Legal Resources for Bloggers
It was just a month ago that Dan Slee made this prediction about bloggers and the law:
“At some point I’m convinced someone will lose their house in the not too distant future over an internet blog post. It’s potentially that serious.”
With that in mind, I’m compiling this list of Legal Resources for Bloggers. My hope is that it’ll be a living document, and I’ll gladly update this with new links as I discover them, or as you send them to me. (Use the contact form or just leave a comment below.) I also hope this is beneficial for all bloggers, not just our hyperlocal crowd.
Legal Resources for U.S. Bloggers
EFF: Blogger’s Legal Guide
Based on my somewhat limited research, this is the pre-eminent resource for bloggers about the law. Lots of read and research.
Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP)
Its mission is “to provide legal assistance, education, and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media.” It offers a searchable legal guide.
Online Media Legal Network
A project of the CMLP (above), it “connects lawyers from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help.” Participating lawyers will “provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance.”
Media Bloggers Association (MBA)
Founded in 2004 by several well-known bloggers. Since its creation, the MBA “has provided a wide range of legal support services to hundreds of bloggers facing legal threats related to their blogs.”
Center for Internet and Society (CIS)
Information resource from Stanford University
CyberSLAPP.org
Created by “a coalition of civil liberties and privacy groups (listed below) who have come together to protect the right to speak freely and anonymously on the internet.”
Media Law Resource Center (MLRC)
The MLRC is a non-profit that was formed “to monitor developments and promote First Amendment rights in the libel, privacy and related legal fields.” See below for related links.
MLRC: Libel and Related Lawsuits Against Bloggers
The MLRC offers a list of cases (with links) in which bloggers have been sued.
MLRC: Legal Actions Against Bloggers
This is a blog from the MLRC that seems to serve the same purpose as the link above. It may be a replacement for that link.
Chilling Effects
A project that “aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities.”
100 Free DIY Legal Resources on the Web
A big list of links.
Legal Resources for U.K. Bloggers
U.K. bloggers are invited to send in links for this section. For now, I’ll link to a few blog posts I’ve found that address legal issues for bloggers.
Talk About Local: Libel, defamation – keeping it legal
Philip John: Getting serious about hyperlocal, part 1: Legal issues and MA Online Journalism: Law for bloggers and journalists with Paul Bradshaw
Dan Slee: BE LEGAL: Six things a hyperlocal blogger really should know about the law
Paul Bradshaw: Presentation: Law for bloggers and journalists (UK)
Legal Resources for Bloggers: Other Countries
This one’s all yours. Please send in any links which may be appropriate.
Thanks to all who’ve helped collate this resource in some way, whether you know it or not!
Turn Your Blog Into a Newspaper with Zinepal
Think of all the people in your neighborhood/town that are sitting in a doctor’s office reading magazines every day. Or sitting in the waiting room at the car repair shop. Or at the salon. Wouldn’t it be great if they were reading your blog instead of Ladies Home Journal or Sports Illustrated?
They can be reading your blog — without needing a laptop or smartphone — thanks to Zinepal.com, a service that takes any online content and turns it into a fairly customizable and printable publication. Before looking at how it works, let me show you what the final product looks like: Read more
Four Reasons Why Your Local Blog Needs a Mailing List
I’m thinking about creating mailing lists for our local blogs. I haven’t fully thought-out the mechanism for creating and managing these lists. A Yahoo Group? Do it myself? Some other e-mail platform? But I have figured out the Why.
Four Reasons Why Your Local Blog Needs a Mailing List
1.) Everyone uses e-mail. Few use RSS. E-mail is the number one online activity among Internet users in general. I don’t have any stats on this, but RSS adoption is certainly way behind e-mail use. I feel like we, as bloggers, tend to put all our faith in RSS as the tool for pushing our content to readers. But e-mail seems like the smarter, safer choice. (The closest stat I could find about this was from Pew Research earlier this year, which showed that 91% of online adults use e-mail, but only 32% read blogs. It’s in the third chart from the bottom. Not specifically RSS, but perhaps close. )
2.) People don’t want to learn RSS. On one of our local blogs, I set up a WordPress page about RSS. (See the Richland blog.) I purposely left such a page off the other blogs to see if the Richland blog would get more RSS subscribers from the tutorial being there; it hasn’t. Over time, all of our local blogs have had generally similar subscriber counts. You don’t have to teach people to use e-mail.
3.) E-mail is more ubiquitous. No matter where people go, their e-mail can go with them. You don’t need a smartphone to have e-mail on your phone; any web-enabled phone will do. Thanks to webmail services, you can check personal e-mail while at the office. It’s everywhere. Again, I don’t have any stats on this, but it seems safe to assume people don’t check RSS nearly as often as they check e-mail.
