SOCIAL BUTTONS, icons that facilitate the sharing of content on your site or blog, are now a mainstay of social media.

It’s not enough to simply produce content, you must have the tools in place to allow your fans to share to their Facebook, Twitter, Digg ect.

THE TOOLS

Sharethis is a useful and popular option for websites and Wordpress.org sites. Notice the green Sharethis button on this page, expanding to reveal social buttons, Sharethis opens new windows to your social sites to share content you like.

Grab social icons at My Social Buttons in a variety of styles and sizes. These buttons are for you to link yourself and will not automatically open a share window.

For more social icons, visit Open Source Hunter for 128 inventive and free buttons.

While you can add Sharethis to a Wordpress.org site, you can’t add them to a Wordpress.com blog.

A good option for .com’rs is Get Social Live. I use this one on my blog and I can vouch. Simply copy and paste the permalink and title of your content and viola!, Get Social whips up code to copy and paste into your blog. Sound easy? It is.

Another great site for icons, images and textures is Webtreats. Tasty and free!

Community Connection

What social media buttons do you like? Let us know in the comments, por favor.

For more blogging tips and resources, please check our Focus Guide to Blogging.

Photo : Patrick Ng

STEPPING OUT to shoot the latest MatadorTV vlog I realize just how important it is to have my creative tools readily available.

It sounds simple, and it is, but it takes discipline. If I step out to go on a ride or a walk, I know if I don’t bring my camera there will likely be something I want to film (the guy doing back flips for a dollar). If I forget my notebook and pencil, I will be struck with some phrase or inspired idea with nothing but my leaky-bucket of a brain to contain it.

Besides being prepared there’s also a way of going through your day as an opportunist, basically being open to and allowing yourself to physically be present where your creative “sparks” usually occur. I find them outside, under rocks, in bars and graveyards, and on my mountain bike.

Being prepared and being inspired are two totally different things. But preparing to be inspired can leave you at the right place and the right moment, when the light is perfect or some heartbreaking truth is unfolding across the street.

Being a creative opportunist is simple. Remember:

BRING THE TOOLS.

A small camera, a paper and pencil at the very least. A sketch pad, harmonica, your favorite book, journal, guitar, water colors and a laptop is even better.

GO WHERE YOU ARE INSPIRED.

For me this week it was Mrtyle Edwards park, with all its crabs and yawning views of the Olympics. Next week it could be some old smelling coffee shop. The point is plant myself where I can marvel, where I can come out of my head and watch, prepared for inspiration.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What environments stoke your creative fire? What do you carry with you; a notebook, laptop, a camera? How do you prepare yourself to be inspired?

THE IDEA for this post came from a question at Matador’s forums earlier this week. A discussion was raised about how to migrate your blog from Blogger to WordPress without losing content.

Below are a couple resources that show you how to do this, and then after that is a bit more on why I think this is worth doing. Earlier this year I wrote a very general overview on Which Blogging Platform is Best for Writers , and I still think it’s valid, however, after looking at a few more things about SEO and “ranking” (which I’ll explain below), I’ve changed my mind somewhat about Blogger.

How to switch

WordPress has an easy to follow page that explains how to import content from Blogger (or other platforms) to WP.

Or you can watch this video:

ANNOTATIONS allow you to display messages, thought bubbles and most importantly, add links to other YouTube videos. Adding links lets you guide your visitors to other videos and create interactive games, improving your viewer experience and getting you more views.

Anyone with videos on YouTube can add annotations to their vids. Annotations come in three flavors; Notes, Speech Bubbles, and Spotlights. Spotlights can be used as links that allow viewers to go directly to the video you link to. Annotations can be layered and placed anywhere in the viewer with multiple annotations appearing on the screen at once.

Annotations are free, easy to use, and well worth the little time they take to implement.

NOTICE MY USE OF ANNOTATIONS IN THIS MATADORTV VLOG.

WATCH THIS VIDEO FOR A TUTORIAL ON ANNOTATIONS

Now that you know how to use annotations, start experimenting on your videos right now. When it comes to using annotated links to create an interactive game, their is virtually no limit to what you may create!

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Image: HikingArtist.com

AT MATADOR we usually avoid bigging ourselves up too much, but there have been some hardworking ninjas behind the scenes creating some great resources for writers and bloggers. I wanted to share some of the following:

How to Write

This page includes everything from how to write narrative essays using scenes to techniques for writing bilingual dialogue.

There are also lots of resources as far as magazines and websites you should know about.

Blogging Tips

Blogging tips is probably our fastest growing section of articles. There are resources here that can take you step by step through how to start a WordPress blog and finding a good WordPress theme.

