Go Pinterest-ing! – Cool Stuff to Pin on your Pinterest Boards
May 16th, 2013 | No Comments | Posted in jamadots in the loop enewsletter content, Lifestyle, Random Tips, Social Media, Technology
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Short Tutorial – How To Add Smileys To Your Facebook Comments
Want to go a step beyond text-only emoticons such as 
when you comment on a friend’s Facebook post? As long as you know the “code,” you can insert a cute and colorful smiley instead.
Simply type in the right characters, provided in the chart below, and they will change to the corresponding smiley when you post a comment. You’ll note there are sometimes several different shortcuts listed for the same smiley; just take your pick.
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Facebook Policy Change Results in Hysteria — and a Hoax
If you’re confused over a recent email from Facebook regarding its data use policy, you’re not alone.
The email — with the subject line “Updates to Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” — sparked an online hysteria which divided the Facebooking world into two factions: users who suspected the email was yet another phishing spam scam; and users who believed that Facebook is rolling back copyright and privacy rights, and protested this by cutting-and-pasting a viral status update. Neither are accurate.
The hysterically reposted status update starts like this (and goes on and on and on):
In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, graphics, comics, paintings, photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!
Blah blah blah and so on. We’re all busy people, so let’s just cut to the chase:
- The Facebook policy update email, subject line: “Updates to Data Use Policy Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” (pictured below) is totally real, totally from Facebook and totally not a scam.
- The Facebook policy update doesn’t represent any egregious robbery of your personal data, photos, drawings, macaroni art, etc., let alone any personal data you’ve already made available to Facebook or on many a site or mobile device.
- Even if Facebook was coming for your macaroni art, et. al, your cut-and-paste status would do nothing to change it. As Snopes (a site you should have bookmarked) helpfully reminds: “Facebook users cannot retroactively negate any of the privacy or copyright terms they agreed to when they signed up for their Facebook accounts nor can they unilaterally alter or contradict any new privacy or copyright terms instituted by Facebook simply by posting a contrary legal notice on their Facebook walls. ” This is true whether Facebook is a publicly traded company or not.
Now that we’re clear on that, let’s focus on the notable items of this totally real, authentic Facebook update (which you can read in full here):
- The new policy will allow Facebook to obtain data about you ”from our affiliates or our advertising partners” (with whom you’ve already shared your personal info, such as websites, memberships, etc.), to “improve the quality of ads.” Plenty of sites already do this, matching your info (which you’ve provided, technically of your own free will) to show you ads your most likely to respond to, and to report to those ad partners how you did respond.
- Facebook is also axing your ability to vote on policy changes — a practice it first launched in 2009 to a continually underwhelming response. As Suzanne Choney reported earlier this year, a vote on privacy changes resulted in “hardly anyone voting.” (The trouble here may be in the rules, however. ”Hardly anyone” equaled 342,632 votes at the time,” Choney explained. An army, but hardly the third of its users Facebook requires to vote before it registers dissent.)
- You have until 9 a.m. ET, Wednesday, Nov. 28 to vote or comment on these and the other changes — probably for the last time. That’s a scant seven days since the policy notice went live on the Facebook Governance page, but face it, were you ever really going to vote, anyway?
NBC News contacted Facebook over the confusion likely caused by the latest policy change announcement and the latest Facebook copyright status hoax, and received the following email statement:
As outlined in our terms, the people who use Facebook own all of the content and information they post on Facebook, and they can control how it is shared through their privacy and application settings. Over the last few years, we have noticed some statements that suggest otherwise and we wanted to take a moment to remind you of the facts — when you post things like photos to Facebook, we do not own them.
True enough.
As we reported a year ago, Facebook made a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the massive privacy rollback on 2009 which bars the social network “from making any further deceptive privacy claims.” Facebook is also now required to ”get consumer’s approval before it changes the way it shares their data, and requires that it obtain periodic assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years.”
Hence these emails that send us into a status-update cut-and-paste panic. If you fell for it this time around, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re certainly not alone. As Facebook users, we’re still angry over the social network playing fast and loose with our privacy in years past. Some people show their rage in fits of cutting and pasting, others vow they’ll never touch Facebook again, then secretly log in three days later. We may love it too much to leave it, but can you really ever trust a cheater — even when that cheater is trying to show you its reformed?
