WordPress Multimedia Power

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WordPress Multimedia Power
One of the best ways to liven up a dull blog is to add multimedia content. In fact, adding interesting multimedia content is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site and to make sure that people feel like spending more time at your site taking in what you have to offer. 
WordPress 3.0 has some very powerful features where multimedia content is concerned but, in discussing multimedia content in blogs, it’s also important to understand how copyright law affects the use of multimedia on your blog.

Adding Video and Audio to WordPress

When you make a new post to your WordPress blog or when you add a page, you’ll find a dialog that allows you to add video or audio. You have the option of adding a file of your own, a link to someone else’s site or to embed video from another site. WordPress has its own feature that allows you to embed but, if you prefer, you can also get embed code from most of the major video streaming sites, including YouTube.

When people come to your site after you’ve added the multimedia content, they will see the familiar window for video with the arrow indicating that they can press it to play whatever video they wish. The same holds true for audio. With audio files, people generally have the option of downloading or streaming the audio, just as they do for videos.
If you plan on uploading and including your own audio or video in your blog, remember it will add to your bandwidth totals for the month. If you have a video heavy or audio heavy blog, the best move is to get an unlimited bandwidth hosting account so that you don’t have to worry about going over and getting hit with overage charges. Of course, if you just have a personal blog, it’s unlikely that you have the kind of traffic that will push you into overage territory, anyway.

Copyright Law

Copyright law is involved in many of the most spirited debates – and sometimes downright hostile debates – regarding how materials may be used on the Internet. In most cases, your safest bet is to embed video if you want to use it on your blog.

If the originating site is providing you with embed code, it’s a reasonable assumption that it’s okay to use their content on your site, provided you use their player and give them proper attribution. Always check to make sure, however, particularly if you are running a site that exists for commercial purposes.

If you plan to include a lot of audio and video content on your WordPress site, you need to be extremely cautious about copyright issues. Most materials on the Internet will have a disclaimer describing how they may be used by other sites.

Make sure you study up on how these work so that you don’t end up running afoul of copyright law. The entertainment industry is suing people for piracy regularly these days, so you don’t want to end up on their bad side.

If you have your own video content, be sure that you do qualify it by explaining how other people may use it on their sites or that it is exclusively to be viewed on your own site. If you plan to stream your own video, you’ll have to make certain that your server is set up for it.

This is something that you’ll need to discuss with your ISP before you go ahead and upload video. There are WordPress themes available that include designs and technological accommodations for multimedia content and that make it very easy to manage such a site.

    Olga Ionel

About the Guest Author:

Olga Ionel is a creative writer and passionate by WordPress, SEO and Blogging. Don’t forget to check out stunning WordPress Themes.

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