If you’re already have a blog, this page also has good info on how to deal with content scraping and what to do with out of control comments.

Social Media

This page still has a lot more to add, but there are some really good resources here already on things like how to promote your photography online and utilizing retweets to become a twitter ninja..

Additional Resources

I also wanted to mention just a few of the other resources and communities outside of Matador that I visit at least on a semi-regular basis:

*New Pages – comprehensive listing of calls for submissions and literary magazines
*Practicing Writer – blog and site with focus on academic opportunities / discussions, and good market resources as well as interviews. Good newsletter.
*Brevity – blog on ‘creative nonfiction’, has good commentary, essays and news in the nonfiction ‘world’.

Community Connection

These are some of the resources out there for writers. What other ones do you use? Please let us know in the comments below, and thanks for visiting and sharing our focus pages.

View from author’s window on perfect day.

I WAS pre-coffee tweeting one morning when I saw a tweet on winetasting in South America, a story I had submitted a few days earlier.

Oh good, I thought, my story is published.

As a freelancer, especially one who writes for the web, even with Google alerts it’s hard to know sometimes when something of yours is going live, and you have to keep your finger on the pulse (or watch your blog traffic) to see what’s up.

Five minutes later, stovetop espresso in hand, I clicked through the link I’d sent my followers. The whole story was scraped. The story which I had pitched, had accepted, researched and written specifically for publication had been lifted, wholesale and placed elsewhere. For free.

Scraping is stealing someone’s content and posting it as your own. In the past I had seen bits and pieces of what looked like my stuff, and even photos I’d taken posted elsewhere. I would write a little, hey, you-know-what email, and usually get some satisfaction, a link at least.

But this? This had my editor messaging me asking if I’d double-submitted, a major no-no in this incipient industry. It also had me wondering just what had gone wrong. It happened that the site which had scraped my article belonged to someone who had recently asked me to do a guest blog post.

I hesitated for a minute, wondering if I’d somehow given permission for him to steal the content. Classic blame the victim mentality.

In the end, my editor contacted the offending party, who removed the content. I retweeted the real URL, and I sat, and fumed, downing more coffee, waiting for an apology that never came. I contacted some people with thicker skins and more years on the job than me, and came away with some different perspectives, and posted my frustration on my blog, where I knew the scraper, my editors, (and every other visitor, and maybe even some of you) would read it.

The question of when content scraping will happen to you is not so much if, but rather when. Do something out of the ordinary, or achieve a small amount of notoriety or write something clever and sit back and relax. Anyone, anywhere can lift your work and pass it off as their own, without so much as a credit, link, or thank you.

So what’s a creative, prolific person to do?

You could not publish anything, anywhere, keeping it all for yourself and under lock and key. Ick. You can watermark photos, or use Flickr’s “all rights reserved” stamp, (though this amounts to nothing more than a “pretty please don’t steal my photos, thanks”).

Writing is trickier. The written word is easily cut and pasted, or retyped from print onto a blog. South African infertility blogger Tertia Albertyn found several entries from a published book she’d written (So Close: Infertile and Addicted to Hope) posted on another blogger’s website.

Julie Schwietert, managing editor at Matador and one of the people who held my hand through my scraping experience, told me about a Cuban photographer friend of hers whose photo she’d seen in a gallery in New York.

He doesn’t follow up on these cases, he says, because the energy required exceeds the benefits he would reap. It’s not that he necessarily throws photo licenses into the wind, just that he knows that realistically, he will make himself sick with effort at trying to track all of these infringements down.

David Miller, Matador’s senior editor, has another take on artists’ rights, which he explained to me over Spanish tortilla one evening in Santiago. He believes Creative Commons licenses are the way to go.

CC defines themselves as “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.” CC has gained popularity via Flickr, where users are allowed to specify that the works can be used with credit, for financial gain, or not, etc. Artists using CC have the benefit of increasing their internet footprint, with the possibility of remuneration coming via special projects. A good example is Trey Ratcliff, the most popular travel photographer on the web.

6 Thoughts on Content Scraping

1. Expect it. If you’ve got it out there, expect it to turn up somewhere else.

2. Prevent it. If it’s important to you to prevent it, take steps to do so. Hide it, watermark it, post it as an un-copyable PDF.

3. Find it. Go out and troll likely thieves, search uncommon character or word strings or check your Flickr referrals and see where people are coming from. Often, someone has linked to your photo from Flickr, and not rehosted it, which makes the theft easy to track.

4. Defend it. If you’re irked, set your editors, your blog readers (like Tertia’s), and other bloodhounds you have working on your behalf to storm the castle. Ask politely for the content to be removed. Grow steadily more insistent if they refuse or ignore.