4.) E-mail is easier to share. Sure, Google Reader and other RSS tools offer sharing/bookmarking features. But again, is there anything easier than hitting the FORWARD button on your e-mail software and sending it to a friend or neighbor? Don’t think so. And even if sharing RSS feed item was easier, how many neighbors would be able to get it? Not nearly as many.
What Have Others Said?
Consider these two quotes from earlier this year about e-mail and local information:
1.) In Reason magazine, Jesse Walker wrote:
I’ve lived in two Baltimore neighborhoods, one in the city proper and one just outside the urban boundary in Towson. In both cases I learned almost immediately about every substantial local crime that had been reported to the cops—not by reading the police blotter, but by checking my email. Through the same lists, we were kept abreast of subjects involving everything from upcoming block parties to an effort to build a community swimming pool. And if we needed anything from a babyitter to a handyman, the lists were an instant source of informed advice.
2.) At SXSWi, Steven Johnson of Outside.in said this:
“Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half-mile of my house, and I don’t get an e-mail alert about it within half an hour, it’ll be a sign that something is broken.”
Your turn: Do you agree? Disagree? Maybe you already have a mailing list associated with your blog? If so, tell us what you use and how it’s working for you. If not, would you consider adding one? Comments are open. Go ahead and make this post better.
Why NOW is the Best Time to Start a Local Blog
What’s the saying? When one door closes, another one opens. Yep. That’s what’s happening right now:
Newspapers take a bus plunge: circulation plummets 10.6 percent
Average weekday circulation at 379 daily newspapers was down 10.6% in the first half of 2009, compared to the first half of 2008. Ouch. 24 of the top 25 US newspapers suffered circulation losses in the first half of 2009. Double ouch. Some of those declines were more than 20%. Triple ouch. The Nieman Lab post puts this into perspective:
“The 10.6-percent decline means that since last year, about 4.5 percent of U.S. households have given up reading a printed newspaper, and that printed newspapers now reach less than 40 percent of U.S. households.”
Don’t get me wrong, please. I subscribe to and read our local newspaper every day, even if they do disrespect local bloggers. I’m not rooting for newspapers to fail. Okay? Okay.
But let’s face it: For local bloggers, this is an Opportunity. With a capital “o.” When I wrote about why hyperlocal blogging works, decline of the traditional media was high on that list. If you’re thinking about starting a hyperlocal news blog, there’s no better time than now to do it. Here’s why:
- Your neighbors are starting to shift their news-reading habits. The web will soon replace traditional media as the primary source of news.
- Traditional media is struggling, newspapers especially. The numbers above offer plenty of evidence.
- Not only are papers struggling, but many of them haven’t yet figured out how to elegantly transition to the web. Chances are good that there’s a void in your area where online news is concerned.
- Building an audience typically takes time. Your local blog probably won’t be an instant success. Start now, get those beginner’s mistakes out of the way, and get into a routine. Learn what works and what doesn’t in your hometown, and keep doing the former.
This shift from traditional media to online media is still in progress. Over time, more and more of your neighbors will turn to the Internet for local news and information. If you start now, you’ll be better prepared to give them what they want when they find you. Don’t wait. Do it. Go.
How to Create a Local Newswire for your Blog
I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I don’t run hyperlocal news blogs. Yes, we post news, but it’s not “hard news” and we purposely stay away from potentially polarizing topics like politics. That’s because the main purpose of the blogs isn’t to be a news source, but to indirectly increase my wife’s visibility as a local real estate agent. We post about community events, school-related news, and stuff like that, while skipping accidents, crime, politics, and so forth.
But I also recognize that people reading our blogs might want some more local news, so just this past week we added what I’ve called a “local newswire” to each of our four local blogs. Here’s a screenshot from the newswire on our Richland real estate blog:
This might be a valuable page for any hyperlocal blogger, whether you run a news blog or not. The main requirement is that you’re using WordPress. (If someone wants to write similar instructions for another blog platform, let me know and I’ll gladly link to it or let you post it here as a guest article.) If you’re using WordPress, here’s how to do it.
How to Create a Hyperlocal Newswire
1. Download, install, and activate the Lifestream plugin. This plugin lets you aggregate an unlimited number of RSS feeds into a single page on your blog. (Or into a post, I suppose.) Lifestream has its own requirements (PHP 5, MySQL 5+, etc.), so check your hosting setup to make sure it’ll work.
