Mister Nifty

You know you’ve done it before. You searched Google images until you found a cool photo, yanked it off of somebody’s website and then you slapped that dude right on your website. The problem is, it was on a website that had paid for a license to use it, and now you have it sans the required license. Beware, because you are in danger of harassment and possibly a lawsuit against your organization.

Last week I had a client contact me regarding an issue with a large stock photography house. Apparently, several years ago their secretary had downloaded a couple of images that looked nice and posted them on their site. She didn’t rename the files at all, neither did she have a license. So, my client receives a letter from unsaid stock house stating they had watched his website for two years and were now asking for $1,400/image to pay retroactively for the licensing of those images.

Times are tough and stock photography houses are using third-party search engines to find their images via file-name or advanced image recognition software.  If you get caught with an unlicensed image, it could mean some big bucks, or at least a headache that won’t go away for a long time. There really is not much they do to get you to pay the cash other than sue you. If you haven’t hosted multiple amounts of images, it’s a pretty sure bet they aren’t going to spend thousands of dollars to get $1000-$2000 out of you. However, if your site is littered with images, you just might be in a heap of trouble when they come knocking.

If for some reason you were to go to court for massive copyright infringement (including non-commercial transfer of digital files), the fines are up to $250,000 and up to 5 years in jail. I don’t mean to scare you, well…yes I do. It’s a very serious matter that you need to look at right now.

Search your site and see if there any images that you don’t have a license to post. Then, hit the delete key and get them off there now! It’s a good time to take care of this before you start getting letters in the mail.  Google images is a search engine of images on the web. It is not a stock photography site that provides royalty free images to everyone everywhere. Please stop using it for your image needs.

If you need good photography check out my post on 100 Legal Sources For Free Stock Images. Also, one of my favorite resources is Flickr. Go to their website and do an advanced search. Check the box for Creative Commons photos. Once you view all the sizes for the selected image, look at the bottom of the page for the license of that photo. It will tell you how you can use it, and if the photographer wants a credit link or mention.

It’s the right thing to do to license your images. If Jesus had a website, He would license his images….well he would probably just make them Himself.

This is just a curious observation from over the past few months. I see a lot of theological tweets and central sermon idea tweets pop up at certain times throughout the week (mostly on Saturday nights) from preachers that I follow on Twitter. It’s interesting to see the general study habits of a large group of people by their preach tweets.

I find myself “preach tweeting” when I’m studying for a sermon as well. I just can’t help it! And if you’re Pentecostal like I am, you have to sprinkle some exclamation marks in there somewhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I think we should tag these sometimes awkward, sometimes context-lacking, sometimes off-the-wall and sometimes powerful 140 character sermons #preachtweets.

I’ve created a fun little chart to illustrate my observation. Disclaimer: By no means is this reliable empirical data.

Facebook has 400 million users. That’s almost 6% of the entire global population. Facebook’s founder has made it clear at the latest developer conference, that Facebook aims to take over the entire Internet. They want to be the central hub where websites come to get users/traffic.  Facebook is bigger than the United States population. I can’t think of any other online business that has this much power over the personal information of 6% of the global population.

There has been a lot of concern in recent days with Facebook’s privacy practices. Recently the Wall Street Journal exposed how Facebook and Twitter send your user information when you click on any external link. This violates Facebook’s own privacy agreement.

Basically, information called a referrer is sent to the site you visit after clicking on a link or ad from Facebook or Twitter. Within that referrer is a reference to your profile screen name or number. This information is collected by analytics trackers such as Google Analytics.

No longer are you an anonymous user, but with this information they have your public profile information at their finger tips. This has huge implications if you come across an unscrupulous site. If your Facebook privacy settings are not locked down, an advertiser can find your full name (sometimes your hyphenated maiden name) and even your address on your PUBLIC profile.

Facebook has launched a new program as well that gives certain websites your information so they can customize their site just for you. You may not know it but you are automatically opted into this program with the latest Facebook update. It’s only a pilot program for now, but in the future, your information could potentially be shared with thousands of sites across the net just by visiting.

Here are a few ways I came up with to protect yourself and your information:

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If you’re looking to add some interactivity to your church site, Qhub is a great place to start. With its intuitive interface, you can easily create a page where others can ask questions about your church and you can provide answers for others to see. I haven’t seen many church sites with anything of this nature. It would be a great way to expose new visitors to frequently asked questions that come from other visitors and members. A lot of times leadership teams conjure up what they think visitors would want to know. This is a great way to find out exactly what people want to know about your church and leadership team. I love the full moderation controls, spell checking and bad language filters. Plus, it’s free!

Go to Qhub

This is a great article about writing a good About Page on your website.

(via @smashingmag)

BatchGeo is a neato little service that lets you import a spreadsheet of information about each location. Once you create your map, BatchGeo saves it on their server and you get an email with a custom link as well as an embed code for your own website. This is a great way to skirt coding the Google Maps API for such a nice custom map with multiple locations. Here are some usage ideas I came up with:

• Multi-site churches directions map
• Youth night progressive dinner map
• Outreach map to use internally
• Member directory for smaller churches
• Youth trip planner – post hotel and stopping point information for parents

Go to BatchGeo

(via Life Hacker)