8/3 Mashable!

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Mashable! - Social software and social networking 2.0. HOW TO: Customize Your YouTube Channel August 2, 2009 at 7:32 pm YouTube recently redesigned channel pages to make them more dynamic and easier to customize. The beta channels are now a hodgepodge of your uploads, favorites, playlists, and numerous in-channel editing options. Should you upgrade to the new design, you have a greater chance of creating an eye-catching channel that’s likely to keep your viewers engaged for longer. YouTube originally made the redesigned channels available to a select group of elite members and new users. Now however, the video site is letting anyone upgrade their channel, and eventually they’ll be moving all remaining channels over to the new version. As previously reported, the redesign allows for wider videos and better organized pages; the result is a viewer-friendly experience centered around your content. As such, we wanted to highlight some of the best ways to maximize the redesigned channels and show you how to customize them to your liking. The Basics First things first: upgrade your channel. There’s absolutely no reason not to. The new design is sleeker, more viewer-friendly, and is just more dynamic than the old design. Plus, it’s pretty painless to upgrade. Simply visit your Channel Design page and click “Upgrade my channel.” You’ll notice immediately that most of your previous channel customizations are already carried over in the new design, which is good news if you put a lot of time and effort into designing your channel’s look and feel. Now that you’ve upgraded, you’ll immediately want to edit the video content settings for your newly enhanced channel. Thankfully this can be done with just a few clicks. Find the edit button in upper right-hand corner to view the content selection menu. You can opt to display uploaded videos, favorites, playlists, or a combination of all three. If you select the playlists option, you can then individually select the video playlists you want to include. You also have the option to adjust the featured content set and the featured video for your channel. Since the featured video is the one channel visitors will see first, we suggest you peruse your options to find the right setting. In-Channel Editing In-channel editing is the new black on YouTube, and though basic in concept — you can edit everything without leaving your channel — it’s a key time-saver and an incredibly useful upgrade. You’ll notice that the new design is replete with editing options everywhere. You’ll want to take advantage of these to tweak the information displayed about you, your activity, and your videos. Here’s what you can edit right from the channel page: recent activity, privacy settings, displayed settings for profile information, subscriptions, subscribers, friends, and channel comments, as well as channel settings, themes, and modules. You’ve got a lot of power right at your fingertips. When it comes to theme and module editing, users with no CSS or design experience will find themselves completely at ease with beautifying their channel design. The themes and colors are pretty self-explanatory, so you can pick a preset theme, start toying with colors, and get an as-it-happens preview while you tweak.  You can still upload a custom background image and adjust the coloring for every element of your channel. Once you’re done, just click save to publish the new design publicly. Also make sure to take a quick look at the modules tab if you’re interested in removing or displaying content modules. You can do away with, or include, these modules: comments, recent activity, friends, subscribers, groups, and subscriptions. Extra Channel Tips Adjusting background image file size: One annoying thing about YouTube background images is that they’re constrained to 256 KB, which means if you have a high resolution image, you’re out of luck unless you’re able to compress the file size with a photo editor. If all of this sounds foreign, not to worry. An easy way to downsize your image is to use an online photo editor like Picnik. Simply upload or access your online images from Flickr or Facebook, and click the “Save and Share” tab. You’ll notice that you can select from a few different photo formats (try JPG), and then use the sliding bar to compress the image file size below 256 KB. Click to save your photo, and now all you need to do is upload it to YouTube (Edit Channel -> Themes and Colors -> show advanced options). Expand your color palette: YouTube also only lets you select from 64 different colors, but you can really use any browser-safe color by inputting the right hex code. Why not use a web color chart like this one to have even more choices? Just enter the code of your choosing into the box next to the color palate, hit enter on your keyboard, and your preview is instantly updated. Keep up with what’s new: YouTube has an under the radar blog dedicated to the Channels Beta project. Since this is a beta offering, YouTube is pushing out changes and adding new features on a very regular basis. Subscribe to this blog to be the first to know about what’s new. Reviews: Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, picnik Tags: channel, customize, youtube Quote 5 Words From the Associated Press? That'll Be $12.50 August 2, 2009 at 6:07 pm We’ve known that the Associated Press has some odd policies in regards to social media and the web for a while. The AP social media policy says that employees need to control not only what they said on Facebook, but what their friends said as well. We also got wind last week of the AP’s plan to find where anyone uses AP material online in an attempt to stop what it considers unauthorized use of its content. To say it’s causing controversy would be an understatement. Part of the AP’s plan is to charge for use of its articles if you quote 5 words or more. They signed a deal with iCopyright in April to accomplish this goal. iCopyright is a widget that handles not only print and email, but republishing as well. Well the widget’s starting to get some attention, if only for the jaw-dropping starting price the AP is charging for quoting its stories: $2.50 per word. The process goes like this: you copy and paste the excerpt or article you want to reprint. Next you pick your price, ranging from $12.50 for five words to $100 for 251 words or more. Here’s the price list, if you are not an educational or non-profit organization (they get a discount): While this isn’t particularly shocking, it’s still part of a series of disturbing statements and actions the AP has taken in terms of web content. This plan’s going in the wrong direction Let’s first be fair to the AP before we heap on the criticism. They’re the source of a lot of our news and a valuable journalistic asset. They are also trying to protect their content from what they see as illegitimate copying and unfair use. Still, the entire policy is a battle against the direction of progress, and the price point is way off. Social media helps spread information faster and to more people, which is the point of a wired service like the AP. The company’s complaint is that blogs and news aggregators (i.e. Google News) are taking its content and making all the advertising revenue. What they forget is that they provide a great deal of traffic and attention to content creators in the process. We don’t know the answer to this conundrum. But we do know that the AP’s current plan is riddled with holes. Laws protecting fair use come into play and are essential to freedom of the press. The AP really needs to define their policy on fair use vs. reprinting. It also seems obvious that no small-scale publisher is going to pay $12.50 to quote a line from an article. when quoting and linking on the web are common practice. What do you think? Is what the AP’s asking for fair? Or is the price absurd? Let us know in the comments. [via Hacker News] Reviews: Facebook, Hacker News Tags: Associated Press Facebook Leads to Suicide, Warns UK Head of Roman Catholic Church August 2, 2009 at 3:12 pm Are Facebook, MySpace, and cell phones creating a suicide-prone generation of children? Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, strongly believes so. He also points the finger at SMS and football players (soccer in the U.S.) dehumanizing society and eroding our social skills. The Archbishop made his many thoughts on social media clear in a lengthy interview with The Telegraph. His comments come on the heels of the tragic news that 15 year old Megan Gillan overdosed on pain killers due to bullying on Bebo. The Archbishop’s Words Here are the Archbishop’s thoughts on emailing and texting: “I think there’s a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.” On Facebook and MySpace: “Facebook and MySpace might contribute towards communities, but I’m wary about it. It’s not rounded communication so it won’t build a rounded community … If we mean by community a genuine growing together and a mutual sharing in an interest that is of some significance then it needs more than Facebook.” On communication increasingly occurring through digital channels: “We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point. Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.” On suicide: “Among young people often a key factor in them committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they’re desolate.” He also claimed that Facebook and social networking are causing teenagers to value the number of friends they have, rather than the quality of their relationships: “It’s an all or nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up an identity; a collection of friends about whom you can talk and even boast. But friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it’s right.” It’s Really About Personal Responsibility I’ll stop there because we can sum up his quotes into one argument: overuse of Facebook and social media are leading to the decay of society. While he does not say we should stop texting, he strongly implied that technology is destroying communities and, yes, encouraging suicides among teenagers. His points aren’t without merit; overaddiction to almost anything, whether it’s a narcotic, Twitter, or World of Warcraft, often leads to negative outcomes. Still, our experience has shown us that social media helps build communities rather than tears them down. It has brought people together rather than isolated them. Social media’s the straw man of this debate. It’s easy to blame new technologies for breaking down the fabric of society. It doesn’t go to the root of the problem, though. For example, it’s misleading to point the finger squarely at social networking in the Megan Gillan Bebo bullying case. Bullying is not specific to the web – it happens on the playground just as much as it happens on the Internet. The issue isn’t the medium in which the harassment occurred, but the harassment itself. So before we start throwing our cell phones into the fire and deleting our Facebook accounts, we should take a look at ourselves first and realize that new technology can almost always be used for the betterment of society. It’s up to us to be responsible with the power of new technology, and to avoid the pitfalls of human nature. Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter Tags: catholic church, facebook, social media, suicide Twitter Bloodbath: World of Blood Games Move to Twitter August 2, 2009 at 1:36 pm At their peak, the World of Blood series had a dominant presence on Facebook. The series consisted of four primary time-consuming online RPGs: Blood Lust, Skies of Blood, City of Blood, and Elven Blood. Combined, they have hundreds of thousands of active users – Elven Blood alone had over 240,000 players. Then Facebook dropped the hammer hard on World of Blood’s developer, Patrick Shyu. They banned all of his apps this past April after he broke the Facebook Terms of Service multiple times (i.e. illegal notifications, misleading links, etc.). Now three months later, the World of Blood games have been revived as a series of Twitter games in the same vein as Spymaster. Prepare yourselves for a Twitter bloodbath. The basics If you’re unfamiliar with the World of Blood games, they are essentially massive multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs), similar to the popular World of Warcraft. While each Blood game is different in theme (i.e. Skies of Blood is post-apocalyptic in setting, while Blood Lust focuses on vampires), the core gameplay is the same: earn cash, construct buildings, embark on missions, buy weapons, level up, and build alliances with friends. The World of Blood games were infamously known for their viral tactics, and 140blood is no different. When you first join (via Twitter Oauth), it automatically tweets from your account that you’ve joined. It also sends out tweets for events like your purchases, completing quests, etc. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any discernible way to turn off these auto-tweets as well. If you’re going to play a World of Blood game, prepare for a lot of game-generated tweets. As we discussed in a previous article World of Blood games have sneaky monetization tactics. Like Mob Wars, if you want extra cash or life to upstage your competition, you can purchase points to help you do just that. Avoid completing the shady offers though – you’ll just end up paying for strange supplements and products you never wanted. There’s a good reason Facebook banned World of Blood While the actual gameplay of the 140blood games is solid, the entire World of Blood series still concerns us. Without any way to control when you tweet, World of Blood has a great deal of control over your Twitter account, though their implementation of Oauth eases our concerns. We’re also wary of any service that offers you benefits in return for “completing offers” of free trials that end up not being so free. Facebook banned Mr. Shyu and all of his games back in April for a reason. In fact, the Facebook team made a concerted effort to completely cleanse the Fb Platform of his influence: "If you have evidence of any apps still available on Platform that are operated by Patrick Shyu, then please let us know. To reiterate an earlier post, there are more enforcements on Platform than you are aware of, since Facebook does not publicize enforcement actions." That’s not to say his current game is not legitimate or entertaining: on the surface, both seem to be true. Still, Facebook doesn’t ban apps with 240,000 users very often. Play 140blood at your own risk. Reviews: Facebook, Twitter Tags: 140blood, facebook, twitter, World of Blood   This email was sent to topblogsofthenet@gmail.com.  Manage Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? 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