There's a very cool arty project taking place across the UK (world?) right now. A whole bunch of Moleskines have been let out into the big bad world, each with their own theme, and if one lands in your filthy paws then you have the honour of taking over a page or two to do whatever the hell you like with.
 
When I received a text yesterday saying, "Ms Poppy, your Hoffman is here", I knew that @loudmouthman was outside my office with one of the aforementioned Travelling Moleskines. The theme of this particular one was 'Town & Country'. I have completed my entry and will now be passing it on, will you be next to receive it?

Read more about the project here.

My debut into the world of porn was an unexpected one. Like many (self-obsessed) people I have a Google Alert set up for my name, at some point before Christmas I was ‘alerted’ to the fact that eight or so pictures of me were being hosted on a rather crudely named ‘bustyskinny.com’. In case you haven’t heard of it, bustyskinny.com “brings you the most popular as well as the hard-to-find best natural busty skinny girls on the net. Some girls are models. Some girls are amateurs. But they are all naturally beautiful, busty, great boobs, skinny and thin.”

I’ll be perfectly honest here, my first thought was not “OH MY GOD THOSE BASTARDS!”, it was actually more along the lines of “Wooooo, someone thinks I’m naturally beautiful, busty, skinny and thin!”. As my hideous shopping trip for new jeans confirmed yesterday, skinny and thin I am not. 

After a few moments of laughing about the ridiculousness of it all with my then boyfriend, I went to Google myself to see how well the porn site performed when my name was the search term. When the site came up at the top of page 2, well ahead of many of the blog posts I’d written, site profiles I had and so on, I began to worry. Having an unusual name like mine has pros and cons when it comes to social media, it’s very easy for people to piece together a lot about me with very little effort. I didn’t want potential business contacts, friends, family (or anyone really) to Google me and then think that I’d posted my pictures on to a porn site.

The pictures that were posted were not pornographic. I would have been mortified if naked pictures had turned up online without my permission, but these pictures were not in the least bit sexy. I’ve always thought I’d make a good porn star, with enough strategic sucking in I can take quite a good sex shot, but the lead photo in my smutty debut was one of me sulking, stroppy, sunburnt and starving waiting for my breakfast to arrive in a Tel Aviv beach cafe - GLAM! There were some bikini shots but, again, these were not ‘sexy photos’. They were certainly not photos from some private collection, these photos were on both my Facebook and Flickr accounts as part of much wider holiday sets. The other photos of girls on bustyskinny.com were pornographic though, some were pretty hardcore.

Anyway, I contacted the site and told them to remove the pictures and all reference to my name and then forgot all about it.

In May I got a DM from Paul Lomax, he’d Googled me and the fourth result was my page on BustySkinny. He kindly got in touch to let me know in case I wasn’t aware of it, I’m very glad he did (thanks Paul!) as I wasn’t aware that the page was quickly climbing the Google rankings. I realised it probably wasn’t something to be ignored and put a shout out on Twitter for any advice on how to get the pictures removed as emaling the site admin hadn’t worked, lots of people (notably Barry Vitou, Ben Metcalfe and Barnaby Gray) stepped up with advice. Within a few weeks, the pictures were removed (and I felt invincible and had a peculiar urge to sue lots of people).

There’s a US copyright law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or DMCA for short, which protects you and I from having our copyrights infringed. If you ever find any of your photos being used without your permission, kinky or otherwise, then following these simple steps should help you get them removed…

Firstly, find out who hosts the website that is using your images. You can do this using a clever site like WhoIsHostingThis.com.

Then, email the hosting provider with a copyright infringement notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Your email needs to include the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature. [Statutory requirement 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(i)]
2. Actual identification of the material you claim violates your copyright.  [Statutory requirement 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(ii)]
3. Sufficient information to enable the hosting provider to locate the actual material you claim infringes your copyright. [Statutory requirement 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(iii)]
4. Information reasonably sufficient to permit the hosting provider to contact you.  [Statutory requirement 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(iv)]
5. The following statement:
   “I have a good faith belief that the use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent of the law.”[Statutory requirement 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(v)]
6. The following statement:
   “Under the penalty of perjury I state that the information contained in my complaint is accurate and I am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright I claim is infringed.”[Statutory requirement 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(vi)]

Now I’m no lawyer, obvs, but that worked for me. And if you ever find someone’s stolen your pictures without permission, then hopefully it will work for you too.

p.s

If the person who posted my pictures there is reading this, lemmeknow. I want to hurt you, kthxbai.

What the hell is wrong with me, do I have no discipline? Evidently not. Hence, this blog post is a week later than I would have liked to have posted it. But there my negativity will end, because meeting Jeff Pulver last week was a real treat. Positivity from this point forward :)

So, last week Mr Pulver hosted his first ever breakfast in London taaaahn. Around 50 people descended on the ICA to meet the man himself and, of course, to network with each other. I’ve been an avid follower of Jeff on Twitter (@JeffPulver), we’ve chatted on Facebook and we nearly met a couple of times in Israel, but the timing was always a little skew-whiff. But although we’ve conversed a lot on t’internet, I had never met Jeff ‘IRL’ until last week.

As with all of Jeff’s breakfasts, the guests were greeted with pens and stickers and encouraged to write their own personal tagline on their name badge and to keep another sticker blank for the other guests to ‘tag’ them. Now we’re all used to tagging our content online, but to tag each other…in real time? That’s nifty.

I’ve kept my tag cloud and stuck it in the back of my diary as it’s a nice little reminder of the event. Some of the people tagging me where complete strangers, others people I’ve spent a lot of time with.

Don’t worry, I know I’m crap at taking pictures (maybe I should upgrade from the camera on my mobile?!) so I have done the honourable thing and typed out my tags…

• Social Medium
• Girl
• Lush (from @PhilCampbell, who is rather luscious himself)
• Trusty Person
• I am content
  
• Twit Chick
• Star on 12Seconds.TV
• Followed by many
• Muse (awwww, thanks Jeff!)
• Touch texts
• Listen (i.e don’t just look, from the lovely @loudmouthman)
• Look up (i.e away from my booby area, again the always cheeky @loudmouthman)
  
• I like your glasses
• Likes chocolate
• Tuc Tuc
• Shower Periods (that one was the charming @PaulWalsh, see previous post for context!)

I liked tagging others and I liked being tagged, it was a great way to network. If you ever get a chance to go to one of Jeff’s breakfast, then go dammit!

I was also lucky enough to have dinner one on one with Jeff that evening, many wise words were shared…but now I’m just showing off.

So, my super cute new best friend forever is getting ready for bed. He’s been doing all sorts of sweet things today. Until the moon came out he was eating his dinner, I assume that in an hours time he will fall asleep upstairs :)

I must say I thought he was a bear until I noticed his bushy tail in this pic, he’s clearly a little fox!

When I logged into Gmail this morning it all looked a little different, I wasn’t drunk or anything so I knew there had been some definite moving of furniture. I was told I could click on ‘themes’ and customise my Gmail, so I did and now my inbox is all cute :-)

I can’t remember the name of the theme I chose. The tab has disappeared since changing computers (although my new theme is still there) so I can’t change it or fiddle with it at the moment. My colleagues who use Gmail haven’t been offered the chance to customise their theme yet, so I guess they’re rolling it out over the next couple of days the way they did with video chat last week.