2. Make a list of local RSS feeds that you want to pull into your newswire. Local newspaper, local TV, you name it. Just grab the URLs of each RSS feed and save it in a text file.
3. Add each RSS feed URL into the Lifestream admin/settings page. As you can see from the screenshot below, Lifestream pre-supports a few dozen types of feeds — Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and many more. I used a few of those, but mostly used the “Generic” RSS feed.
When you click on the “Generic” button there, it leads you to a short and simple form where you supply the feed URL. If you want, you can also give it a label that will show up on your public newswire page — like “WKRP News” or something like that.
If you want to have little customized icons like we do (see the Google and Yahoo icons in the first screenshot above), then you’ll need to create those (16 x 16 each) and indicate the URL for each icon when you add the feed. Or you can skip this and have the generic orange RSS feed icon show up each time. Your call.
4. Repeat step 3 for each feed you want to include in your newswire.
5. Create the newswire page. Just create the new page, give it a name and URL in your WordPress admin, and make sure to put
[lifestream]
as the page content. That’s all you need. Hit Publish and you’ve got a local newswire. Congrats! But wait, one more thing to share….
How to Handle Non-Specific RSS Feeds
If we had one blog for our entire region, the above is all I would’ve needed to do. But we have four blogs, one for each of the main cities in this area. And the local media covers all four cities — in other words, the local paper’s RSS feed includes news about all four cities, when we only want news from one city appearing on each blog.
How do you pull out news for a single city from an RSS feed that covers many cities?
Try Yahoo Pipes. Now listen, I’m one of the least technologically smart people I know. Programming makes my eyes glaze over and puts me to sleep. So if I can figure out how to use Yahoo Pipes, you can, too.
You’ll need a Yahoo account and all that stuff. Login to Yahoo, go to the Pipes URL above, and click the button to create a new pipe. Then here’s what I did:
1. Under the SOURCES tab on the left, click “Fetch Feed.” This adds a module to your pipe that lets you add any number of RSS feeds. Cut and paste the URLs of all the generic feeds into this module.
2. Under the OPERATORS tab on the left, click “Filter.” This adds a module that you can use to filter the content of your pipe. In my case, I’m taking the RSS feeds of all the local TV stations and the local newspaper and I’m going to filter them to include only stories that say “Richland” in the headline, and ignore stories that say “West Richland,” a separate town. (There are additional filtering options, but I’m just using this for now.)
3. Once you have both modules setup the way you want, make the pipe. Use the fun pipe-y interface to connect “Fetch Feed” to “Filter” and then connect “Filter” to “Pipe Output.” When you’re done, it should look something like this:
At this point, click the “Pipe Output” module to test what you’ve done. Some results should show up at the bottom of the screen, telling you that you’ve created your first Yahoo Pipe.
4. Wrap it up and get out of there. Save your pipe and give it a name if you haven’t already. Click the “Back to My Pipes” link, and then on that next page, click the name of your pipe — this will take you to the page that has the RSS feed of the pipe you just made.
5. Grab the pipe’s RSS feed URL and add it to Lifestream. Once you have the RSS feed URL, do the same thing you did in step 3 above when adding feeds to Lifestream.
Step 6 – pat yourself on the back for figuring out how to use Yahoo Pipes!
See It In Action!
If you’d like to see the four newswires we’ve just published, here are the links:
Richland Newswire
Kennewick Newswire
Pasco Newswire
West Richland Newswire
These are only a couple days old, so you’ll see that there’s still some cleanup work to do in places — fonts, font sizes, etc. And since they’re so new, I have no stats to share about how many times the pages get visited or anything like that.
Final Thoughts
I think there’s value in this kind of content no matter what kind of hyperlocal blog you have. For Cari and me, it adds a lot of news content to our blog — most of which we wouldn’t write about ourselves. But even if you do have a news blog, I think there’s value in aggregating other local news content so that your readers have a one-stop source for what’s going on locally.
As I mentioned, if there’s a way to do something similar on non-WordPress blogs, leave a comment or send me an email so I can link to your “how to” or invite to write one as a guest post. If you already have a newswire-type page on your blog, or have questions about what I’ve described above, the comments are open.
How To Find Free Photos for Your Local Blog
I’m a strong believer in the power of images. Add a memorable photo or two to a good blog post, and it can become a great blog post. I think this is especially true with local blogs, where readers may respond even more strongly to familiar images of local places or events — things they’ve seen out and about, but maybe don’t see too often online.
Sometimes, you can build entire blog posts around a photo. On one of our local blogs, I recently recently posted a photo of an elderly man trying to cool off at an outdoor fountain. Not the most amazing photo ever, but it certainly told the story about the weather we’ve been experiencing.