Don’t Believe Everything You See on Facebook
July 20th, 2012 | No Comments | Posted in High Speed Internet Service, jamadots News, Social Media, Uncategorized
DIGITAL ENTREPRENEUR | Hollis Thomases
Jul 20, 2012
No doubt, when there’s money to be made at something, there will be people who will find a means to exploit it. The Internet is no exception.
In the earliest days of the Wild Web West, we had platforms like AllAdvantage, which shared advertising revenue by paying people “to surf the Web.” So one individual could register multiple accounts, randomly visit sites without any real interest in them, and get paid multiple times for basically the same surfing behavior. Good for them; not good for advertisers.
Then came GoTo.com, the precursor to Google AdWords and the whole “pay-per-click” (or PPC) model. The early days of PPC were tarnished by tales of gross click-fraud misconduct–companies would pay drones or build bots or malware to just click on an ad over and over, to deplete their competitors’ funds. Google’s introduction of “PageRank,” a factor weighed in its search algorithm, also encouraged cheating: Businesses again paid people to build useless links to their sites, or to click repeatedly on a website’s link in order to game its popularity and achieve a higher search engine ranking.
In most of these “good guys vs. bad guys” scenarios, the market ultimately gets corrected as platforms make adjustments to squash the corrupt behavior. But then the black market just moves on to other vulnerable places–and now it’s found a home in social media.
Offensive Behavior
Before I go any further, let me say this: I’m going to avoid naming names or pointing fingers–and I’m definitely not endorsing any of these tactics.
Tags: AllAdvantage, Facebook, google, Hollis Thomases, PPCWatch the 4th of July events and fireworks on jamadots.com
July 3rd, 2012 | No Comments | Posted in High Speed Internet Service, jamadots News, Lifestyle, Notices, Social Media, Videos
We’ve got exciting news and want you to be among the first to know!
On July 4th, we will be streaming video of the events taking place in Bayshore Park and Munising’s impressive fireworks, as they launch from Bayshore Marina and explode high overhead.
If you have friends or family that are unable to attend Munising’s famous Independence Day activities, this is the perfect way to say “hello”. Just ring up your friends via telephone, email, text, etc. Look into the camera, smile, and finish with a wave. The events camera is located on the west end of the food pavilion, near the area where the sidewalks converge. Just look for the jamadots.com Live, Streaming 4th of July webcam banner. (The fireworks camera is set to accomodate the high exploding fireworks and is pointing over Munising Bay.)
To view the live video simply go to www.jamadots.com and click on the main banner. You will be redirected to the jamadots.com 4th of July webcam page where you will be able to view the live, streaming video.
We’re excited to be able to provide this video, made possible by our jamadots.com high-speed internet.
We hope that you, your friends, and family will have tremendous fun watching the festivities on the 4th of July webcams.
Happy 4th of July!
To access the cameras now >>CLICK HERE<<
>>CLICK HERE<< for a schedule of Munising’s 4th of July events
10 Best Free Image Hosting And Photo Sharing Websites
Picasa offered 1 GB limited space for uploading and downloading images. It is hosted by google. Fast and easy photo sharing from Google. Share with friends and family, or explore public photos.You can purchase more space paying it
Photobucket offers image hosting, free photo sharing and video sharing. Upload your photos, host your videos, and share them with friends and family.
Imgzzz is new hosting service. You can earn money with uploading images. They have introduced earning system with your adsense code. You need to registered on website and add your adsense code. Upload image and share with yours friends.
Iimmgg is Free image hosting service. Share pictures. Post images on blogs, forums, message boards and much more.
Flickr is largest hosting for uploading and download fresh images. You can join and upload your own images.
TinyPic is a photo and video sharing service that lets you easily upload, link, and share your images and videos on MySpace®, eBay®, Orkut Scrapbooks, blogs, and message boards.
It is simplest tool and popular for uploading images. It have unlimited bandwidth . Peoples usually used on social networking for sharing the images.
Pixa
Pixa is a FREE image and flash hosting service that allows everyone to upload their own images.
Pixa offers various resizing, cropping, filtering and layout options.
