Essential viewing for freelancers and agencies

May 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Not sure why I didn’t post this earlier, but it’s such a good video I thought it was worth belatedly sharing. Mike Monteiro from Mule Design covers some of the issues for a new creative services business around the most important, and most often ignored area of actually getting paid.

It really is essential viewing if you want to avoid making some potentially expensive mistakes, and it’s also pretty entertaining as long as you don’t mind a bit of swearing, as you might have guessed from the title…

 

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

One of those videos it’s worth saving and rewatching every so often to remind you that you need to be taking care of business when you’re running one!

Filed Under: Consultancy, Freelancing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Taiwan police ask Plurk for IP addresses of users

April 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Microblogging service Plurk has been pretty successful outside the U.S, but having already been the victim of a ban in China (followed by MSN China cloning the site with their own product), the service has now been asked by Taiwan police to provide the IP addresses of some Plurk users, without being supplied with a court order by police.

As reported on Global Voices, Alvin Woon, one of the founders of Plurk, posted a message saying he’d been asked by police for the information.

Unless a court deems it necessary, what the police are asking is technically illegal. But it turns out that it appears to be usual practice for the police, who have confirmed that they would make around 10 such requests to Plurk every month. Since Woon is not located in Taiwan, and the Plurk servers are in America, he hasn’t complied with the request.

But obviously Plurk isn’t the only website being asked for user details and IP addresses, and other companies are being more cooperative with police enquiries. Given current laws being proposed and implemented in the UK, U.S and Australia, along with the approach of China to internet freedom, it’s more important than ever to have an understanding of your rights, your privacy, and the attititude of any social network/blog/hosting company/ISP that you use. One book I’d recommend for a greater understanding of the nature of law on the internet and how it can be changed by Governments would be Code: Version 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

Filed Under: Microblogging, Plurk Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Win a lottery or get served high court papers with Twitter

October 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Two quite different uses of Twitter popped up in my feeds, and both worth sharing to see the wild diversity of uses of what is effectively a simple communication tool:

First up is the TwitterLotto project (HT to Twitip), which was created by a university student as a marketing experiment which allows you to win a prize simply by following @twterlotto. And as visits to the site’s home page increase, the prize goes up (currently at $23). On December 25, 2009 a winner will be chosen, validated as a real person actively using Twitter and then awarded the cash.

And on the flip side, the impersonator of a political blogger named Donal Blaney is being served an injunction by a law firm – via Twitter! It will be served at 1930BST and will include a link to the text of the full court order. It’s being done this way because the impersonator has remained anonymous – and apparently injunctions can already be served via email in the UK, so it’s not as removed from the norm as you might have thought. (HT BBC/Mashable)

Filed Under: twitter Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Publish to Twitter with a voice message…

September 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

New service Twitwoop will help anyone who has an urge to tweet but can’t type at the time, as it allows you to publish to Twitter with a voice message from your phone.

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Register your phone with the service, call the access number relevant to your location in the U.S, UK, Norway, Netherlands, Ireland, France or Germany, and your message gets published as long as you haven’t masked the identity of your phone – if there’s no caller ID, the message goes into the public Twitwoop timeline on Twitter.

It’s been created by German Voice Application Service Provider, Woopla, and the FAQs states that it uses the official ‘Sign in with Twitter’ process to avoid using your login and password.

All good so far.

Interestingly, the service doesn’t say how your voice becomes text, although it does state in the Terms of Service that your messages will be available to anyone on the internet with a direct link in your tweets. So hopefully not making it liable for the same debates and intrigue as voice-to-text service Spinvox has been experiencing.

Things not to like:

I can live with the service auto-posting that I’m using it, especially as I can delete it.

Not so happy about the following:

‘You furthermore accept to receive private messages from twitwoop on your private account or become informed about new twitwoop services or features using your registered phone number.

By signing up to twitwoop you automatically become a follower of twitwoop on Twitter.

You can delete the twitwoop messages from your timeline at any time because those were placed acting on your behalf. Deleting the files however can only be done by calling one of twitwoop’s numbers where you can delete your number and all of your data.’

So if I accidentally upload something I want to remove, I have to go through a phone menu to delete everything?

And in the meantime I have no choice about receiving private messages to Twitter, or worse to my phone?

Hmmmmm

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