That was a photo I took myself, but you don’t always have to rely on your own camera skills; you can find free photos online, and use them to spice up your hyperlocal blog. The lazy way is to search Google images, find a photo, steal it, and publish your blog post. That’s not what this post is about, nor is it something I’d ever recommend. If you’re going to use someone else’s photos and don’t want to pay, please play by the rules and be fair to the photographers. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is technically a non-profit organization, but when most of us talk about CC, we’re referring to the system of licensing that lets content creators indicate how and where others may use their content. Creative Commons applies to any type of content – photos, articles, sounds, videos, you name it. It’s a supplement to the traditional copyright law that says “all rights reserved” when you create something. Creative Commons lets you say, Yes, I created and own this work, but you may use it for free under certain conditions. Here’s a list and explanation of the current Creative Commons licenses.
Where to Find Free Photos for Local Blog Posts
There are several places where you can search specifically for photos that have been licensed via Creative Commons.
1. Flickr Creative Commons search
Photographers can apply a Creative Commons license to their photos when uploading them to Flickr. And Flickr conveniently lets you search/browse images that match each type of license. When I’m blogging and in need of a photo, I stick with the “Attribution License”, which lets me use the image in any way I want as long as I give credit to the owner.
For example, on my Small Business Search Marketing blog, I was writing an article a couple months ago called When Local Keyword Research is a Dead End. I wanted a good, strong “dead end” image to illustrate the article. I used the link above to search Flickr for photos tagged with “dead end,” and found a great photo of a street sign in decay. It was perfect:
And since the license was “Attribution Only,” I was free to use the image, edit it, add my own text to it, etc., as long as I credited the photographer (which I did at the end of the blog post).
In terms of local blogging, you may think that Flickr won’t have any photos of your home town that can be licensed, but don’t give up that quickly. Try it. Try different license types if need be. Earlier this year, I needed a photo to illustrate a post on our Richland Real Estate Blog, Hanford Tour Schedule Announced. Sure enough, Flickr had several to choose from. And this isn’t exactly a booming metropolis we’re talking about.
1a. Flickr Groups
A second Flickr option is to search Flickr Groups for groups about your area. No matter how small your hometown is, I’m willing to bet there’s a group on Flickr where local photographers are uploading pictures. Now, these people may not be granting free usage of their photos … but there’s nothing to stop you from introducing yourself and politely asking if you can use a certain image on your blog.
2. Yahoo Advanced Image Search
A couple months ago, Yahoo added a Creative Commons search option to its advanced image search page. If you want to edit the photo in any way, be sure to click the “Remix, tweak, build upon” option, and if you’re using the photo on a commercial web site or blog, click the “Commercial use” box, too.
One drawback here is that Yahoo only searches Flickr photos at the moment, so it’s pretty much redundant to what I described in option #1 above.
3. Google Advanced Image Search
One of the options on Google’s advanced image search page is “Usage Rights.” This is where you go to search for photos with specific licenses applied to them. Google will search Flickr and other sources, so it may be a better source of free-to-use photos than Flickr itself.
“Labeled for reuse” is the equivalent of the Creative Commons “Attribution License,” so choose that if you plan to edit or modify the image before using it. Google only introduced this recently, so I haven’t had a chance to use it much yet.
4. FreeFoto.com
You can use web-sized photos from FreeFoto.com provided that you provide attribution to the image and a link to FreeFoto.com. But you cannot edit the images in any way. There are limitations, though. Click on the link for “USA” photos, and FreeFoto.com tells you that only photos from the east and west coast are in their system.
5. Morgue File
Photos from MorgueFile can be used commercially, can be edited, and you don’t even have to provide attribution to the source or photographer. Here, too, the number of local photos for your area may be limited. A search for “Seattle,” for example, only brings up 129 matching photos. A search for “Kennewick,” one of the cities near me, has no matching photos.
6. stock.xchng
Recently bought by Getty Images, this site will show you both free images in its own system, plus some very inexpensive options from the popular iStockPhoto.com site. A search here for “Seattle” produces 302 matching photos. It even shows three photos when I search for “Kennewick.” Individual photographers can set their own usage rules on each photo, but the site’s image usage policy is a bit confusing on the whole.
Final Thoughts
At this point, Flickr and Google appear to be the best places to find free photos for use on your local blog. There are several free photo sites in addition to the three listed above, but my impression is that finding local photos on sites like these will be a hit-and-miss affair.
If you have a favorite source of free photos, please drop a note about it in the comments!
-
-
Featured Video