Free Image Hosting
Tags: Free, free image hosting service, free photo sharing, google, linux web servers, photo, Share, space, uploading images, web hosting service Free image hosting provide a web hosting service running on several dedicated linux web servers. You can share pics , create photo Galleries, Host all your blog photos, put images on space etc
Facebook Expands Safety & Security Tools
Just a day after security firm Sophos sent Facebook an open letter addressing privacy issues, Facebook has introduced a suite of new safety features.
While the social network did not satisfy the letter’s requests to make privacy the default, create a vetting process for app developers and turn on HTTPS automatically, it did come through on the promises it made in an announcement at President Obama’s White House Conference on Bullying Prevention last month. Here’s what’s new:
Two Factor Authentication: This is a new feature that will be turned off by default. If you turn it on, Facebook will ask you to enter a code anytime you log in from a new device.
Improved HTTPS: Facebook added HTTPS support in January, which makes it harder for someone on a public WiFi network to hijack your data. Now if you start using a non-HTTPS application while in HTTPS mode, Facebook will automatically switch you back to HTTPS mode when you’re finished.
Expanded Social Reporting Tool: Facebook’s new social reporting tool brings community members into the mix when dealing with bullying or other violations of Facebook’s terms of service. The features allows users to send a private message to the person who posted the offensive content or — if they want to report the content to Facebook — to include trusted authority figures as contacts in the report. Previously, the feature was only included for photos and wall posts. Now it is available on profiles, pages and groups as well.
Family Safety Center redesign: Facebook’s safety center got a makeover that highlights the site’s safety philosophy, community, and tools and resources like account settings. As in the previous versions, resources for Parents, Teachers,
Teens and Law Enforcement are also highlighted. Facebook wrote on its official blog that it also plans to add a free, downloadable guide for teachers who want to use social media in the classroom. Considering that most schools block
Facebook on their computers, we’re curious to see what the guide suggests.
What do you think of Facebook’s safety update? What changes do you think Facebook should make to improve user security and privacy?
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Lead-in to the weekend – 2/4/11 [Mood music - anytime]
February 4th, 2011 | 4 Comments | Posted in Entertainment, High Speed Internet Service, Lifestyle, Random Tips, Social Media, Technology
Social Music: Top 5 Sites to Build a Playlist
The Social Music series is supported by BLive Share, a platform for online music sharing and host of the Groove Armada mini album.
Ah, the perfect playlist. In the quest to find a musical oasis where track after track is a pleasant reprieve from the surrounding world, even the best of efforts are often thwarted by limited song selection, an overly complicated user interface, or the lack of insight into upcoming songs. So we’ve scoured the web to find only the best musical offerings and we’ve put together a list of five sites that make playlist building a joy.
You may notice that we’ve left Pandora and Last.fm off our top 5 list. Although we love each site for separate purposes, they both, in their own way, complicate the process of hand selecting and fine tuning playlists that are musical masterpieces. So don’t fret, the 5 sites we’ve include are bound to help you construct your best online mix yet.
1. Slacker
We recently pitted Slacker against Last.fm in a head to head battle, and even though Slacker fell to a worthier overall opponent, we think it’s the top site for building out extensive playlists.
One of Slacker’s greatest features is the huge assortment of pre-fabricated stations covering all music genres. Users can take a slacker approach to listening to music by just tuning into one of these stations and loving or banning songs as they go.
When it comes to customizing and creating the perfect station, Slacker is certainly at the head of the class. Custom stations are started with ease — just search for an artist or band — and can be fine-tuned to achieve playlist nirvana. Slacker can recommend related material, and you can add the specific artists or songs you want.
Tired of listening to the same old pop songs? With Slacker you can opt to listen to only fringe or unfamiliar songs, minimize or maximize how frequently your favorites are played, and pick and choose from current or classic artists. Essentially you can build stations from scratch and tweak them to your heart’s content. Now that’s pretty impressive.
2. Favtape
Favtape, from Ryan Sit and Freestyle Labs, is a mashup of Pandora, Last.fm, SeeqPod, and Slinkset, and it pretty much takes the hassle out of making playlists online. Favtape’s tag line claims it’s “the easiest way to play music online,” though I would argue that it’s actually the easiest way to make a fantastic online mixtape.
