The one negative aspect of Dishonored that took hold and spread through the gaming community was that the game was disappointingly short. A (false) rumor held that someone had beaten the game in four hours while streaming the gameplay. Double that time might not be out of the question, though.

Someone speeding through Dishonored, killing everyone in their path could easily beat the game in under 10 hours. That doesn’t mean the game is short. Much like Skyrim, the game offers up a world and allows players to either rampage through it or take the time to get to know the setting.

Over on YouTube, user ThePhotoshop has created one of what will soon be a multitude of Dishonored videos showing the many creative ways to assassinate the game’s targets. Though ThePhotoshop gets fairly creative with the game’s magic system and objects, this certainly isn’t every single way to eliminate a given target. It is extremely funny, though – especially the one that requires collecting several canisters of whale oil to gently lay a trap while guards and partygoers look on.

The video might contain spoilers concerning the setting of a mission, but there are no story spoilers, so check out the many assassinations of Lady Boyle:

A clever toolset newly announced by Yahoo offers WordPress bloggers a sidekick bearing additional content from Yahoo’s various content services, including the Flickr photo sharing site.

Yahoo Shortcuts have been seen in Yahoo’s pages as dashed underlined links. Doing a mouseover of one of these provides a popup with additional content related to the linked term.

The process takes a step forward for WordPress bloggers. After installing the plug-in, Yahoo Shortcuts watches what one writes. After the post is completed, the plug-in’s "Review this post" button leads to suggestions for Shortcut content.

Bloggers can leave suggested Shortcuts in place, or remove them as desired. When keeping the Shortcut, the blogger has the option to keep it as a link, or make it a badge that can be embedded in the post.

Yahoo’s Flickr integration with the WordPress plug-in will be the feature that catches a log of attention. The company said in the Shortcuts description it searches for relevant, Creative Commons-licensed photos based on terms appearing in the post.

Photos can be resized and placed anywhere within a post. The plug-in automatically attributes the photos to their owners who have made them available under those Creative Commons terms.

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SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) is an exciting idea with a lot of potential, if developers take advantage of it. I’ve talked about it before, but the gist is that applications can subscribribe to data feeds (like calendars subscribing to calendar event feeds), and any time the feed changed, all the applications connected to it would be updated with the new data. Calendars could subscribe to multiple event data feeds, and all the feeds would continuously stream updated data into the calendar.

The spec is available at feedsync.org for anyone to use, and it supports RSS and Atom feeds.

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Richard liked the Swedish kitchen appliance company’s newsroom but had a few observations about ways it could be improved. The single comment to the post (as of this writing) comes from Anders Edholm, an Electrolux representative, explaining why some things were done the way they were and acknowledging that some of Gatarski’s recommendations should be implemented.

It’s particularly gratifying to see a company like Electrolux. It’s not a high-tech company. It’s not a massive General Motors-like corporation. And it’s not based in Silicon Valley. Yet the company clearly recognizes the value of expanding the definition of “media” and presenting content in a manner that makes it easy to use online.

The newsroom currently features a tag cloud (tags link to related press releases), video and images (including company videos on YouTube), blog posts about Electrolux products on Engadget and Gizmodo and a series of RSS feeds. The whole site is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license.

Using the Shift Communications template for a social media newsroom, it’s easy to list elements that could be added down the road to enhance the site. Technorati tags, purpose-built del.icio.us accounts, and an RSS-enabled events calendar leap to mind. It would also be great to see the press releases housed in the newsroom adopt the social media press release format.

But it’s easy to point out what’s missing. Mainly I wanted to add my congratulations to Electrolux for not only launching the newsroom but also for walking the talk by joining the conversation about it that Dr. Gatarski began.

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The survey was conducted by The Creative Group, a company that offers online job search services.

Making a good impression online when someone searches and researches you is imperative nowadays. You absolutely need to make sure that you manage your reputation online, which includes things such as making sure that positive things about you appears in the search engines’ search results. You can keep up with your online reputation by setting up “alerts”, which are available for free from Yahoo! and Google. You can be notified via email whenever a new web page or instance of your name appears online.

As you can see from the screen capture above, I’ve been handling my own personal online reputation for a while now. In fact, a search for my name at Google reveals about 75,000 results (this varies from time to time). Obviously, this blog, right here, is going to rank very well. But take a look at the other search results…articles I’ve written, others sites I own, and other stuff. If you’d like to monitor your own reputation, then set up a Google alert by going here. I recommend that you set several up for different versions of your name if that’s appropriate.

Fifty percent of advertising and marketing executives recently polled by The Creative Group said that they search online for information about prospective hires at least some of the time. Among those who search for information about prospective hires online, fourteen percent have decided not to hire someone based on what they’ve found.

