Creative Commons

Creative Commons is something that I talk about at a high level when I deliver social media training. Here is the long version of this story.

• Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

This license is the most restrictive, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

• Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

• Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

• Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

• Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

• Attribution (by)

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

There is a lot more to CC than these six categories. There is an organization called CreativeCommons.org, it’s a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

They are based in the U.S.A therefore it’s unclear if all their licensing rules apply globally.

There is another category called CCO that applies to your own work that you can waive your rights and make it completely available to the public without restriction to copyright and database law. This category applies to scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content.

We all need to earn a living, so who would be crazy enough to use these licenses?

The best known example of course is Flickr, they have incorporated these licensing into their offerings.

Wikipedia, Google and Open course ware. The most interesting one is a band called Nine Inch Nails, who released some of their songs for FREE as well as a limited tired step version of other products, services etc…This had an amazing effect whereby they had a sold out tour and sold their other products as well.

If you are thinking of incorporating CC into your business or otherwise, there are great guidelines on how to go about this. Since we are here in Canada, then how do we know if all this is relevant to the laws here. I am happy to say that we do indeed have a CC Canada.

The answer to this dilemma is Social Media. So what is Social Media anyway? Social Media is a term used to reference sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn and more.

Currently there are 12,381,640 Canadians on Facebook. Statistics Canada’s  population clock estimates that the total population of Canada is 33,760,010.

That’s a significant amount of Canadians on this one social network. This does not take into account the number of people spending their time on social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogs etc…

Based on all the statistics it’s very apparent that social media is here to stay and is not just a fad. So as a business how do you advertise or market yourself in these sites? It’s through social media marketing.

Then what is social media marketing?

Marketing is about building relationships and social media tools help you achieve this in an online world. Social media marketing is about using sites like Facebook, YouTube et. to create awareness and credibility about a brand. This is indirectly translated to growing revenues for your business.

These sites are free however it’s very important to

• tie your business goals into your participation in these spaces
• not spam your audience
• use these sites the the way they were inende, entertainment
• start a dialogue with your customers (build relationships)
• incorporate this  into your business processes

Participation online takes time, effort and consistency.  If you are spending time online building your business then take time to track your efforts and tie this into your website analytics.

So before you participate in social media start paying attention to who is visiting your website and where they are coming from. This will give you a baseline to start from. Then track the difference between the traffic to your website before and after your participation in social media.Tweak this as you go.

I am becoming a LION on  LinkedIn.  It means LinkedIn Open Networker.

By adding LION to my name I am letting the world know that I am going to let anyone and everyone into my network.  Yup total strangers.  The main advantage of doing this is that I will grow my network rapidly.

History of the LION

Back in 2006 Christian Mayaud and John L. Evans rapidly established the LIONs group on Yahoo.  Below is the LIONs badge on Yahoo.

John applied to LinkedIn for a Badge of recognition and invented the LION concept in members names.  This made it easy for other LIONS to find them.  LinkedIn did finally gave this a go unoficially.

LIONs™ Badge as carried by LIONs™ on LinkedIn Given LinkedIn’s move to monetize their social network I can see this as being a bit of an issue.

Christian Mayaud has used this to suceeed in his business ventures.  He liked LinkedIn as he never forgot a face however not remember the connection.   Being part of the VC community and participating on LinkedIn sparked the whole interest from other people and recruiters.

Becoming a LION could affect your LinkedIn SEO and makes it somewhat confusing.  I will give this a go and report on this at a later date.

Have you bookmarked your favourite websites and check them on a regular basis? If you find this rather time consuming and frustrating when the website you look at has the same information from a couple of months ago then?RSS is for you. ?

RSS aka Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication?is a format for delivering regularly changing web content like headlines, update notices, blogs, wikis etc…?directly to you.?It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quiclky, after it was published.

Another analogy is a magazine subscription, only in this case it’s delivered to your RSS reader everytime there is an update?

For you geeks out there, RSS is an XML-based format for content distrubution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines?and descriptions of specific information.

A lot of websites these days offer RSS feeds. It’s easy to see if a website has an RSS feed, it will have the orange button in the link window.

RSS is a free and easy way to promote your website without the need for complicated contant sharing partnerships.