A LOT of people leech my images for blog posts, forum posts and social networking profiles. When it's a one-off and it isn't too much of a bandwidth hog, I chalk it up as a cost of doing business. Honestly, the face that 15 year olds think my work is cool enough for their purposes pleases me to no end. Still, I do put a stop to it under several circumstances- with high traffic sites, when people use large images (over 50k) for message board avatars or signatures and when people basically redistribute a leeched image as part of a theme.

Such is the case with this MySpace theme.

At least it was the case. For a while that theme used the top edge of one of my black book images as an accent. Since I moved the original source image as part of the site reorganization over at robreact.com, it was generating a lot of 404s. Investigating the 404s and seeing how often it was being used, I decided to use the leeching to my advantage with a little bit of an advertisement.

I guess they should be happy I'm so nice. There are a lot of less savory variations I could have chosen….

Reading a new article I co-wrote about social networks?

Yes.*

With tens of millions of active, loyal users and an unprecedented ability to differentiate users based on their interests and affiliations, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace offer a rich opportunity for events to increase their audience, focus their offerings, and extend the reach of their event beyond the convention hall.

Read the rest:

Using Social Networking to Market Meetings

My published writing credits have taken an odd turn over the past couple of months. Where in the old days they were almost entirely based around movies they now includes an article for Rare Book Review and this article for Association Meetings magazine.

Thanks to Rob Everton for getting me involved.

*and by "yes," I mean no. If the Celtics don't seal the deal tonight I'm going to be a bundle of nerves for the next two days. After the Patriots in the Super Bowl I'm not quite ready for another disappointment and I don't want to get down to a seventh game with the Lakers. Even though I think the Celtics are the superior team, injuries to key Celtics and the presence of Kobe are enough to make me sweat when thinking about a potential game seven.

I have nothing to do with this other than the fact that I work there*, but Cramer is starting up a Webcast Series. The first one will be on online video. Here's the blurb:

Best Practices in Online Video: A Platform Approach
Thursday, June 19, 2008 1:00 PM ET

These days, high-quality video is easily accessible not only on desktops and laptops, but also on just about every portable device, such as mobile phones and iPods. For these reasons, video has become the communications medium of choice for both corporate and consumer audiences. But still, many companies have questions about how to create online videos and incorporate them effectively into their marketing mix.

Join Cramer for a live, interactive webcast that explores what every marketer needs to know about online video with a panel of industry experts.

Tune in on June 19th to hear Rich Sturchio, Cramer’s executive vice president, creative services, present a panel discussion featuring industry experts from Brightcove, Permission TV and Interactive Video Technologies.

• Adam Berrey, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Strategy at Brightcove
• Matt Kaplan, Vice President of Creative and Client Services at PermissionTV
• Greg Pulier, Chief Technology Officer at Interactive Video Technologies

You will learn:

• How utilizing online video platforms can enhance your marketing campaign
• How social media supports online video, from viral sharing to user comments and ratings
• When to use professionally-produced content or guerilla-style production
• When to go live or on-demand
• If video is effective in advertising
• About the future of video consumption and what it could mean for your business

A pretty comprehensive set of topics, so if you're at all interested in the subject (and honestly, if you work on the web, you should be) be sure to check it out on the 19th.

*so I can't take any credit if it's really cool

Sherlock Holmes, bitches!

Have I ever posted this picture of me giving Professor Moriarty a piece of my mind?

I'm such a Sherlock Holmes nerd.

"I hack, baby", sung to the tune of "I Get the Job Done," by Big Daddy Kane.

I'm a Feedburner user. One of the tabs in their "publicize" section is a link to a Sping Widgets feed widget that you can use to put your feed on places like Myspace. I thought that seemed like a no brainer, so I did it up real quick and inserted it into my interests. It looked fine, I just couldn't click any of the links*. Apparently, Myspace disables links in Flash objects, which kind of kills the point of having my feed posted over there. Not to be discouraged, I gave it a few minutes though and came up with a pretty simple hack to at least fake it enough to make the thing worthwhile.

What did I was wrap the whole thing in a DIV with height and width equal to the widget. Inside of that I added an empty anchor tag pointing back here. I figured If I couldn't link to individual posts I might as well get some links back to the main blog page and people could figure it out for themselves. I styled that anchor thusly:


/*give it its own height and width*/
display:block;
width:230px;
height:280px;
/*set the position to absolute, so we can (a) stack it and (b) out it where it needs to go with pixel precision*/
position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:20px;
z-index:20;
/*give it a background color and then blow away the background color with opacity without this there's no "hook" for clicks. It's just an empty box I probably could have achieved the same effect with a transparent background image but this is bandwidth free.*/
background-color:#333;
opacity:.05;
filter: alpha(opacity=05)


You can see what the anchor looks like, in terms of positioning, with this example:

As you can see I left room for the scrollbar and the menu.

One thing that makes this work right out of the box is the fact that the Spring Widget code already sets wmode to transparent which allows HTML elements to sit on top of a Flash Movie.

Here's some copy and paste code, if you're into that sort of thing:

*This was just copying and pasting the code as pure HTML I'm not sure if using the Spring Widgets "insert into myspace" button works any better as I couldn't get it to actually insert the code into my profile.