Month: March 2019

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, talking about social media is an ever-changing and moving target and this article can never be truly comprehensive. The goal of Plymouth Create is to have you thinking more critically about where you put your content, not that you don’t participate in these networks which still have a lot of value, but rather that you own the work you create. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others all have different audiences and the more places you push your content to, the more opportunities for discussion and feedback you’ll receive. The ability to network with an increased amount of people that isn’t reliant on face-to-face meetings is a powerful change in how we interact on the web and the value of it. As you begin to explore social media the best recommendation would be to choose a space you want to explore and really dive in. Follow as many people as possible, talk to them, respond to their work, and you’re more likely to get responses in return that start to build that sense of community for you.

LinkedIn is the professional resumé of social networks. It mixes the ability to keep an updated resume of where you work and what your accomplishments are with a social aspect of having people recommend you and comment on your work. Most users find LinkedIn helpful not as a day-to-day network they use, but rather when they’re searching for a new job and want to find people they know that might have connections. The old saying “It’s who you know” when finding a job or making a connection is particularly relevant here where those connections can be exposed to you (You know this person who works for the company of one of Bill Gates’ sons, and the VP went to high school with you).

It doesn’t have nearly the same user base as Facebook (though there are about 450 million monthly active users to date) and the way people use it is very different. Twitter (X) has focused on the short status message from the start, before Facebook even integrated the idea into their platform. It’s a conversational platform for interacting with people. It’s used heavily at conferences and many choose this as a social network for really networking with peers and others in their community as well as people they might not ever meet in real life. You can follow as many people as you want and it’s a great way of having a stream of information about “what’s happening” with people and groups you’re interested in. One powerful development of Twitter is that celebrities have begun to embrace it as a way to speak directly to their fans without having the message interpreted through other media and journalism with a slant. The ability to search various topics or hashtags (keywords) and see a running stream of what people are saying about that topic is also a very powerful way of gauging reaction to ideas and events. It’s a great idea to experiment with a Twitter account by signing up, adding a profile picture and information about yourself, following a group of people, and interacting with it daily. While the gratification may not be immediate, it’s one of those social networks where the more you put into it the more you will get out of it.

Embedding a Tweet 

In WordPress, you can embed a tweet into a blog post. All you have to do is search for Twitter in the block editor, and then add the URL to the tweet (or you can simply add the Tweet URL). The tweet will be automatically formatted to match what it looks like on Twitter. In addition, viewers of your blog can interact with an embedded tweet, and even “like” it if they are logged into their Twitter account.

Embedding a Twitter Timeline

WordPress allows users to embed their Twitter timeline directly into a website in the form of a widget. Widgets can be placed in several areas of a site, and are easy for viewers to see and interact with from the site’s front page. 

Facebook

The majority of folks that will read this likely have a Facebook account. With over 1 billion active users it’s by far one of the more popular social networks. Many treat Facebook as a semi-personal space, one reserved for family and friends to share photos and highlights of what’s happening in their lives. Facebook also supports “Groups” for sharing amongst a smaller set of individuals regularly, and “Pages” which are less personal and more public-facing profiles meant for organizations and businesses. There are plenty of applications that make it easy to publish a link to the work you do on your blog and your participation in other networks back into your Facebook profile. In general it’s a good practice and can often lead to interesting conversations with different groups of folks. This practice of publishing elsewhere and then feeding into Facebook is desired over the alternative, using Facebook for all content and then pushing it out to other communities. The main reason for this is that privacy concerns over how different people can view content on Facebook have changed often enough to leave users concerned. There’s also never any certainty of sustainability with any of these social networks (remember MySpace, Vine or Friendster?) no matter how popular, so publishing in your own space and then pushing out to others makes a lot of sense. The key takeaway is that Facebook is a great personal network and can also be the starting point for some of these larger professional discussions should you decide to use it that way.

Public domain works are free from copyright restrictions. This means that the work can be used by the public in any way and has no attribution requirement.  

Through Creative Commons, a work can be placed into the public domain through the “No Rights Reserved” (CC0) license. This license is used by copyright holders who wish to release a work from copyright restrictions. For WordPress, this will typically be the most appropriate license for placing content in the public domain.  

It should be added that there is another Public Domain license that Creative Commons offers. This is known as “No Known Copyright,” or public domain mark. This license should not be used by creators who wish to release their own works from copyright restrictions. For that purpose, use the CC0 license.  

Adding a “CC0” License to WordPress

To use the “No Rights Reserved” (CC0) license, navigate to the Creative Commons Public Domain page. Under the “CC0” heading, select “use this tool.” This will bring you to a form that will generate code for your WordPress site. See the above videos to learn how to place this code into your WordPress site.  

On a WordPress site, you may want to add a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses will allow others to share your work, making it more open and accessible. The amount of freedom that others have with your work is dependent on the type of license you select.  

The Creative Commons “Choose a License” feature allows users to take a quick quiz to determine what license is best for them. For example, a license that Creative Commons offers is the CC Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). This license will allow others to share and adapt your work if attribution is provided.  

Once a license is selected using the “Choose a License” feature, Creative Commons will generate code that can be embedded into WordPress. You can apply a Creative Commons license to a WordPress post or page, or you can apply a Creative Commons license to your entire site. 

Adding a Creative Commons License to a Single Work 

To add a Creative Commons license to a post on your WordPress site, you will need to embed the license HTML into a block on the post editing screen. To learn how to embed Creative Commons license into a post, see the following tutorial video.

Adding a Creative Commons License to an Entire Site 

A widget at the footer of your site is the best way to apply a Creative Commons license. A widget will appear at the foot of every webpage that a viewer navigates to. See the following tutorial video to learn how to place a Creative Commons license into a widget at the footer of your site.