The Internet is a fantastic place. Websites are simply clamoring for your attention, and many of them will give you something for free just for stopping by. You don’t have to pay to access most web sites, either. You can browse or search for just about anything and find a free resource that fills your needs. Articles, indexes, ebooks, .pdfs, and images are everywhere.

Accessing these resources is easy, legal, and free. How you use these materials, however, can be like walking a tightrope—there are lots of ways to screw up, and many of them hurt.

Images Are Easy to Grab

If you need images for a project, it’s really easy to grab images off the web using Google Image Search, Microsoft Live Search Images, or any stock photo site. Some of them even come formatted just the way you need them. With others, a little work with a smudge tool or creative use of cropping removes watermarking and makes the images look just like they came from your copy of Photoshop or digital camera. Is it ok to gather images this way? We have to look into the definition of a copyright to know for sure.

What Is a Copyright?

Copyrights are intended to protect a creator’s rights to the content he or she created, especially with regard to financial compensation for the use of the content.

Private incentives to create are supported by the exclusive rights that owners of copyright enjoy. Copyright owners (or their assignees) have the right to carry out or authorize reproduction and distribution of their work; preparation of derivative works; and, for literary, musical, and various visually based works, the public performance or display of their work. (1)

How Do I Know Something is Copyrighted?

The U.S. Copyright Act states that a copyright exists once an “original work of authorship [is] fixed in any tangible medium of expression . . . from which [it] can be perceived, reproduced or otherwise communicated.” (2) Thus, images “fixed” to files and hard drives are copyright, by default and without notice, the moment they are created. Everything on the Internet is copyrighted—how you use content is simply a matter of what permissions the creator has given you for its use.

Infringing on Copyright Holders’ Rights and the Consequences for Doing So

Using images from websites found through a search engine image search or from stock photo sites without permission or payment is infringing on the copyright holder’s rights. This includes creating derivative works.

There are some exceptions to copyright rules that fall under “fair use,” but most of these are in relation to educational purposes or making copies of something you already paid for the right to use. It you are going to use an image or other content for monetary gain (like on a blog with ads), then you definitely need to follow copyright law.

If you infringe on a copyright holder’s rights, there are three general outcomes. You might not get caught, but then you have to live with knowing you broke the law. You might be caught and asked to pay fines or damages. Finally, you might get caught and have someone take you to court.

Getting caught does happen, too. I have recently seen at least two companies that have had to pay fines. One had to pay $240,000 for the use of images it didn’t have the rights to. It nearly sank the company.

Play by the Rules

It’s more expensive to get caught than it is to pay for images up front, and all three outcomes for infringing on copyright holders’ rights reflect very poorly on your character. If you respect copyright holders’ rights, then you can justly expect others to do the same and you can morally enforce your rights. You could also put a line on your web site or on your work that states you comply with all copyright laws. This marketing statement may help reward you for following the law. Finally, following copyright law will let you be comfortable in your own skin—you’ll be able to feel that you are an honest person.

Some people have wondered: is Blog Rush against the Google AdSense terms of service?

Blog Rush, as I see it, is NOT against Google AdSense’s terms of service.

The Google AdSense blog says:

As many of you already know, our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

Google wants to make sure that site and blog owners aren’t providing people with an incentive (beyond normal interest and curiosity) to click on AdSense links.

Blog Rush Is in the Clear

If you examine each part of the quote above, you can see that Blog Rush does not violate any of the statements made.

No one is paid to click on AdSense ads after they land on a page they found through Blog Rush. Doing so does not result in a reward for visitors.

No one is being paid to surf or autosurf—in money or clicks. Even if you surf your own site for an extra 1000 pages, you’ve only earned impressions. If your article titles suck, no one is going to click them. This will be even more true as cheating is weeded out of the impression system. You can see this even now—the cheaters are generating thousands of extra impressions, but no extra clicks. Click-through rates are simply falling. If someone does click through, it’s because they are truly interested in what you have to say.

Blog Rush is not click exchange—no one is using the system to agree to click each other’s AdSense links.

There is no incentive to view other web sites’ pages.

Because Blog Rush in no way affects visitor behavior in relation to AdSense ads, it does not violate the terms of service. So go ahead and join Blog Rush and see if it increases your blog traffic.

