My last blog post contained links to a few products that you can buy online since I'm a huge fan of online commerce. Unfortunately, I was recently scammed by a "Web Loyalty "program and the merchant I purchased from.

Back in July I bought airline tickets on an online travel agency, and at the end of the process a pop-up window offered me some free coupons for my next purchase by joining what appeared to be their "Web Loyalty" program. By supplying them my email to opt-in I had authorized the "Loyalty Company," not the travel company, to retrieve the credit card info I provided the travel agency and charge me a $9.99 monthly membership fee.

I'm usually pretty good at reading fine print, but I have to admit I didn't give it a second thought since I assumed it was just a another freebie account and I was only providing them my email. Besides, the travel site claimed to be secure, so I didn't stop to think they'd be selling me out so cheaply.

The question comes up many times; is digital watermarking some sort of fingerprint? The quick answer is no and both technologies are quite different.

Last week I shared a link to website that has a lot of valuable information about copyright and content theft. The author of PlagiarismToday also wrote an article on this very topic. Digimarc also provides a link to an excellent case study on the same topic, which you can download here.

When you have great images and artwork, you need to get it into the public domain in multiple ways, including public Flickr PhotoStreams.

Check out some amazing work by Julie Everhart; who has an impressive 125,000 plus views on Flickr! Julie uses Digimarc for Images to protect her work.

Editor's Note:  To see more of Julie's artwork visit her on her Redbubble site.

I suspect a few of you have the same problem I have when buying gifts for the holidays. Do you end up giving yourself one or two as well? I've tried to limit this impulse to smaller ticket items, or at least to cool things that I wouldn't normally justify.

Here's a few items and sites of cool silly stuff I'm thinking of buying or doing to help stimulate the economy without breaking my budget.

The Photojojo store has some really cool toys. While the Diana lens is a little too retro for me, I'll probably blog a review of the Jelly phone filters sometime next year. Anyone crazy enough to record a video or photos while riding with the helmet digital camera mount, please please let me know! We might have to share...

If you want to impress the loved ones with your hands-on skills try out Make Magazine's blog, the crystalline Christmas ornaments will show you didn't sleep through high school chemistry after all.

Going green? Check out Lifehacker.com's cool use for those empty wine bottles. If you haven't already discovered Lifehacker, spend a couple of extra minutes exploring this really great site. Warning, it might be hours before you emerge.

FYI, I don't know anyone at these sites, receive anything from them or have any other reason to list them here except that I like them a lot.

Enjoy!

Oh, one last article to explain all this, maybe...

Our friends at ImageSpan have a great product, LicenseStream, and of course they blog about the latest LicenseStream news and offer tips and tricks to content owners.

The recently posted a two part series (can a series really be two parts?) on ways photographers can engage their clients during the holidays. 

My favorite tip is to reach out to potential partners who would be interested in bartering services. 

Adding my two cents to the their blog post, many web sites have remnant advertising inventory this time of year due to increased holiday traffic they are unable to sell. Instead of running low CPM "run of site" impressions they could be running ads to your storefront - in exchange for your images for use in future marketing efforts.

For those who are trying to design their own website and are not web designers by trade I have an interesting plug-in for you to check out. The folks at Medialab are a little crazy and came up with a plug-in for Photoshop that allows you to design a single webpage or a whole site.

I've played with the trial version and found it pretty easy. You basically need to learn their "program language" for labeling layers and a few additional tools that customize and tweak your site's functionality. I'll be honest that creating a quickie test page was simple enough, but I don't have the time to sit back and apply myself to really learning all the tools. It certainly seemed to have all the bells and whistles during my brief tour.

This year I've had the pleasure to meet a gentleman by the name of Jonathan Bailey. He has in-depth knowledge regarding copyright laws and how to protect your content. What's even better is his own website where he shares all sorts of valuable knowledge. Not only that, he also does his own research to inform you about what options are available out there and what's new in the market. Visit his site and learn more!

Are you an iPhone owner who enjoys image manipulation, is interested in fun apps, and has some time to kill? Then you may want to download ColorSplash. I recently downloaded the application and started to play around with it at a recent conference – which is what I do when the speaker is incredibly boring...