5. Accept it. Take a page from Julie’s photographer friend’s book, and realize that it’s more important to hone your craft than it is to chase down wannabes.

6. Do an end-run around it. By marking your work Creative Commons, you increase exposure. Consider that disseminating your work (even freely) does not cheapen your ability to express yourself, and if you develop your craft and to the point where you have your own voice and vision, no one will believe that anything you create belongs to someone else.

Personally, I’m working on moving towards step 6, but I must report with sadness that I’m still in the capitalist grabby mindset that what’s mine is mine, and it’s not yours to show, publish, make money from or claim as yours unless I give you permission. Let’s see how far that gets me.

Community Connection

Matadorians, where do you find yourselves? Has your content been scraped? Did you follow up? Are you ready to go Creative Commons all the way?

Photo: Rutger de Moddertukker

IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD YET, new FTC guidelines will be going into place beginning Dec. 1. These guidelines include, among other things, a mandate on disclosing any and all paid sponsorships or endorsements.

From the FTC Guide:

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. . . . Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

While many bloggers such as Marty Dickinson are bemoaning the impending regulations, some of us in the travel writing are looking at them as a step in the right direction. With full disclosure now being federally mandated, there seems to be more of a chance that current industry policies forbidding travel writers from taking comps will be revised, giving travel writers more freedom in looking for / accepting stories, and perhaps more to the point, earning a living.

How you answer Dickinson’s question about the regulations–”why would it be important for people to know that you’re getting a commission payment for a referral?” will probably determine how you feel overall about the issue.

The point is less about money and more about about transparency. After looking at this issue (or at least trying to) from all sides, I came up with a manifesto of sorts called Material Transparency.

I argued that bloggers and writers not only embrace the impending FTC regulations on material connections, but expand the concept into an overall aesthetic of transparency in their other connections, their crew, their companies, all as a way of defining and helping exhibit / promote their personal brand.

In what ways, if any, will these upcoming regulations affect your work as a writer or blogger? Please let us know in the comments below.

Image jiruan

Twitter Lists is a brand-spanking-new feature that allows you to follow groups of Twitter users that are compiled in various lists. This lets you to follow segments of Tweeple that share an affinity and create your own Lists for others to follow.

You can create a List for your fav bloggers, your family, your jilted ex’s…you name it. Because the latest tweets of everybody on the List are displayed in real time, Lists is a great way to get an overview of what a group of related people are talking about.

One of the beautiful things about Lists is that by following a list you are not actually following every person on the List. You are following the List itself. This means you don’t have to add the individual to your main tweet stream, you may simply check in on the List as often as you wish.

I invite you to follow a Matador Team list I have created. By following this list, you can readily see what all of Matador ninjas are tweeting about.

If you don’t follow Matador on Twitter, crawl out from your rock and click here.

Img: Torley

BLOGS ARE REALLY just points of entry for conversations. Even the simplest post can lead to comments that build on one another and go in unexpected directions. Something as innocuous as a landscape photo essay can transform into a religious debate.

It’s a stoke to see (and moderate) the evolution of comments around a post when this happens. But when a piece either gets popular enough, or if it’s thought-provoking enough, or even if you get one person with hurt feelings (or someone just plain out of control) in the mix, the whole conversation can devolve into a shitstorm. People begin attacking each other or the author personally. Some take the ultimate ‘weak-ass’ route and threaten to sue. It’s ugly and tedious to deal with, but it’s also something you can take a kind of pride in dealing with–you know you’re being read.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts our whole team had on dealing with comments:

Have a stated moderation policy.

As Andy Hayes notes, “There is precedent for bloggers being successfully sued for comments on their blog, so clearly reserve your right to remove or edit libelous, profane or otherwise unacceptable content.”

At Matador we have a liberal policy towards letting voices be heard. We let most comments stand unless they’re outright hateful or spam.

As Julie Schwietert notes, there’s a distinction between censorship and fostering good conversation. “I don’t view deleting inflammatory, hostile, or non-productive comments in the back end as censorship, especially when those comments are made by someone who wants to hide behind the relative anonymity that the Internet can provide.”

Shut down comments if necessary.

If it’s your site, then it’s your territory. Some people may view this as censorship, but it’s still your right to take down comments if a conversation has devolved completely. A good idea is to simply leave a note stating what happened as clearly and transparently as possible.

Address mistakes or issues that people bring up.

Make a mistake in the article? Fix it. Were you wrong? Admit it. Everybody makes mistakes, so take it constructively (even if the commenter is less than professional about it).

Community connection

How do you deal with out of control comments on your blog while still trying to maintain and promote good conversation? Let us know in the comments.