No? Good. Otherwise I’d be skewering you in this post, too.

We all know the type, though—two-faced, double-dealing, hypocritical, dealing behind closed doors, polished smile with forked tongue, amicable but back-stabbing.

A Real-life Weasel

I have a recent example. No real names or specific information will be used because I’m not 100% sure I have all the information correct and I wouldn’t want to ruin someone’s name due to inaccuracy, but this is the way things appear to me.

A young entrepreneur I know, we’ll call him Adam, had some really good ideas and decided to start a business. He figured out a process that is tricky and has a learning curve too big for the average consumer, and so he began a service to carry out the process for customers. Things got moving, but Adam quickly figured out that to hit critical mass he had to get some outside help. He asked a friend to invest in his company and a relative to help manage the business.

Being an entrepreneur, Adam continued to have good ideas related to the process he created. For some reason, he didn’t feel like sharing them with his investor or his manager. He began working on his ideas parallel to his first business. Eventually, they were developed enough that Adam left his first business to start a new business. The interesting thing is that the new business is in the same industry, performing the same service, in the same geographical area. The only difference is that his new business incorporates his new ideas and doesn’t involve his investor or manager.

Analysis of a Weasel

Why was Adam willing to stab his friend/investor and family member/manager in the back?

Maybe it was greed. He wanted a bigger share of the profits from his good ideas for himself.

Maybe it was bad personal skills. Adam couldn’t work with his investor or his manager very well, and rather than resolve issues, he decided to just leave.

Maybe it was malice. He was mad at his investor and/or manager for a perceived wrong and wanted to punish them.

We may never know with Adam, but these reasons usually point at a flaw in the weasel, not his situation or coworkers.

Consequences of Being a Weasel

Despite the immediate gains that a weasel may reap, there are some negative effects:

1. I will never do business with Adam, and I will try and persuade anyone who is considering doing business with him that it isn’t a good idea. I can only look at him with contempt for what he did, and I can’t trust him. In general, a weasel can expect to lose the trust and confidence of some (or all!) of his associates.
2. Depending on the contracts he signed, Adam may have done/be doing something illegal. For example, there are often non-compete clauses or issues of intellectual property at stake. The process may have been associated with the business and not Adam himself, which means he may be stealing his former company’s intellectual property to use in his second company. In general, if weasels take actions that are illegal (and not just unethical), they can expect to be caught eventually. The odds are certainly against them.
3. Adam may work for a while with his new business and realize that it is going to fail, that it isn’t as successful or efficient or profitable as his last business. Weasels often don’t realize how good they have it until they’ve burnt their bridges on the way to something that appears better, but turns out not to be.

There are lots of ways to be a weasel, some of which are illegal, some of which are not. The reason you would be called a weasel, though, is because they are all unethical. Be careful about how you deal with people and make promises. If you change your deal or break your promises for your own benefit, you risk being labeled a weasel and facing some or all of the consequences that come with being a weasel.

I recently learned about a new traffic generating system called Blog Rush. I’m usually very skeptical of such systems, but this one had some very interesting unique ideas that kept me on the hook just long enough to try it. The system is in Beta, and there have been a few hiccups more than most Beta launches, but on the whole it is working as advertised.

The Idea Behind Blog Rush

The basic idea behind Blog Rush is to create a network of similar sites and facilitate the exchange and dynamic rotation of links between these sites. Each site in the network installs a widget that lists five links to blog posts in the network. Your blog’s widget will show the links from other blogs, and your blog will be linked to from other sites’ widgets.

Blog Rush Referrals

So how does the system decide which links to show? Through an impression tracking and exchange system. Each time your blog shows the widget (1 page impression, 5 link impressions), you earn the right to have your blog linked to for one impression on someone else’s site.

Because you are creating 5 link impressions for each page impression, but only receiving one, the system has 4 extra link impressions per page impression to hand out.

For now, Blog Rush has done two main things with these extra impressions:

1. They have reserved one link impression for themselves to use for advertising and handing out bonus impressions.
2. The other three are used for rewarding referrals to the system. If you refer someone, you get an impression for every impression they earn. The same thing happens for each level of referrals, all the way down to ten “generations.” You get less and less of an impression at each level (level 10 earns you 1/8 of an impression), and the fractions add up correctly to three total impressions.

