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.

Last week I watched Michael Mann's Manhunter. It's a real gem of a movie starring William Peterson ( CSI Las Vegas ). Manhunter is essentially the prequel to Silence of the Lambs and was remade and titled Red Dragon in 2002. Although I really like Anthony Hopkins as the venerable Dr. Lecter, I have to say, Mann's highly stylized version from 1986 is still my favorite. All this Michael Mann business of course lead me to watching a few episodes of Miami Vice ( which I posted about here ) and so naturally I have been taking a few screen captures. Not really sure where I'm going with this, but I really liked this one which was only on screen for a second and is fitting with yesterday's post about surveillance.

It's interesting how these things all tie themselves together. Last semester at MICA, we had a few visiting artists who sort of hit the nail on the head. Flickr searches, surveillance in cinema, photo archives--it's all beginning to meld together. The above image was captured on my laptop screen at 1440 x 900 pixels. As you can see the actual image area is cropped to TV format, and additionally cropped by the original editor for the in-camera surveillance effect. Not too may pixels to work with!

Backing up your digital media, documents, and other important files is a hot topic. Personally I try to follow a pretty simple concept called "The Rule of Three." This rule is easy to remember, and fairly simple to implement. You can customize it however you see fit, so long as you are still following the rule.

• Keep your files in three locations
• Backup your files following three different schedules
• Utilize three types of media

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.