I recently ran across a blog posting on a website I helped to put together while living in Dominica. The website, RossPHR.org was originally constructed as a way to dispense news and information about the local chapter of the Physicians For Human Rights organization at Ross University in Dominica. This organization does great things like fund raising for locals and international aid campaigns.

In their latest post titled "Grange Video, Mitchel Dubois" someone has put together a slideshow based campaign to raise funds for this individual in Dominica. It's a great idea and hopefully their campaign will help to get this guy the care he needs. However, the author chose to use the hit single, "We Are The World" which was originally the title song for the famous USA for Africa campaign. It was written by musical giants Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones in 1985.-- Anyone who's anyone has heard the tune!

My question is, how did RossPHR secure the license to use this song in their slideshow. Well, I'm sure they did no such thing. In fact, I would take an educated guess and say they simply downloaded the song off the Internet and used it without ever once considering whether or not they were doing something wrong.

But blogs do this all the time. There are literally hundreds of thousands of instances of illegally used material on the web right now, perhaps more. Just take a look at YouTube. These days when I want to listen to a song, YouTube is usually my first stop--It's absolutely incredible. YouTube has made an honest effort to stop this, but really, it's nearly an impossible task.

I just saw this over at www.lx3-photography.com/ and had to post it! So good! Nikki Waller from the Wall Street Journal has some fun insights into why she loves her Panasonic LX3. She also has a full review article here. I love how she thinks the lens cap makes it "retro" but also kinda hard to use. Oh boy.... Enjoy!

This is the first in a series of three articles titled “My Virtual Office.” Each part will go over in detail my opinions and experiences surrounding a handful of web-applications that I really can’t live without. This series is geared toward the self-employed freelance writer, photographer, and software consultant, but it is probably applicable to other small businesses as well.

For the past several years I have been using a growing number of web-applications to help run my small freelance business. These applications take care of quite a bit of work for me. They help me keep my accounting in order, they help me keep track of client relationships and even act as a value added service when working on projects in certain cases.

In this first part of this series I will cover one of the most important aspects of any small business: bookkeeping. If you don’t keep proper records of your business expenses you will have a hell of a time come tax season. What’s more is that without a good mechanism for invoicing your clients, getting paid becomes a real hassle.

I'm pretty excited about David Alan Harvey's new project called burn Magazine. Not only is the website really slick and smartly designed, there is some really great content on there as well. His promo video, which I believe premiered at this years LOOK3 festival, is a little polished for my taste, but it gets the point across. So, I'm eager to see where he goes with this site and what is to come. I'm also happy to see someone using Wordpress and SlideshowPro in a fairly basic but good looking manner.

Keep and eye on this one!