Blog Rush Inequality

There was a person who left a comment on the Blog Rush blog who was concerned about unequal impressions. His example stated that if there was someone who had 1,000 impressions vs. someone who had 100, a growing deficit of available impressions would be created. This would be true, but only if you have too few sites. As you increase the number of sites, the deficits and surpluses will tend to average out almost perfectly, especially over time. Blog Rush has already served more than 40,000,000 blog headlines, so I’m not worried about the availability of page impressions to show the link impressions I’ve earned.

Cheating on Blog Rush

The biggest problem with Blog Rush so far has been some cheating. Many bloggers have created ways to game the system by creating bad pageviews—for example, using a script to auto-load pages to earn impressions, even though no human ever sees the pages. These cheaters have sucked up impressions earned by legitimate bloggers and have nearly killed click-through rates. However, Blog Rush has switched to a manual review system for new blogs and is purging existing blogs that aren’t meeting standards, so this problem should be fixed soon.

Click Through Rates on Blog Rush

My last concern about Blog Rush will be click through rates. How many impressions will it take before someone clicks and visits my site? The last time I checked, I had nearly 300 impressions without a click. It can take over a thousand impressions to generate a click, though, so no final verdict here… The headlines you write for your blog posts will also be extremely influential on your click through rates, so write headlines that will grab attention and will be short enough to fit in the widget (7 words, 40 characters or so).

It can’t hurt, so go try Blog Rush. I have visited some blog posts that sounded interesting, so it has value for discovering new information, even if no one clicks your links. And if I’m clicking links, there’s a chance I will visit your blog some time!

People are the most decisive factor in your company.

Think about it: without people, who would be running the computers, operating the machines, or answering the phones? Who would be buying anything that you sell?

I know that this is definitely an obvious observation, but I thought I would take the time to make you think about it again. It’s so obvious, and we have often thought through who is involved in our business, and thus we tend to forget that the human element is the most important element.

How Can People Be More Decisive?

What can you do to make the people involved with your company happier and more effective?

What are your customers asking for? What need can you fill for them? What pain or irritation can you remove from their lives?

What do your employees need to work more efficiently? What hampers them from meeting (or even setting!) goals? How can you help your employees to be more motivated?

Just remember to periodically look at how each part of your company affects the people involved. People will thank you.

Or are you like me?

I had a recent experience where I didn’t get what I needed to understand, and I didn’t even know what I needed to know. It was one of those situations where my lack of experience was so profound that I couldn’t even possibly be expected to understand what I didn’t know or to discover it without being told.

What They Don’t Teach You In School…

There are two things that I didn’t learn in school that life had to teach me in other ways. First, school teaches us so much about success and avoiding failure that we don’t know how to make, and recover from, mistakes. Risk taking and risk management is not encouraged or taught. Innovation isn’t encouraged or rewarded, either. In fact, if you don’t follow the prescribed system, you get punished, and there is no reward for exceeding expectations. All this changes when you’re not in school. Risk management is a vital skill, and innovation is hopefully seen as a good thing and rewarded.

The other thing that really cannot be learned in school is what things are like in a real-world, full-time, non-internship, graduated work environment. This is where I had some shortcomings lately. I had some inaccurate expectations of what my work environment would be like, and because I have not been graduated and employed long enough to have experience with this situation, there was no way I could know. This problem for new graduates is universal enough that my current employer has previously avoided hiring fresh graduates, preferring that they learn their first lessons somewhere else.

Getting It

So I spent the last two weeks recovering from some mistakes I made and learning some lessons I had to learn at some point as a new (almost a year ago) graduate. Don’t get frustrated when you run into situations like mine—much of the time, you can’t even be expected to know any better, and we all have to learn to recover from mistakes. Just focus on mitigating and repairing damage and learning your lesson correctly the first time so that you can move on to your next set of challenges.

One of the hardest things to do in many companies is to measure employee contributions.

For example, in a company that values innovation and creates tools, processes, or software for speeding up production or services, the flashes of inspiration that employees have while showering, eating, running, tinkering, or engaging in other unrelated activities can be hard to measure and compensate correctly. That 30 seconds of pure inspiration and creativity can be worth more than weeks or months of nose-to-the-grindstone labor.

