YouTube Users Can Make Videos Creative Commons By Default

Starting on Wednesday, YouTube users can license their videos for Creative Commons by default.

Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons (CC), wrote a blog post published on Wednesday reminding the public that its Creative Commons video program on YouTube is still up and running — and has added 40 years of video in the past year since its launch.

“Four million creative commons videos on YouTube are just waiting to be reused, remixed, and reimagined,” Casserly wrote.

The program, referred to as “CC BY” allows users to borrow media, edit it and share it without the threat of copyright violations.

“Do you need a professional opening for your San Francisco vacation video?” the blog post suggests. “Perhaps some gorgeous footage of the moon for your science project? How about a squirrel eating a walnut to accompany your hot new dubstep track?”

YouTube users can borrow content in videos marked “CC BY” and edit it in YouTube Video Editor.

“Free tools like the YouTube Editor are essential in helping democratize video,” Casserly said.

Creative Commons licensing allows photographers and videographers to circulate their work, while letting publications and businesses take visuals from their large selection.

YouTube give you this scenario: “Imagine seeing your footage used by a student in Mumbai, a filmmaker in Mexico City, or a music video director in Detroit. By letting other people play with your videos, you let them into a global sandbox, kicking off a worldwide team of collaborators.”

If you’re interested in including your YouTube videos to the CC BY program follow these steps: Once you upload a video on YouTube, select “Creative Commons Attribution license” from the “License and rights ownership” menu.

Will you include your videos into YouTube’s CC BY section? Share with us in the comments.

Amazon Planning 5 or 6 New Tablets

Amazon is planning to introduce five or six new tablet iterations of different sizes, including a 10-inch model, according to a report quoting the president of Staples.

Demos Parneros, president of U.S. retail for the chain, told Reuters that Amazon is making the new models to help sell digital products like MP3s, TV shows, apps and games now that physical versions of those products are starting to decline in sales. Parneros did not say when the new products would hit shelves. Reps from Amazon could not be reached for comment.

The report comes as rumors are buzzing about Amazon’s next tablet release. An AllThingsD report earlier this month predicted Amazon would release a thinner and lighter Kindle Fire 2 some time before September. Meanwhile, BGR reported that Amazon was planning two Kindle Fires — a 7-inch version called “Coyote” and a 10-inch “Hollywood” tablet. The Coyote, BGR says, has a dual-core processor just like the current Kindle Fire, while the Hollywood is said to pack a more powerful quad-core processor. A larger Kindle Fire would presumably offset Apple’s rumored release of a smaller iPad, which would vie with the current Kindle Fire.

Another persistent rumor is that Amazon will release an Android-based smartphone. The company may give more clues about its tablet strategy on Thursday, when it announces its second-quarter earnings

Why Facebook Needs a Want Button

Like what you see? There’s a button on Facebook for that. Like it so much that you want it? There… isn’t a button for that. But for company brand fan pages, there should be.

The presence of having a “want” button included on Facebook would ultimately have a different impact on a company brand page than that of the traditional like button. Depending on what you post, it could get a whole lot of use or not. A café changing its cover photo to a picture of a new seasonal summertime salad definitely gets plenty of clicks for wanting whereas a status update just wishing everyone a happy Friday and inquiring about weekend plans is best left to being liked (though if comments left behind include awesome weekend outings, those could very well be “wanted” just as much too.)

You want it, you got it! But for a brand’s profile page, how could such a button be put to best use? Let’s imagine and put a plan into action on what it would be like for Facebook to have this kind of feature available shall we?

Consider the Industry

The nice thing about having a button that implores that we “want” a specific item is that it can really help promote new products being rolled out at companies or even show off older products that have been recently revamped and enhanced. For retail brand pages this button would be extremely helpful to boosting the sales of hot new items, particularly during the holiday season in the case of chains like Macys and Target. Beyond retail, a want button is also ideal for the food, beverage, and entertainment markets all of which roll out seasonal items and have plenty of familiar favorites to highlight to the consumer.

Include a Visual!

Just as Pinterest has an image at the ready to repin, so should brand pages looking to make the most out of a want button. Including a picture not only maximizes the use of the new button, but may also be shared onto multiple Facebook profiles. Take care with how many photos you post onto the brand pages wall though – unlike Pinterest or even Tumblr, Facebook wasn’t designed as a microblogging website and nonstop pictures each day could clog the profile up.

If you know you want to feature a high number of pictures, a good idea would be to create a photo album and encourage users to visit it and click on the products that they want. Add new photos of products daily to keep ‘em coming back for more.

(Note: I’m talking about this button as though it’s real. Must remind self it’s not just yet, must remind self it’s not just yet…)

Copyright Permission. You Need It.

This is where it starts to get tricky because unlike Pinterest where many of the photos on the site don’t often link back to the original source, for Facebook to use a want feature would require that all of the images posted be copyrighted to the source posting them. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Even more crucial would be that the images would have to either include a URL link to the site where a visitor could find out more about the product or click through the picture to the website in order to buy it. After all, you did “want” it, didn’t you? To that end, the launch of such a feature would also require constant updates on products that sell out or are available in limited supply, both on the brand page and on the website.

Written originally by Deborah Sweeney. Article here

770,000 Users Demand YouTube-to-MP3 Conversion

Philip Matesanz, a 21-year-old German student studying computer science, believes that it should be easy to convertYouTube videos into downloadable .mp3s. His website, youtube-mp3.org, allows its more than one million daily users to do exactly that.

