Google Apologizes for Monday’s FUBAR

Gmail’s product manager pushed an article to the official Gmail blog late on Monday to acknowledge the problems that many GMail users faced trying to access their email on Monday afternoon (PT).

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.

The post does not provide any real detail as to the source of the problem, only an acknowledgment and an apology for the inconvenience.

The outage provided people with extra free time on their hands to try out their artistic abilities in describing the problem. This was my favourite of the GMail Fail Whales:

Image Credit: Todd Garland of HubSpot, this copy from YoavShapira’s photostream.

So yea, apparently email is critical to most people’s regular day. Whoda thunk it?

CityTV Breaches Creative Commons

This week CityTV was cited by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for failing to uphold the copyright of a man who published photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons license. Though the ruling doesn’t actually compel CityTV to atone for their actions by crediting the photographer (Joel Charlebois, aka uwajedi).

When CityTV arrived on the scene to do a story about the burglary, Charlebois says that he “refused [a reporter's] request for an interview….[and] asked him to leave.” Charlebois did, however, say that he “had taken pictures of the perpetrator and was looking forward to posting them on [his] Flickr site”; the reporter “was interested in seeing them,” so Charlebois gave him his card, but, he says, not permission to use the shots in any way. [torontoist]

The photos are of a man who allegedly tried to break into the photographer’s home. After posting the Creative Commons licensed photos to a couple of groups on Flickr, they were run by CityTV on their newscast without providing any attribution despite the fact that they were aware the Charlebois had taken the photos.

It took nearly nine months for the CBSC to make its ruling. In my opinion, the fact that it doesn’t actually compel CityTV to fix their mistake but merely acknowledge it fails to uphold the spirit of the CC license. As Duane Storey observed:

If I were to use CityTV footage on my blog without attribution, I would bet I would get a nice cease and desist letter forcing me to take it down in no time. That they think the laws should be different in each direction seems characteristic of most large media conglomerates these days. [duanestorey.com]

This sentiment seems to be shared by a number of individuals including Charlebois himself. Must it be up to independent media such as bloggers and podcasters to show the “professionals” how to properly attribute work? Was this simply a case of laziness on CityTV’s part or is it a symptom of a deeper disdain for those who don’t actually get to carry a press credential?

How to Blog Better with Flickr

Pictures are worth a thousand words, or so the story goes. When writing blog posts or any other kind of content on the Internet images are a big key to making the content more understandable and more interesting. A great way to help manage the images that you use for your site is to make use of a photo-sharing website like Google’s Picasa or Yahoo’s Flickr.

I’m partial to Flickr myself. One of its advantages is the large community around it that helps to support each others photographic endeavours. Another is the more recently added Piknic photo-editing service which allows you to make changes and adjustments to your photos directly on the website.

I recently put together this quick “how-to” for a friend of mine and decided that I might as well share it with the world. Without further ado, here is a step-by-step how-to on adding Flickr images to your WordPress blog.

Open the page of the image you want in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmsquared/2195515600/
Click on “All Sizes”
For most blogs, the “Medium” sized image is usually sufficient. Its largest side will be 500px with the other scaled to match
Right-click the link marked “Download this image” link and “Copy Link Location” (Firefox) or “Copy Shortcut” (Internet Explorer)
On your blog, click the “Add Image” button in the editor
Paste in the Image URL from #4 (WP will pick up dimensions automatically)
Done!

To add links back to the image in Flickr…

Go back to the Flickr page, right-click the “Back to the Flickr photo page” link in the top-left and select “Copy Link Location”
In WordPress click on the image that’s been added to your post, and then click the “Add Link” button in the editor.
Paste the URL for the Flickr photo page
Done!

Flickr Fight Follow-up: The proof

After the post I did a couple of days back about FlickrFight using images and not attributing them to the photographers who took and own the images, I thought it might help to actually point to some of the things that FlickrFight is doing.

First off, they’re not copying the images, they are getting them from the Flickr API. As a result they have access to all the information required to properly attribute the photos, and I sorted that out after five minutes of looking through the Flickr API documentation.

Here are two Creative Commons licensed images that came up in my search for Sunrise vs. Sunset:

Photo Credit: onurati on Flickr

Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr

Get it together, FlickrFight. Attribute the photos! Everything you need to know is RIGHT HERE.

Flickr Fight Doesn’t Attribute Photos

Pouring through my ever overflowing RSS reader tonight I came across a post on AppScout by Alan Henry about Flickr Fight. This is a site that allows you to search for two terms, and then determines how popular the term is based on the number of hits returned in a Flickr search (Google Fight knockoff??). Along with the search result is a grid of photos for each of the terms. Compare Coke vs. Pepsi, Angelina & Jennifer or whatever else you like… or better yet, don’t.

The one major thing missing from Flickr Fight is it’s lack of attribution for any of the photos it displays. It simply links to the images stored on the Flickr server and doesn’t bother to provide a link to the photo’s page in flickr, or credit the photographer/owner of the image in any way, shape or form.

This is the kind of IP violations that make posting legitimate content online a risky venture. If people don’t consider copyright violations of online material legitimate, then how will these forms of content distribution ever be considered good, legitimate viable sources??

Shame on Flickr Fight, and shame on AppScout for not picking up on this glaring omission.

Leopard Breaks Flickr Uploader

Caught this story over on DownloadSquad tonight. OS X Leopard causes a problem with the Adobe Flash plugin for all browsers on OS X (Firefox, Safari and Opera were tested). The problem has been acknowledged by Adobe but no release date of a fix has been determined.

As I found out last night it makes the uploader very broken. You can select files to upload, but once that’s done the uploader simply does nothing. Sits there like a bumpkin on a log. One wonders why Adobe didn’t take the time to test this with one or two of the Leopard Betas / Release candidates…

The DS article does mention a partial workaround, but it’s a HACK. I would caution against even attempting it. If you need to upload in the meantime, just use the client application and ignore the issue until Adobe get their act together.

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