Bloggers use, and don’t use, Creative Commons Licenses for a variety of reasons. Some feel that it is a great way to give back to the community, others use CC licensing as a form of promotion, encouraging their content to be used with attribution, and others feel that it is a way to promote copyright reform.

However, Creative Commons can actually provide bloggers benefits that go well beyond the buttons and badges. In the uncertain copyright climate of the Web, having a firm lawyer-written license, regardless of what it says, can have huge benefits over the ambiguity that comes with not having one.

Here are just five less-promoted ways that choosing a CC license can help you, your site and your content, even as you surrender some of your rights in a particular work. read more

Happy Monday, folks! First off, I’m sorry there was no Movable Type Monday last week. Seemed like most of the community had taken off for the holidays, so I decided to hold what I had for an extra week. But now it’s a new year and there’s lots of new stuff to talk about.

Plugins

Custom Header — Byrne Reese put out a new plugin for uploading and customizing the header image on your blog. Custom Header handles the whole process of uploading, cropping, and positioning your banner image. This will be great for personalizing template sets, and it modifying an existing template set to use this plugin looks very straightforward.

Share — This plugin lets you add an “email to a friend” form to your blog posts. Created by Dan Wolfgang, Share is customizable and works with MT’s junk filters. Thanks, Dan!

Tips & Tutorials

Besides his Share plugin, Dan also recently wrote instructions for using his Poll Position plugin with jQuery. Poll Position lets you add polls to your blog. I’m a huge jQuery fan, so I’m glad to see Dan write this up.

Beau Smith wrote improved installation instructions for the Action Streams plugin. Looking at Beau’s method, it seems odd Action Streams isn’t set up this way to begin with. Glad somebody explained the right way to do it.

Writer Susan McNerney posted instructions on changing your banner image. It’s clear that Susan was frustrated by how much trouble it was to change her banner. Sounds like she needed Byrne’s Custom Header plugin.

Over at TMCnet, Tom Keating out does himself, writing a tutorial that offers several things one can do with MT assets. He starts with listing recent image assets linked to entries, then creates a related entries widget that includes images, and finally shows how to add images to the FastSearch plugin. Thanks, Tom!

Finally, John Walker describes how to install Image::Magick on CentOS 5.2 for your Movable Type blog. His instructions may not be limited to MT, but since ImageMagick is one of the most difficult things I’ve had to install for any blog platform, I wanted to share his instructions.

What have you done with MT this week? Let us know in the comments.

Twitter is being used in a phishing scam to obtain your login credentials, using a fake login site under different domain to try and trick you to fill in your username and password. They are using direct messages to do this, and supposedly uses tricked accounts to widen their scam. Read the Twitter blog post for more.

Always make sure that you sign in on twitter.com! That way you’ll know that you’re not sending your login credentials through an unknown party. You might even want to take it one step further and just not click any links in the notification emails sent out that tells you you’ve got a DM. Just go to twitter.com instead, and click the DM link in the right column and you’ll be in the clear.

Scott Campbell, a 13-year-old entrepreneur, has launched a new Scottish blog-centric social network called ScotBlog.net.

Aimed at anyone living in Scotland or with Scottish ancestry, it has many of the same features found in other social networking sites such as the ability to create profiles, add friends, join groups, send private messages, and maintain a blog.

The main aim of the website is to create a safe, fun community for anybody to use, from tech savvy users to silver surfers,” says Campbell. read more

Two-thirds of moms use five or more forms of technology every day to stay in touch with their families, consume and compose content, and manage their lives.

That’s according to recent research from BSM Media, published in “Mom 3.0: Marketing with Today’s Mothers by Leveraging New Media & Technology”.

The report predicts that video blogs (vlogs), podcasts, social networking and microblogging will increase in popularity over the coming year. read more

WordPress 2.7 downloads now passing 800,000. WordPress goes to the Supreme Court. Weblog Tools Collection announces college scholarship fund for WordPress students. WordPress 2.7 problems with XML-RPC. WordPress.com annual wrap up features dramatic statistics and features. Analysis of top WordPress Plugin authors in the WordPress Plugin Directory - who is on top? Chicago Breast Cancer Marathon call for WordPress men to march. And more WordPress news, security information, Plugins, Themes, and tips.

WordPress News

WordPress Men Called to Marathon for Breast Cancer: Brian Gardner is calling on Chicago/Midwest WordPress male fans to join him August 7-9, 2009, for the 60-mile marathon for the Chicago Breast Cancer event. He claims it will be a great journey talking WordPress and blogging non-stop.