The survey was developed by The Creative Group and was conducted by an independent research firm; it included 250 responses, 125 responses from advertising executives and 125 responses from senior marketing executives.

According to The Creative Group, advertising and marketing executives were asked

“How frequently, if at all, do you use Google or another search engine to learn additional information about a prospective hire?”

They responded as follows:

Always      19%Sometimes   31%Rarely      24%Never       24%Don't know   2%

           100%

Of those who search online for information about prospective hires were asked then asked:

“Have you ever decided not to hire a candidate based on information you found online?”

They responded as follows:

Yes         14%No          84%Don't know   2%

           100%

Dave Willmer, executive director of The Creative Group, said that professionals should keep all audiences in mind when posting information online. “Search engines make it quick and easy to learn about people,” he said. “If there’s something that you wouldn’t want a potential employer to know about you, don’t post that information in a public forum.”

According to Dave Willmer, executive director of The Creative Group, some hiring managers “search online to gain a better sense of a candidate’s industry involvement and interests.”

“Employers aren’t just looking for red flags,” he said. “They’re also seeking evidence that a potential staff member is invested in the profession, perhaps through participation in trade groups, or industry blogs or message boards.”

Here’s a list of tips for creating an impressive “digital footprint”:

Stack the deck in your favor.

Websites such as ZoomInfo.com allow users to post information about themselves, so consider including details about your professional involvement and qualifications on these types of forums.

Make the most of social networking sites.

Sites such as LinkedIn.com are good venues for learning about job openings and making new contacts. But be selective in who you allow into your network. Potential employers who have access to your contact list may ask these professionals for referrals.

Share your insights.

Posting your comments on industry forums or authoring online articles in your area of expertise is a smart way to reinforce your professional reputation.

Create your own website.

Along with showcasing industry knowledge on other people’s websites, you also can create your own Internet presence with links to articles of interest, and information about your skills and past achievements. For creative professionals, a website with work samples is especially beneficial, as many employers will want to see prior projects before arranging a job interview.

Be prepared to explain.

If there is unflattering information about you online that you cannot remove, be prepared to offer an explanation to employers who might inquire about it.

The Creative Group is a company that offers online job search services and has local offices in many major markets in the USA and in Canada.

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Scouring sites like Flickr, where amateur and professional photographers alike share their work, has become a standard means of finding just the right image. So it’s not particularly surprising that Virgin Mobile Australia took the same approach in its effort to find images to support a print-based advertising campaign. Among the images they found was one of 16-year-old Alison Chang, taken by a friend at a church event and posted to the friend’s Flickr account. Seeing the Creative Common license, Virtin Mobil’s marketers grabbed the image and splashed it all over bus stops with taglines like, “Dump your Pen Friend” and “Free Text Virgin to Virgin.”

Now, Chang and her family are suing Virgin Mobil and Creative Commons, not because Virgin failed to pay for the rights to Chang’s image, but because using the image is a violation of her privacy rights. (You can watch a CNN interview with the Chang’s attorney here.)

On its surface, the lawsuit is a cautionary tale for organizations who view Flickr as an archive of royalty-free images. Lawrence Lessig—the Stanford professor, Constitutional law attorney, and intellectual power behind Creative Commons—offers a deeper dive into the issue (although he is constrained from commenting on the merits of the suit). In a post to his blog, Lessig raises a number of points:

…this case does again highlight the free culture function of the Noncommercial term in the CC license. Many from the free software community would prefer culture be licensed as freely as free software—enabling both commercial and commercial use…But this case shows something about why that objective is not as simple as it seems. I doubt that any court would find the photographer in this case had violated any right of privacy merely by posting a photograph like this on Flickr. Nor would any court, in my view, find a noncommercial use of a photograph like this violative of any right of privacy. And fianlly, as the world is now, while many might resist the idea of Virgin using a photograph of theirs for free…most in the net community would be perfectly find with noncommercial use of a photograph by others within the net community.

The Noncommercial license tries to match these expectations. It tries to authorize and reuse—not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy.

I urge you to read Lessig’s entire post, where he points out that the Creative Commons has been effective and that the organization has taken pains to make the meanings of the various licenses easy to understand (easier, he points out, than Congress does with copyrights). The suit, however, shows CreativeCommons has some way yet to go. And the distinction between commercial and noncommercial licenses does not address permissions “for a puboicity right, or a right of privacy” (a point reiterated by Ryan Zhel, the Changs’ attorney, who says the suit is about privacy, not commercial vs. non-commercial distinctions).

We in the social media community embrace and extoll the virtues of Creative Commons licenses, but this lawsuit seems to show that they are not a panacea. It’ll probably be up to the courts, ultimately, to decide who has rights to your image once it escapes into the social media space, with or without your knowledge or consent.

Not surprisingly, there’s plenty of commentary on the story.

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