17. Creative Commons

You might have noticed this little logo on both this blog and the Library Learning 2.0 blog. It's a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists,
and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to
carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved"
to "Some Rights Reserved."

Creative Commons is an alternative to Copyright, it allows more use, a wider range of choices for distribution, reuse and attribution. You can go to the Creative Commons website choose among the options for how you'd like to share your work. The license can be applied to both works online and offline. There are books publish with the Creative Commons license. Flickr allows you to apply a license to all your photos, very handy for people looking for images to use, you can limit your search to only those you're allowed to use.

Links

• FAQ
• License options

16. Are you LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social network with a decidedly more "networking" feel. It was originally set up to allow people to do the sort of networking that happens at both conferences and company parties. The idea is that you connect with people you know, then if they know someone you would like to get to know, you can request an introduction. This is why the service stresses that you shouldn't link to, or connect to, people you don't actually know.
LinkedIn has a free basic service that lets you:

• Build and maintain a trusted professional network of unlimited size
• Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates
• Request and provide recommendations
• Create a professional presence on the web
• Request up to 5 Introductions at a time
• Search for and view profiles of other LinkedIn users

as well as a premium service that gives you a bit more access to other LinkedIn users. The free service, the one that I use, is good enough for most uses!
LinkedIn has, as all social networks do, a way for you to create a profile for other users to see. When you enter in all of the jobs you have held, the educational institutions you have attended and the various clubs, committees and any other ways you may have met people you would like to be linked to, you will be given a list of all of the other people who have worked in those jobs (at the same time you did) or attended those schools or belonged to those clubs/committees/etc. When you recognize someone, you can easily invite them to become "linked in" with you and they will be one of your connections, as soon as they approve the invitation. Through them, and their connections, you can grow your network and keep meeting new and interesting (and possibly helpful) people.
My LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/hastingsr if you want to see a profile in action (or make me a connection of yours...).

15. Last FM

Last.fm - is the music you want. Another music web2.0 site. Sign up for an account, tell it songs or artists you like and viola! Music just for you. It's easy just to go to Last.fm and sign up for an account to start listening!

Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalized recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.

Like other social networking sites you can:

• find friends



• add your music to Facebook, Myspace and/or blog.

14. Edit your photos - without PhotoShop

In library learning 2.0, we covered Flickr, the photo sharing application that has become so popular in the last few years. Today, we are going to revisit Flickr and one of it's newest features! Flickr has recently teamed up with Picnik, the online photo editing site, to offer basic online editing to it's users. With Picnik, you can crop, resize, add annotations (as I did here:



) and generally do basic editing to your images - without an expensive application like Photoshop installed on your computer. When you first get into Picnik (by clicking on the photo in your account that you want to edit, then clicking on the "Edit this photo" link above that picture) you are faced with a row of options, including sharpening and a red-eye fix. Click the button to get to the interface to make your changes, save the picture as a new photo or over the old photo and you are done!
If , however, you want to do more than just simple fixes to your photos, there is a "create" tab as well. This tab gives you the option to add annotations of text and arrows (as I did above) as well as creating image effects, adding frames or touching up photos that aren't quite right. Some of the options, however, do have the word "premium" running along the side of the option button. This means that you have to pay (even if you are a Flickr Pro user) to use that particular effect. There are a LOT of options that are free, though!
If that feature of Flickr's doesn't work for you, or you aren't a dedicated Flickr user, there are other options out there as well:

• Pixenate: This site lets you make edits, save the new image to disk, upload to Flickr or MySpace or store it on their site.
  
• Resizr: For basic resizing of images (for use in profile pics and the like), this site will resize them, then help you upload them or share them.
• Phixr: More advanced tools, and it requires a login to save your images, but it is a great replacement for basic "photoshopping" needs.
• Adobe Photoshop Express - just released last week, this is the "little brother" of Adobe's very expensive Photoshop program - no downloads needed!