WordPress Goes to the Suppreme Court: The community blog of Londonderry NH.net, in Londonderry, New Hampshire, used their WordPress blog in defense of their case on school funding before the Supreme Court of New Hampshire and the Senate. According to Steve Young of Londonderry NY.net, when asked about sharing some WordPress history, he said:

For us it was the fact that it could make history in the way we used it. April 30th, 2005, was our first use of WordPress and [first] post. Using it to blog about school funding in New Hampshire, we published anything and everything on school funding. We ended up in Supreme Court and won. Our attorney told us, in part because they were able to use the data to hold the politicians accountable for the things they had said.

Matt Mullenweg would be proud as it speaks to his favorite subjects: freedom of speech and WordPress.

Problems with WordPress 2.7 XML-RPC: Joseph Scott reports on problems with libxml2 For WordPress XML-RPC users that he’s been finding on the WordPress Support Forums and elsewhere. The problem is not WordPress specific, but the PHP XML extension using the new versions of libxml2 which leaves off angle brackets. The solution so far is to use old versions of libxml2 known to work or build the PHP XML model against the expat parser instead of libsml2. Check the forums and his post for updated information, as well as the Trac ticket on the issue.

One Million Downloads of WordPress 2.7: Two weeks ago, there were 500,000 WordPress 2.7 Downloads and Miroslav Glavic caught the rollover of the counter. As I write this, there are now over 800,000 downloads, moving fast for 1 million. Bets are on Twitter as to when one million downloads will be counted on the counter. There is now the WordPress Download Counter which adds a counter to your blog’s sidebar featuring the number of official WordPress version downloads from the WordPress Download Counter for WordPress fan blogs.

Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition and Now Scholarship: For several years, Weblog Tools Collection hosts one of the most popular WordPress Plugin Competitions in the world, with some of the winners becoming the most popular Plugins around the community. Plans are underway to make this year’s contest even bigger than before, but they want to do more. Mark Ghosh announced plans for a Weblog Tools Collection College Scholarship to promote “WordPress development and help students dip their toe in WordPress.” More news on this exciting educational program soon. read more

It may not have been the largest free blogging platform available, but for anyone who used JournalSpace for their blog the events of the last week were catastrophically significant.

Three days ago, JournalSpace lost all of its data. Yes, all of it. The hardware itself was intact, which means that either the OS X Server suffered a major failure or someone with malicious intent wiped the hard drives. read more

I would argue that blogs are already mainstream. When I was in the USA last I saw bloggers mentioned quite a bit on national TV news, to a lesser extent it happens over here in the UK also. When the talking heads mention something assuming everyone knows what it is, surely then it is mainstream, even if a large part of the population couldn’t tell a blog apart from any other website.

MySpace and FaceBook I would say are mainstream because my Mum has heard of them, and not through me.

What about Twitter? read more

There are thousands of career-related Web sites out there, and my primary blog, Jobacle, is one of many. Every time I get reminded of that fact, I get a little dizzy, and then I look away. Because I know I can do it better. Or die trying.

The reality is many of these sites have more resources in terms of manpower and financing. But I can’t let that stop me from creating a product that I believe in.

That’s why I wear blinders 90% of the time.

I know that the shrewd MBA grads out there will remind me that monitoring and analyzing the competition is a key component to making your business a success. However I also believe there is something to be said for trying something different.

That’s why I don’t read your blogs, fellow career writers. And if you’re alos writing in an over-crowded niche, I recommend the same.

Sorry if the truth hurts. I hope you won’t unsubscribe. After all, I don’t think any good writer will hold reciprocity as a standard.

The Web is messy. Every now and then take a peek around, but stargazing is for people looking for an excuse not to write. It’s good to know who is writing in the same genre as you, and it’s nice to occasionally come around for inspiration, but i would not make monitoring part of your daily habits.

What say you?

While many of us were eating, drinking and “Auld Lang Syne-ing” over the past week or so, Consumers Union has been busy securing a deal with Gawker Media to acquire Consumerist.com.

The non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports is bringing its independent, unbiased publishing policy to the site; from today, Consumerist.com will no longer carry ads.

President and CEO of Consumers Union, Jim Guest, spoke of his delight in adding such a vibrant site to its portfolio of information products. It’s most definitely a case of well-established traditional media taking on hugely popular new media – over 70 years of publishing buying out a three-year-old boasting around ten million monthly page views. read more