I’ve recently signed up to Pinterest, among all the hype. Now rarely do I read through the TOS of pretty much any service I sign up for, as I assume most of us don’t. Well more fool us!

It’s just as well there are people out there who do read these things because it brings our attention to extracts such as this:

…you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content…
read it in full here

Now I’m no expert in these matters but it seems as though we give up any copyright ownership over anything we post on the site and allow Pinterest to use it in any way they feel free.

I’m glad I’ve only used the site for a bit of fun up to now and nothing serious or business related. Many out there are actually trying to implement it into their marketing plan and that worries me. They’re putting their own products and designs on the site and this could lead to messy situations, as mentioned in the article.

What are your thoughts on this, I wonder?

Some more interesting reading:
Pinterest Copyright, TOS: To Agree or Not To Agree
Hey Photographers! Pinterest is Not for You
Pinterest Might Be Enabling Massive Copyright Theft

To make life simpler, specifically when there’s a comment thread you want to keep track of, you can use a relatively new feature in Hootsuite. It lets you create a dedicated stream for any Facebook story.

I use this when administering Facebook pages and there’s a popular story I want to keep track of. It’s also great for checking up on heated discussions in groups. You can even use it to follow people’s chats without them even knowing there’s someone keeping such a close eye.

To put it simply, this feature is a way of ‘bookmarking’ those comments and conversations that matter most or are important to you. Here’s how to do it:

Choose any Facebook stream you have in Hootsuite and once you find something of interest, something you might like to keep track of, just click on the arrow [as pictured below] and hit ‘Create Comment Stream’.

It really is as easy as that. What you’re left with is a new stream which holds all the activity on the story you were interested, housed in it’s own column. Perfect!

As with any stream in Hootsuite, you will get a visual notification when there is new activity in your new comment stream.

This week’s #HSUchat focused on the required Social Media skills and opportunities for ongoing training in your current position. While not in a full-time role, the skills I had proved invaluable and sought-after in the freelance experience I’ve gained.

The chat also brought up some interesting figures on the increase in Social Media jobs and the greater demand for these skills in general.

So whether or not you work in Social Media or Marketing specifically, what role does Social Media play on a day to day basis and did those skills help you get the job in the first place?

The Apps available from launch are YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and Get Satisfaction. With upcoming Apps said to be Disqus, Slideshare, Posterous, Salesforce Chatter, Constant Contact and Summify. So plenty to look forward to!

As you can imagine this further enables you to manage your personal, professional or company’s various profiles around the web without having to leave the Hootsuite Dashboard.

Hootsuite isn’t the first to introduce features like this. Seesmic has allowed you to expand the functionality of their desktop client with extensions for some time.

The choice of extensions Hootsuite have gone with seem pretty sensible and I’m looking forward to the upcoming ones and others further down the line. Yet another reason to use Hootsuite!

Annoyingly, every time I start Hootsuite, I have to enable https then disable it to get the Apps to work.This shouldn’t be a problem for long, as I’m told https will be supported in the future.

BT is the biggest ISP in the UK, serving around 6 million customers and was also recently ordered to block access to another file sharing site; Newzbin2.

The industry has fought hard to close The Pirate Bay itself, and failed. It still lives! Now it seems it’s plan is to take out the next link in the chain.

I don’t think the industry understands fighting the technology is the problem. They’re insistent in throwing their weight around and passing the blame. Even if they block it, people will find a way around it.

They need to adapt or die.

Flashback: I’ve written this with the current students studying the course I did two years ago. I’ve been thinking back at my own experiences at the time and since completing the course. This particular episode comes from a simple blog post I was asked to do as an assignment.

Some time ago I was given the task of writing a review of a cloud-based audio app. I was given the choice of Audioboo or Soundcloud. I wanted to review both, so I did. It’s just as well too. If I had only decided to go for Soundcloud, what follows might have never happened.

So I ended up doing a two-part review: Audioboo in the first part and Soundcloud in the second. Amazingly, after writing the first part of the review, I received a very cool comment. A chap by the name of Gaurav Mehta had asked me to review his Android app for Soundcloud.

This was a pretty cool thing to happen. Gaurav obviously kept tabs on news about Soundcloud and actively made a point of seeing what was being said. The people talking about Soundcloud, and Android (another subject I talked alot about) are the people he needed to reach out to.

At the time there was no official Soundcloud app for Android so I was pretty happy to hear about it. I reviewed the app, offered some honest feedback and Gaurav got back to me to say thanks and let me know some of the requests I’d made were in the works for the next release.

The point I’m trying to prove is that; just by writing about the subject you’re interested in then, given time, opportunities will open up.

Gaurav has been in touch recently to invite me to a private beta of another app he’s built but more on that another time

Keep blogging!

Anyway, it’s great to have already completed my studies and to now have the opportunity to visit in a different entity and pass on my experiences in the form of a mentor to other students. Specifically, I’m now being used as an example by my former lecturer, Helen Keegan. Helen is teaching the Social Media module which I completed nearly two years ago.

The reason for being invited back is because when I did the module, I instantly took to it and immersed myself in this world of online tools and platforms for collaboration and communication. At the time and for long after the rewards of this have been huge. I’ve made some great connections and have some amazing opportunities which just would’ve seemed impossible otherwise.

So my aim is to demonstrate and help sell Social Media to these students and show how it can not only play a huge part in their education but have a positive impact on their professional lives. Wish me luck!

To get started, all you need to do is re-authorise your account LinkedIn or set it up if you haven’t already. Once that’s done, when you go to add a new stream to a tab, you’ll see a few more options on the LinkedIn section.

You should now notice the tab titled ‘Job Search’. Everything from here is pretty straightforward: You drop in your keywords for the job you’re looking for and away you go!

From what I can gather, the detailed list of search functions on the LinkedIn site don’t work in the job search. If you want to narrow your search geographically, just throw in your country or city. That should bring you more relevant results.

Many students these days are turning to making their notes exclusively in digital form. This is something I’d completely recommend. Not only does it make it so much easier to cut/copy and rearrange when it comes to doing your assignments, but it’s also much easier to share, collaborate and back your work up…

This post was written for Student Furniture. Read the rest here

Klout now attempts to measure people’s influence on Google+. Which is amazing, giving the infancy of the platform.

I still feel the majority of the measurement comes from interaction on Twitter: No matter how many networks I link or take away, the score stays the same (provided Twitter is still connected). Maybe that’s just because it’s my strongest presence.

So, If you’re a lover or a hater of sticking a number on your social presence, at least it’s something. I do monitor my Klout score but make sure I take it with a bucket of salt and try not to live by it. If anything, it’s a good base to work from.

What’s your Klout score? Does it matter to you?