Google, however, disagrees. Last month, it reportedly sent Matesanz a cease-and-desist, claiming that his site’s function violates YouTube’s terms of service. The site is still up, but it no longer works as advertised.

In response to Google’s threat of legal action, Matesanz did two things: he turned to two experts in Germany to examine his case (they have produced reports defending Matesanz) and he asked his users and supporters to sign an online petition defending his site.

That petition took off like wildfire and now has more than 770,000 signatures from users across the world in just over two weeks.

In the petition, Matesanz draws a historical parallel between Google, YouTube and the content providers of yesteryear:

“For decades, people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast,” reads the petition.

“You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn’t want the public to have such technology. Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service.”

The core of the dispute involves youtube-mp3.org’s method of creating MP3s.

Google’s cease-and-desist letter reportedly claims that the site violates the terms of service of YouTube’s API, which prohibits using the API for downloading content as opposed to streaming it. However, Matesanz holds that his site doesn’t use the YouTube API, but gets data through another undisclosed means.

At a broader level, the youtube-mp3.org case is an example of the often conflicting interests of content providers and content consumers.

Google and YouTube make money from advertisements included with and alongside content streamed directly from YouTube; that money is lost when consumers convert streaming videos into MP3s. However, hundreds of thousands of YouTube users clearly desire a way to access YouTube audio content in MP3 form (perhaps for offline listening), a service which Google and YouTube do not provide.

The argument, however, may be becoming moot: Last month, Google introduced a way to watch some content while offline for users of the YouTube Android app, possibly signaling a trend that it will continue to make content more accessible in the future.

When asked for comment, a YouTube spokesperson said, “we have always taken violations of our Terms of Service seriously, and will continue to enforce these Terms of Service against sites that violate them.”

Should Google and YouTube allow all users to download content for offline viewing? Share your thoughts in the comments.

How to Promote a Brand on Social Media

There is no denying that social media is vastly growing day by day. It has become the most successful medium of communication among the people. The rise of Facebook and twitter has taken the online marketing onto a whole new level; most of the companies are using social networking sites as a key variable for their brand promotions. It’s fast and highly influential way of promoting brands and products. It is more cost effective than spending your budget on online advertising such as banner ads or PPC (Pay Per Click).

We have compiled a list of techniques for promoting your brand on social media. A few of the major techniques are shared below:

Building Relationship with the users:

Creating a Twitter or Facebook fan page doesn’t mean that your brand is promoted. Consider this as you are entering into a party room and to make contact you need to socialize with others or as we say engage with the user. Make sure that whatever you are sharing is interesting and worth sharing, so it can build interest of the users and project your brand image as an innovative andoutstanding idea that encourages users to interact and engage themselves with the brand.

Update your content regularly:

This is very important for any brand and product that there content is always updated and is related to the market trends. Because users are mostly not interested in the past details, they always look for the latest and new offerings. So keep in mind if you are posting or sharing anything besensible and intelligent.

More Viral Promotion:

Always keep in mind that whenever you are offering something new to your fans make it viral to increase its value. Some of the social networking sites like “Groupon”is following this strategy. Viral promotions can enrich user’s voice in social media.

Visibility:

Social media will give you visibility and enhance your target market. It will provide you a chance to present your qualities to the wider audience.When users subscribe to your page or “like” your brand, they can see all the updates and activities. If things are interesting the users will repost or share your activity with his/her friends and try to be part of the activity.

Respond Quickly:

Another important part of developing a better social media strategy is to keep in touch with your fans or customers by responding them as quickly as possible, so they feel themselves worthy and valuable. It becomes very easy for brands to engage users and build their brand loyalty among the people by responding early.

Conclusion:

At the end, there are so many things that you can do to increase your audience. Using social media platforms gives you an edge over your competitors (especially from those who are not using social media). Remember, you presence on social media platform is not the only key for the success of online marketing, it’s the interaction with users that counts.

Twitter Search Gets Smarter, Adds Autocomplete

In the age of Google Instant, where we expect search results to complete themselves before we’re done typing, Twitter’s search feature has long seemed a little slow and dumb. Can’t it guess at what search term or person you’re looking for? Can’t it autocorrect your spelling? Can’t it just search among the tweets of people you follow?

Well, now you can do all of that, in theory. The microblogging service took the wraps off a new smarter search product Friday, after teasing us late Thursday with a brief announcement that search and discovery on Twitter was about to change “forever.”

The changes, which are rolling out to all users on mobile Twitter and Twitter.com, fall into three categories.

First, there’s the Google Instant-like guessing. “Search autocomplete shows you the most likely terms for your query as you enter it — especially useful if you’re trying to follow the hashtag for an event or you’re looking for a certain Twitter account,” writes engineer Frost Li on the Twitter blog. “You can select your query from the drop-down menu even before you finish typing it.”

Search autocomplete will also correct your spelling if there’s a common search term with slightly different letters — a feature Google has boasted for years.

Secondly, Twitter says, search is about to get a lot smarter when it comes to related terms, hashtags and accounts. “If you search for a topic for which people use multiple terms,” says Li, “we will provide relevant suggestions for terms where the majority of that conversation is happening on Twitter.”

And finally, once your search is complete, you have a new option to narrow it down: click on tweets from people you follow. This will appear next to the regular search filter options, “top” and “all.” In other words, if you want to forget the rest of Twitter exists outside your circle of follows, the company just made it a lot easier.

Is smarter Twitter search working for you yet? Let us know in the comments.