Lost in Translation

I’m overdue for another post. Things get hairy when you run a business from home, have infant twins, and the air conditioning goes out. In many parts of the country, that’s not a big deal in May, but in Texas it can be HOT! We have babies and ferrets, so it meant several days of little work, no fun, and no sleep.

Meanwhile, here is a post I originally wrote for DrakNet that was posted April 30, 2010.

I thought I’d share it here for those that may not follow the DrakNet blog and also because this site is basically an extended FAQ covering issues I deal with all the time from clients. Google image search and copyright are recurring themes in my line of work.

I get a lot of images from clients to put on websites. Because I like to educate and protect my clients, I am prone to asking, “Where did you get this from?”

More often than not, the response is: “Google’s free image search”.

Let me clear up a common misconception: the image search on Google is not a repository of free images for everyone. What Google is doing is searching images on other people’s websites and showing those images to you. These are images that are protected by copyright law.

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All web designers run across this at some point: a client has created something to sell and they want to make sure it won’t get stolen when they put it online.

Visual art, audio, video, poems, how-to’s, blogs, and other such materials are what we call IP or intellectual property. There is a lot of exaggeration and paranoia surrounding these items and the potential for theft/piracy.

Yes, there are means to prevent theft but none of it is 100% foolproof.

Here are a few facts about managing IP online

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The New York Times released an article titled If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe addressing the popularity of very weak passwords.

Vance (the author) says, “According to a new analysis, one out of five Web users still decides to leave the digital equivalent of a key under the doormat: they choose a simple, easily guessed password like “abc123,” “iloveyou” or even “password” to protect their data.”

This doesn’t surprise me at all. In the years I’ve spent in this industry, I’ve seen many very weak passwords. As a web designer, some clients will authorize me to set up their site and create email accounts for them. This means they’ll give me the password they want used. Often, I’ve had to go back to them with a new password since their chosen one was too weak for the system to accept. Even the client’s alternative password, though finally accepted by the server, are still often far too weak to be secure. (more…)

I, like many others in my field, see the term Web 2.0 and cringe. More so when used inappropriately. Then we hear and see people in our own field using it inappropriately, and groan and smack our foreheads.

This, like a lot of lingo, is often thrown around without a real understanding of what it is and what it means.

Let me put it like this: I’ve avoided jobs where I saw postings from people stating they want someone who understood Web 2.0. Or that they wanted a Web 2.0 website. Because I would have to ask them, “What do you mean by Web 2.0? What does Web 2.0 mean to you in this context?”. And they’ll decide that I’m the idiot here and clearly I don’t know anything. After all, EVERYONE knows what Web 2.0 is, right?

It is almost physically painful for me to hear someone to ask, “Do you know Web 2.0?”. (more…)

One of the purposes of this blog is to clear up technology myths. I ran across an interesting article that just screamed to be written about in this blog.

This piece of “news” was released a few days ago: EXCLUSIVE: W.H. collects Web users’ data without notice.

In a nutshell, the article says “The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama’s promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.”

The article gives reactions from various groups who feel there is something sinister going on.

Bear with me. This post isn’t about politics. It’s actually about technology and business practices. And why this is actually not news.

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