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Welcome to the April 2008 issue of ZooNews, from professional
Web site design company Zoonini
Web Services.
Imagine this. One day, out of the blue, you receive a threatening
letter from a stock-photo company demanding that you pay
a four-figure fee for the right to use their photo on your
Web site... a photo that is already up on your Web site,
and that you were sure you had purchased a license to use.
Upon further investigation, you discover, to your great horror,
that a single photo out of several dozen you directed your
Web designer to use on your site was accidentally forwarded
from the wrong batch, and was never actually paid for.
This nightmare scenario recently happened to one of my clients.
Let this be a reminder to all who use stock
photography to double-check that you have the legal right to use each
and every photo on your Web site before making them live.
Don't take a chance!
And in case you're wondering what happened to my client,
she decided to negotiate payment with the stock-photo
company to avoid potential legal consequences – and
to sleep a little easier.
Last month, it was revealed that Bell Canada has been quietly
rolling out a practice of bandwidth
throttling,
which deliberately slows down certain types of Internet traffic
on its residential Sympatico ISP (Internet Service Provider)
network. Also known as traffic
shaping, the technique is squarely targetted at
people who use file-sharing services to download heavy files
such as feature-length movies.
Bell's decision – which was made without warning
and not announced until it was confronted by customers,
ISPs and consumer advocates – has
infuriated many. Particularly steamed are the smaller,
independent ISPs, which resell Bell's services. These folks,
who have their own customers but lease services from Bell's
network (similar to how companies are now permitted to offer
home telephone service by renting lines owned by Bell),
were not consulted in the decision to start throttling bandwidth,
nor were they notified of the impending change.
In Quebec, the Union des Consommateurs consumer-rights
group filed a CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications
Commission) submission to
have Bell's traffic-shaping practices stopped.
Interested in learning more? Check out technology and law
expert, professor Michael Geist's blog posts on the issue.
Got a technology term you'd like
demystified in ZooNews?
Send it to questions@zoonini.com.
We are working on an exciting new site that we hope to announce
in next month's ZooNews!
Meanwhile, we were tickled pink to see three of Zoonini's
professional-organizer clients showcased in articles
published this spring. Stories
in The
Gazette,
The
Suburban and The Canadian Jewish News
touted the benefits of calling on professional organizers to
help with clutterbusting and other organizing challenges. Clients
featured were Susan Portnoy and Lois Kaplan of Organized
Success, Lynne
Freeman Haque of Simply
Organized,
and Catherine Desjeunes of Kaos
Zapp. Susan Portnoy was also interviewed on 940AM radio
in Montreal. We were especially delighted to learn that much
of this press coverage was the direct result of their Web sites
being found high up in search engine results for terms like "professional
organizer Montreal"... proving once again that a well-designed,
easy-to-use, content-rich Web site always yields good things!
 Think
you can survive without your computer for 24 hours? That's
the challenge posed by the second annual international ShutDown
Day, a "Global Internet Experiment" scheduled for
May 3 and spearheaded by a couple of Montrealers. Any ZooNews
reader who tries to go cold turkey for the day, please let
me know how you fared!
À la prochaine,
kp
aka Kathryn Presner |
