I'm a day late with this post, but life has been busy. I have two closings coming up on Monday morning and well I've decided it's NOT a good idea to let buyers and sellers have the Monday morning closings they want to have. It can make for a complicated Friday.
It was a pretty strange week for me with ActiveRain. (In a good way) First there was the contact I had about using photos earlier in the week which I arranged because they were not mine and I had used them with credited permission from the firefighter that took them on sight at a local court house fire. Then there was the buyer that is now already under contract because he found THE house he wanted to buy on a post I'd written about a listing. Then yesterday there was the lady who called who found something I wrote to my daughter. That post A- has some formatting issues, but since the photos were loaded under the old system I'm not sure I dare to try to clean it up. But that post contained a poem I wrote to my daughter way back in 2008. She was about to enter her senior year of college and little did I know embark on a different (but one I'd always thought she should take) career path. But I was telling her I'd always be her biggest fan and support her and not long afterward she told me she was about to go to EMT school and then Paramedic school and get into the medical field. When she went off to college the "plan" was to be an athletic trainer.
So this mom called me that was going to be speaking at her daughter's graduation from high school. She wanted to read my poem to her own daughter. Well of course I was honored and granted her permission.
That's what I wanted to talk about on my Ask am Ambassador post this week. But charter had other ideas. They wanted my Internet to be on the blink and while I did use my phone as a hot spot to do some things for business, writing a post on ActiveRain just wasn't one of them. And last night was a family celebration with friends, so it's getting done on Saturday.
Permission...
If the "re-blog" button is showing that is granting permission to other ActiveRainers to hit it and hopefully explain why they decided to reblog the post. But so many times I see posts that are obviously NOT the author's original content here that are claiming that it is. If you are using some canned content you certainly can do that if something that has granted you permission to use it, but I highly recommend another route. Take the idea and make it your own. Read, study, research and write your own post.
If you see something that you really want to use and share, it's easy enough to put a link to it and write a bit about why you want to share it. It's even okay to pull a quote from the original article as long as you are linking to it.
Like recently I wrote and placed to link to some of the great places to visit in Georgia and included a link to the seven natural wonders of Georgia. Great places to visit if you are visiting our state... of course so are some man made wonders like MY lake and Rock Eagle. Rock Eagle is right in my county as is Rock Hawk and it's a wonderful day trip with walking trails and a great place to picnic. But sometimes the best information about a place/event isn't my own and can't be written any better so I write about why you should visit, my own experiences with seeing it and post a link.
Because it's found on the Internet goes make it okay to use it. Generally speaking if you find the author and ask for permission to share you can get it. I've been happy to share some of my photos and articles to varies people who have asked. I do get a smidgen upset when when I do a image search and find my copyright registered material used without permission. That has netted my a little money and free advertising over the years. People seem to really love my lake photo that I've used for branding over the years. That sunset photo has appeared on magazine covers and restaurant menus without permission. And because it was my branding photo I didn't just "let it go".
So bottom line... Write original material and use your own photos if you don't have permission. It could keep you out of hot water.
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