The playlist creation process comes in two varieties. The simplest way is to create a favtape via search. You can do your own search for a particular artist or song, view the iTunes top 100 songs, flip through the greatest artists by decade, or search by song year. Either way, favtape returns a comprehensive list of songs matching your query that you can listen to, or click to add to a new or existing favtape.
Favtape also plays nicely with both Pandora and Last.fm so you can turn your recent activity — bookmarked, loved, and recent songs — into favtape playlists. Just enter your username for Last.fm, or your profile URL for Pandora, and you’ll immediately get an instant song list that you can play with favtape style. Plus you can even find similar artists by song, view lyrics, embed selections on your site, and share across Twitter, Facebook, and Stumbleupon.
3. Blip.fm
Blip.fm isn’t your typical playlist builder. The site throws a wrench in the whole music listening experience by going against the grain and automatically creating a playlist based on your friends’ blips. It might be a little daunting at first, but once you get the blip of things, your listening experience may never be the same.
Blip centers around you as DJ and the individual songs you blip, so as a user you would search for a track you want to blip, write a Twitter-style note about your selection, and blip it for your listeners. Then, depending on your settings, your blip can be broadcast to social sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, or Tumblr, and even update your Last.fm scrobbler.
As you start to blip a bit more and add favorite friends as DJs, your blip-generated playlist starts to expand. You can customize a few settings, but essentially every time your DJs blip, their songs will be populated in your mix for a potentially never-ending assortment of songs.
Blip.fm offers a handful of additional features like the ability to view and add DJs with similar tastes, and the option to give your favorite DJs kudos. Ultimately we think Blip to be a fantastic way to add variety to otherwise monotonous playlists.
4. 8tracks
8tracks, similar to the semi-defunct Muxtape, takes a fun approach to creating custom mixes with the idea being that user-crafted music programming is more entertaining than algorithm-generated lists — so swapping mixes with friends becomes the central focus of the site.
You can do two things on 8tracks, listen to mixes or create your own, and it’s as simple as it sounds. Your 8tracks mixed tape must have — you guessed it — 8 tracks. Users can either upload their own MP3s or browse from the 8tracks library to drag and drop tracks to build mini libraries. Once you’ve created your playlist you can give it a creative title, write a description, tag it, send it to Twitter, and embed it across the web.
The beauty of 8tracks, however, has less to do with creating your own music combos and more to do with stumbling across fantastic compilations other members have masterminded. Given that you only get 30 second snippets when you listen to your own concoctions, it’s probably not the best choice if you want to listen to your music. If, however, you’re in the mood to experiment, you’ll find some incredibly diverse musical offerings in your mix feed, from the friends you follow, or by experimenting with the popular mix section.
We think 8tracks is a fantastic way to create community around music, and we love that the playlists you build become like custom radio stations for others to enjoy.
5. Grooveshark
Grooveshark’s simple and clean user interface is designed for creating playlists, making it a breeze to start a new music mix on the fly. You can quickly search songs, people, genres, albums, and existing playlists to get started, but after your initial query Grooveshark will do the rest of the work for you.
Once you find a song or artist you like, you can start a playlist. Grooveshark will then recommend songs based on your selection, and you can either favorite songs, play the songs, add them to your queue or playlist, or embed them as a widget on your own site. As with most sites these days, you can also share your Grooveshark musical selections with Twitter, Facebook, and Stumbleupon, or grab the RSS feeds of your activity to take with you.
Grooveshark continues to play as you browse for new songs, take a look at popular tracks, build up your queue, or upload your own tracks. Since you have complete control over the songs on your playlist, Grooveshark offers the perfect solution for hassle-free online music streaming without all the guesswork.
The Social Music series is supported by Bacardi BLive Share, a platform for online music sharing. BLive Share members get access to exclusive tracks from the Groove Armada mini album free of charge. Learn more about BLive Share.
More Music Resources From Mashable
- Social Music: Top 5 Music Recommendation Services
- Social Music: A Last.fm vs Slacker Head to Head
- 40+ Free iPhone Music Apps
- The Most Popular Music of 2008: iTunes vs Last.fm
- Keep Rocking: 30+ Sites for Free & Legal Music
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, chuntise
Source: Mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/02/09/music-playlist/
February 9, 2009 by Jennifer Van Grove
AMBER Alerts Now Available on Facebook
U.S. Facebook users will now be able to receive AMBER Alerts — the notifications issued when a child is abducted — on the social network, the result of a new partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Details of the new program were made available Wednesday morning, one day before the 15th anniversary of the abduction and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, whom the alert system was named after.