At the same time, innovative new ideas don’t mean much without a great implementation. Sometimes the work that needs to be done is simply lots of basic tasks where quantity and diligence are key.

So how can you motivate employees to focus on the right activities? How do you quantify employee contributions? How can you compensate them fairly?

The Right Activities

For a company to succeed, there needs to be a good mix of innovation and execution. If employees work longer hours, they show dedication and will produce more of the results you have been getting. Activities that inspire innovation can lead to the breakthroughs that change the rules of the game and allow you to execute a new, more productive plan. If working too many hours begins to get in the way of activities that promote innovation, then you may be missing out on breakthroughs. If all of your time is spent on innovation, you will have lots of new ways to do things, but those tasks won’t be getting done.

Quantifying Contributions

Unfortunately, quantifying employee contributions is very difficult. Exactly how much is an innovative idea worth? Estimates of time saved, quality improved, and extra value added are a good place to start.

Fair Compensation

Employers, knowingly or not, dramatically influence the balance that their employees will choose. If compensation is based exclusively on face-time or clocked-in hours, then employees will give you more hours or balk at the shift in their work-life balance and the loss of free, creative time. If rewards are overly biased towards innovation, there will be too many ideas and too little consensus and execution. Compensation should be mixed to reward both types of behavior. Salaries, benefits, and working conditions are best for rewarding consistent production and face time. Stock options and profit sharing are great ways to reward employees in some kind of fair, flexible way for how much their innovations affect the bottom line.

Contribution Culture

The culture of a company can have a big influence on how employees behave. 3M is famous for requiring its employees to spend 20% of their time on non-project related activities—innovating in search of the next big thing. If innovation and employee development are important, then part of normal work hours should be devoted to these activities. At the very least, project hours shouldn’t be allowed to infringe upon innovation time or the activities that help employees innovate. Employees usually understand the need to put in regular hours in order to get fundamental work done. Encouraging, quantifying, and compensating innovation is the hard part to managing and developing employees and quite possibly the most important to your long-term success.

DRM is certainly a hot button right now for content producers, distributors, and customers. Content producers ask, “How will our content be protected from piracy?” Customers wonder, “How can I use my songs on my MP3 player, computer, and CD player?” Distributors question, “How can we bridge the gap and still make money?”

As a customer, I’m feeling stiffed.

The Right to Consume Media

A lot of the argument over DRM hinges on what exactly it means when you pay for a song or movie. Many DRM systems are set up so that payment gives the consumer the right to play a certain song or video on a certain device or in a certain format. This is great for producers—it protects their content very tightly—and distributors—they can keep producers happy and make money again when they change formats—but very annoying for consumers.

If I have to buy the White Album by the Beatles one more time, I think I’ll scream.

I want to buy a song once, just once, and be able to play it now and forever on any device in any format I want. I will even pay a premium over other methods to do so. That’s why I still buy music on CD—I have the ability to rip it and convert it into other formats. The only trouble is, I don’t want every single song on a CD most times—I want to pick and choose. It would be nice to be able to pay once for just the song or video I want and to be guaranteed to have access to it, in any format, forever.

User-Associated Rights

Content producers and distributors need to figure out a way to associate content rights to individuals and their dependents (as long as they remain dependents), not to formats or specific kinds of devices.

If rights to use media were associated with me, then I could go anywhere, use any device, at any time, and have access to the media for which I purchased the right to consume. I could transfer my rights to these songs or videos to other people when I chose to, or as part of my estate in my will. Piracy would stop dead in its tracks.

Someone Always Finds a Way

As in the case of Jon Lech Johansen, if content producers don’t get a clue, people are going to keep finding methods for converting their music from one format to another, and the content producers are going to miss out on an opportunity to make customers happier and willing to spend more money. Think about it—how many songs would you be willing to buy if you knew that you could easily use them forever?

“Every song on iTunes Music Store has been available on the Peer to Peer networks within four hours. All the DRM does is frustrate legitimate consumers; it doesn’t stop file sharing.”

—Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred Von Lohmann

Because there is a huge gap between the current positions of producers/distributors and consumers, consumers keep finding ways to bridge the gap on their own terms. When a distributor finds a way to bridge this gap for consumers legitimately and easily, they will be the heroes of the media industry—both producers and consumers.

