Posts tagged ‘content’

The Instagram rights grab – poor drafting or a U-turn?

Online photo-sharing service Instagram have now been forced to issue a denial that the recent change in their terms of service was intended to give them the rights to sell on their users’ photos to advertisers, without paying or indeed even asking the users concerned.

The new terms of service required users to grant Instagram a “non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide licen[c]e to use the content that you post on or through the service” and also allowed “a business or other entity [to] pay [Instagram] to display your username, likeness, photos and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

Instagram now say that the change was intended “to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram” and blamed confusing language for the misunderstanding.

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Cover art of WWWordsmith

WWWordsmith: Forging a living from online writing

Everyone’s supposed to have a book in them, aren’t they? That piece of folk wisdom underlies the dream that many people have of making a living online through writing. WWWordsmith: Forging a living from online writing is here to explain how, if they’re good enough, they can make that dream a reality.

Authors Kay McMahon and Theodore Koukouvitis have teamed up again to write about the ins and outs of making money online from writing. Each of them brings their own particular perspective to bear on the online writing industry.

The result is a book that covers all aspects of earning a living online through writing. First, a brief introduction looks at the practical benefits of an online writing career, and sets the scene for the discussion of the two basic ways of making a living online through writing: writing as a job (freelancing), and writing as a business (self-publishing). There follows a look at what makes people willing to pay for writing – the needs that the writer must satisfy in order to succeed.

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Is content curation theft?

I recently suggested content curation as a way to build website traffic. I’ve since discovered that some people argue that curation is theft.

According to the Actulligence blog, it’s all theft and curation is shit. I wouldn’t go that far, but given they feel so strongly about it you can read their views on their site and I won’t even quote a teensy sentence of theirs on here. Their argument is that curation is all about copying and pasting other people’s content, with no value added. Therefore, content curators are layabouts and thieves.

Quite a bold statement, isn’t it? Nevertheless, I have some sympathy with it.

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