Facebook has set up 53 AMBER Alert pages — one for each of the 50 states, along with pages for the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands. Interested Facebook users will be able to sign up for alerts pertinent to their individual states. The notifications, which will appear on news feeds as they’re issued, can also be shared with users’ Facebook friends.
Prior to the creation of these pages, certain police departments already used the social network to push out notifications about AMBER Alerts, which are typically issued in what law enforcement officials deem the most serious child abduction cases. Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, spoke about one of these instances during the press event announcing the new Facebook alert system, which was held in Alexandria, Virginia this morning.
Early last month, the Virginia State Police posted an AMBER alert for 12-year-old Brittany Mae Smith and suspected abductor Jeffrey Easley on its Facebook page, after the girl’s mother was found murdered. The department kept updating its page with information about the case as it chased leads throughout the country, and days later, Smith and Easley were found alive in San Francisco after a woman recognized them.
“It really doesn’t take a seasoned investigator to tell you what the odds are of a 12-year-old girl to be safely returned after being missing for five days,” Flaherty said, adding that social media had allowed the department to pursue the case outside its borders. He, along with others involved with implementing the new Facebook system, believes the AMBER Alert pages will enhance law enforcement’s ability to find missing children.
The Facebook AMBER Alert pages are part of an opt-in system, which means users will not receive banner notifications about AMBER alerts.
“We are very sensitive to people considering this as spam, and our message to the public has been: One, you are not going to be inundated,” said Ernie Allen, president and CEO for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Allen said that the program is geographically targeted, which means news about a child missing in Seattle will not appear to those who have signed up for Virginia’s AMBER Alert page. However, if there is a hint that a child or abductor may be in another area, then the alerts may be issued in more than one state.
Though this particular initiative is U.S.-focused, there are hopes for the effort to go global. Allen said other countries are working with Facebook to create similar programs. According to the official AMBER Alert website, 525 missing children have been recovered via the system.
Social Media: Learning more about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
If you’re not using social networking sites yet, you may feel as though you’ve missed out. Don’t worry! There is still time to learn how to use them, and make use of them.
Twitter is an online service that allows you to broadcast short messages to your friends or “followers.” It also lets you choose Twitter users that you want to follow so you can read their “tweets” in one place. Each message on Twitter is limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert (text message.) You can’t say much in 140 characters, but that is Twitter’s charm. Sign up for Twitter and share cool websites you find or even what you are up to that day. Twitter is rated #11* among top websites by Alexa web rankings.
Facebook is a website originally developed to connect college and university students. After the 2004 launch it was quickly opened up to everyone as interest grew. User’s create a profile and then find new (and old) friends to connect with. You may post updates to each other’s “walls” and upload pictures to share with people. Facebook is #2*, as rated by Alexa web rankings, and falls right behind Google as the most highly visited site on the web.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. The focus is on networking with past and present contacts in the business world, and on gaining new contacts through your network. You can create a profile depicting your work experience and connect with past employers, co-workers and industry-related interest groups. LinkedIn is rated #26* among most visited sites on the web.
While Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are a few of the more popular social networking sites, they aren’t the only ones, and new social networking sites launch all the time. So find the one that works for you, your friends and associates…and then start connecting with those around you!
We’d love to have you join our jamadots.com online community! In addition to our myjamadots.com webpage and jamadots.olhblogspace.com/ blog page we have both Facebook and twitter pages so that you can follow what’s happening via our newsletter, posts, updates, alerts, and tweets. By following us on Facebook and twitter you’ll receive the most up-to-date information about local events, telephone and Internet service promotions, tips and tricks, as well as recent news and interesting facts that are communications or social media related. We may even throw in something fun from time to time. This is all part of our continuing effort to keep our customers and the communities we service better informed and ‘in-the-loop”.
We encourage you to join us on the social web.
* The sites in the top sites lists are ordered by their 1 month Alexa traffic rank.
The 1 month rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past month. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.
