internet:

One email to her Flickr account and an hour later they were all altered.

Easy as that.

So here you go. All 47 images are available with the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license. Quite a mouthful, I know. But it basically means that you can put them up on your blog or site and as long as you attribute them with a link, then that’s quite alright.

It’s sharing and crediting – two key characteristics of Web 2.0.

This will be the last blog post for My Digital Notebook in 2009.  I’m off on Sunday on the Africa Rally. The first year for this blog has been a quiet one; I’m planning for much more next year. Merry Christmas everyone – (the War Is Over).

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image credit: Yoko Ono Official

image credit: zipenfish

Outside Euston Square station this morning stood a model with blue eyes and a big smile. She was selling copies of today’s Sun newspaper, upon the front of which was the headline:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

The editor, probably happy with his splash, had decided to be proactive. They had sent people out to sell their Jordan and Peter Andre story directly. It was later pointed out to me that inside the paper was another headline:

“Sex with Jordan? That’s out of the equestrian.”

Tabloids have long been famous for their inventive headlines and today it was nice to see that the paper was being bold and creative with their front page. Two features of newspaper journalism that are becoming increasingly scarce.

It reminds me of a long list of such headlines, a few of which I’ll add here:

1. “Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious” (A Scottish newspaper in response to Celtic’s defeat by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in 2000)
2. “Nut Screws Washer and Bolts” (A report of a mental patient who raped a cleaning assistant at an asylum in California and later escaped)
3. “Slumdog has the Pedigree to Winalot” (On a portentous opening weekend for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire in the UK)
4. “Elton takes David up the aisle” (Elton John marries long term partner David Furnish)

When I look at such headlines I always recall an excellent article that was written by Shane Richmond in the British Journalism Review. He looks at the example of The Sun’s famous ‘Gotcha’, headline during the Falklands conflict and reasons why such a headline would be highly unlikely today due to the importance of SEO and page views for journalists. He wrote:

“The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.

The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.”

Keyword journalism

SEO is important to journalists today and everyone should have a basic understanding of it. If The Sun were concerned solely with drawing the maximum number of searcher into their websites they should used tools such as Hitwise or Google Trends to give keyword information about relevant searches. Most likely the SEO headline that would have resulted would have to be to the order of:

“Jockey speaks following Jordan and Andre’s spit”

Which is obviously very different to:

“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”

I’m glad that The Sun have decided to swap Googleability for creativity. It’s two fingers up to the people that think SEO and page views count for everything – and, if nothing else, it’s earned them a blog post.

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Update:

As Martin Belam points out, it’s not quite the two fingers up to SEO that I was imagining earlier, as the title tag (the bit up in the left hand corner) for the article on The Sun’s website reads: “Jordan’s horseman friend denies fling” - which is far more palatable for the bots.

Different headlines for different mediums – another journalistic lesson.

Photo by the White House Official Photostream

Digital Communism and the Creative Commons

Flickr has long been one of my favourite sites on the Internet. Easy to navigate, full of fantastic images, and with a system (the Creative Commons) that allows everyone to properly acknowledge the authors of work.

Any business, blogger or journalist can benefit from Flickr by properly (and ethically) using the Creative Commons. Just today Kate Day (@kate_day) pointed out that The Official White House Photostream had made available an album documenting President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office.

The image at the top of this post is taken from that collection, and so is this below:

Photo by the White House Official Photostream

It’s almost impossible to estimate how much such a picture would have cost just a decade ago – or, indeed, if it would have been possible in the first place. Now you can use it for yourself for free. All you have to do is abide by the terms of the license which asks that the original author is given credit.

And testament to the pace, versatility and quality of Flickr, here are another five photos that have been added in just the last two weeks; each of them quite brilliant.

Five Creative Commons Photos from Flickr in April

1. Charlotte by Gattou/Lucie I try but miss time to catch up : o

2. Swing on BART by y3rdua

3. So Billy said, hey Stagger! I’m gonna make my big attack. I’m gonna have to leave my knife in your back by harold.lloyd (won’t somebody think of the bokeh?)

4. A spasso nel senese in primavera by carlotardani

5. The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad by this chaplady

Image Credit: publikaccion.es

Point and Click

It’s all too easy to equate online content to online writing – but there’s much more to it than that. Today you’ll find that the best sites have a good mix between both static and dynamic content, video, podcasts and images.

Fantastic images can lend a site a real edge. Best of all for social media is using your own photos and thereby adding to your own narrative. But if you don’t have the time or the equipment, there is nothing wrong in tapping the Internet’s goldmine of free resources.

So, in the spirit of usefulness, and without further ado here is a post filled with links: (thanks to @noodlepie for pointing some of them out and @mattparsons for the logo site)

Seven image banks that every web-designer could use daily:

• Flickr – The best known and most useful. Contains more than 100,000,000 images with a Creative Commons license.
• FreeFoto – A website that bills itself as the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet
• Free Digital Photos – Good for wildlife and nature, also free
• Sport gfx – Probably the best bank of football photos from the Premiership, European and International matches
• Wellcome Images – All with a Creative Commons license – some excellent science photographs
• OpenStock Photography – A wide variety of photography all licensed under the Wikipedia Commons
• Best brands of the World – Image bank containing a good number of the world’s most famous brand logos. – You’ll need to get permission to use them.

(If you do use any licensed images, make sure you don’t stray outside of the boundaries of a specific license and it is important to check. Also, why not let the photographer know? They’ll probably appreciate it.)

Four useful online tools and applications:

• Tin Eye Reverse Image Search: Allows you to trace images across the net, and see where they came from originally, and if they have been copied or modified. Potentially very useful.
• Multicolour Search Lab: Excellent. It allows you to search for images by colour, and only returns results equipped with a Creative Commons license.
• Splashup: Probably the best substitute for Photoshop if you can’t afford the Adobe license.
• Photoshop Express: Touch up, tune, tweak and tint your photos. Or so it says.

Six examples of photojournalism:

The Internet and photojournalism seem to go together particularly well. Here are six examples of excellent photojournalism in newspapers and personal blogs that I’ve noticed recently:

• Gideon Mendal – A Deadly Cargo – documents the desperately sad fight against Aids on the Zambian, Zimbabwean border.
• Erik Gauger – Notes from the Road
  
• The Boston Globe – London From Above | Pirates of Somalia
• The Guardian – Charing Cross Bookshops - image-led, interactive feature
• Glenna Gordon – Scarlet Lion: Liberia
• Maladia – Maladia

One way in which designers can save the world:

• Designers Can Change

And, I’ll finish this birthday party of links off by sending another one out, this time to Adam Blenford, another very talented photographer who appears to have been racking up some air miles.

And the future?