Actually, the question about whether Google will create a Google Office is nearly moot—Google has been moving in the Office direction for at least a year and Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a major step in that direction. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is an integrated spreadsheet and word processor solution. Google also offers email, calendaring, and templated (PowerPoint-esque) Google Pages. Google has a few steps left to bring these services up to full horsepower, and then integrating them and managing users’ data is all (!) that’s left. Google could have an online office suite in a year.

Obstacles to Adoption of Online Office Applications

There are still a few hurdles left before online office applications steal me away from the desktop equivalents:

1. Availability:

   I don’t have universal access to the Internet yet. There are lots of places I go where I can’t get the Internet and wouldn’t have access to my office applications.

2. Performance:

   Ok, so assuming that I wouldn’t really need an office application in locations where I can’t get the Internet, there’s still the question of performance. Even with a high speed Internet connection, sometimes online office apps would choke when a normal office solution wouldn’t.

3. Security:

   The last problem I have is with security. How are my documents and information going to be safe? This is a truly fundamental question for Web 2.0 in general, not just Google Office. If my data is residing on a server somewhere, who is going to hack in and steal it? Tied to this issue is privacy. Is the government going to subpoena a company to give it to them without notifying me? Implementations of good government intentions aren’t always so good, laws aren’t always perfect, and I don’t always agree with the government. There are some cracks in the system that I am worried about.

Not If - When

I don’t think that there’s any question of whether or not there will be integrated online equivalents to Microsoft Office. Even if they won’t work as well as a desktop version, and even if they ultimately fail, there are a bunch of companies who are going to try it. They will even be able to overcome two out of three of the obstacles—availability and speed are technical obstacles which can be overcome, even relatively easily. And number three will be decided, one way or the other—by choice or by default.

(see more Google web services for more info on directions Google could take.)

I’m not the first to discuss this topic, not by far, but this is a very interesting problem: Is Web 2.0 a Friend of True Knowledge? This article talks about recent events surrounding Wikipedia and one of its co-founders, Larry Sanger. Sanger is planning a “high brow” intellectual spin-off of Wikipedia, due to what he feels are 4 “serious and endemic” problems:

1. The Wikipedia community doesn’t follow its own rules, fostering abuse of the system.
2. Anonymity means that no one takes responsibility for their work, and thus trouble-makers have the ability to mess things up without consequences—the troll problem.
3. The leaders of the community have become insular—it’s hard for qualified individuals to join.
4. The community is “off-putting” to academics and professionals. They don’t feel comfortable about contributing to a community that won’t adequately reward or protect their work.

The Danger of Communal Knowledge

The problem with many communal knowledge pools is that, because everyone can participate, the quality of knowledge and information contained in the pool can be dragged down to the level of the least qualified participant—to the lowest common denominator. It’s like group work in school classes—it can be very difficult for the group to produce high-quality work when a member of the group is contributing poorly or even actively hampering the group’s progress. It can be easier to simply remove such a person from the group and continue with those who are constructively contributing. This is what Sanger is proposing to do with his Wikipedia spin-off.

So, Is Web 2.0 a Friend of True Knowledge?

Where bodies of knowledge are open to any contribution and there are malicious or under-qualified contributors, the answer is no. Such bodies will never rise above the lowest common denominator. Too much salt will ruin a cake, no matter what the quality of the other ingredients is.

To be friendly to true knowledge, Web 2.0 groups and applications must:

1. Establish and follow rules for contributions and reviews
2. Be able to eject sub-par contributors and bogus content
3. Capitalize on above-average knowledge and expertise

Web 2.0 is About Collaboration

Web 2.0 philosophies and applications are about enabling and fostering collaboration. Establishing group rules and choosing collaborators is a problem that has always existed and is not unique to Web 2.0 projects. However, as collaboration becomes easier, it is easy to make the mistake of including too many group members and relaxing participation rules so that no one feels left out, increasing the chances that the mix of “ingredients” will contain something “spoiled.” As aggregating and organizing knowledge becomes easier, discerning good work from bad work is the next serious problem.

If problems with groups and rules can be resolved, then Web 2.0 is a friend of true knowledge—Web 2.0 is simply a tool that can facilitate the collaboration and growth of experts and the distillation of scattered pieces of information into new and exciting works. As with other tools, garbage in equals garbage out. We have awesome tools, but we must use the correct inputs.