I wish everyone a happy adventure filled 2013. Some advice: “Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.” – Sidney Freedman 4077 MASH (TV Series).
Here are the top 10 visited posts from 2012.
Thanks everyone for a great year and I look forward to a fantastic 2013.
Happy Trails and Happy 2013.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a great year. I hope that everyone has a great Christmas and an exciting fun and very enjoyable new year.
As of this afternoon 12/18/2012 Instagram responded to the outrage and hordes of angry users that fled the Instragram platform after the release of the updated Terms and Privacy policy. You can view Instragram CO Founder Kevin Systrom’s open letter here.
To be honest I am still very leery of the changes they are making and did not delete my account however I am not sure they have won me back at this point. What are your thoughts on all of this?
Original Post: I typically try not to mix my social media / geek life with my backpacking life but after recent changes with the Instagram policies I wanted to write you all a quick note. As of today I will stop using my Instagram account. I will be moving back over to Flickr. I have been using Flickr to power my blog’s photo albums as well as archive my photos. Here are two articles that talk about the issues. http://readwrite.com/2012/12/18/why-i-quit-instagram-and-am-moving-to-flickr and http://mashable.com/2012/12/17/instagram-signs-your-life-away/.
The biggest reason why I wanted to bring this up is because the way they have worded things in their Terms and Privacy policies. I may not be a lawyer but this just seems wrong to me
“Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service,…”
So that reads to me that they can use it however they want but they do go on to say
“except that you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service as described in the Service’s Privacy Policy, available here: http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/.”
Head on over the the privacy policy and right away you are greeted with how they share your information and they will share your information with:
*people who help us provide Instagram to you
* business partners, which may include advertising partners
* businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of, or that become part of the same group
*outside parties to comply with the law and legal obligations
So to me it opens it up to really do whatever they want with your photos in a way they see fit. I am just waiting for someones child to be used in a marketing or advertising campaign of sorts and the parents not have a leg to stand on in court when trying to battle the rights to use the photo.
I am not going to stand on a soap box and lecture you all on how you should or shouldn’t do things, but at minimum I wanted to make sure you were aware that Facebook who owns Instagram had made that change and plans on changing the policies again in mid January.
With all of that said I recommend Flickr as a great replacement and will only be posting my photos there from now on. Flickr recently updated their app for the iPhone and Droid and has a nice user interface on their website. If you would like to check out my Flicker photos you can view them here.
Hey everyone I wanted to share with you an article I wrote for CampingRoadTrip.com’s November Newsletter. The article is titled Preparing to Hike the Appalachian Trail and can be read in full here. Please enjoy.
Don’t forget that t-shirts are still available and my inventory is shrinking so get yours today!
Happy Trails
Adam
Hey everyone I just wanted to let you all that there are some t-shirts still available to order. There is only going to be 1 run of them. To order them head on over the t-shirts merchandise page.
Here are what I have left in the women’s shirts: Small – 3 | Medium – 4 | Large – 5
Here are what I have left in the men’s shirts: Large – 1 | XL – 2 | 2XL – 4
roceeds from the sale of the shirts will go toward funding my Appalachian Trail Thru-hike and a portion will go to The Dusty Camel Young Explorers Grant. All Shirts run small and are 100% cotton so wash accordingly.
The price includes shipping. Costs of shirts vary depending on ship to location and size.
Happy Trails
Adam
Hey everyone those of you who have been reading my blog and subscribed via rss the url is going to change. This is due to Feedburner being shut down. Please update your links to http://www.hikingthetrail.com/feed/rss.
Also please do not forget to head on over to my Youtube Channel and subscribe.
Happy Trails
Adam
Surprise I changed the site. Do not have a whole lot to say other than Happy New Design of HikingTheTrail.com day. What do you all think of the new layout?
Happy Trails.
Adam