Jewellery designer Alex Monroe has won the prestigious ‘Jewellery Etailer of the Year’ award for AlexMonroe.com. The trophy was presented at the glittering UK Jewellery Awards ceremony last night.

Judges commented on the intimacy of the site and noted that the blog gave a real sense of the jewellery being handmade to order in the UK. The online shop’s easy-to-use navigation and search facility were also praised and delivery times and customer service were described as ‘exceptional’ by a mystery shopper.

Vanilla Storm’s Richard Hudson had this to say: ‘We’re absolutely thrilled that AlexMonroe.com has won Jewellery Etailer of the Year. This has been a fantastic project and we’re looking forward to collaborating with Alex in the future.”

A big shout out to Alex, Emma, Susie and the team. This is a huge endorsement of their hard work in keeping the site fresh and appealing and in engaging with their customers via the blog.

One of the questions that people ask me, quite a lot in fact, is whether they can use images from the internet on their own websites. The short answer is no. Not without seeking and obtaining permission. The same is true for text, graphics and videos.

Of course some creators are happy for their work to be distributed and shared, perhaps in return for a link back or credit. But how can you be sure that this is the case? Many people are still unclear as to the rules and as a result a not-for-profit organisation in San Fransisco has made a number of licenses available to the public that are free of charge. Creative Commons licenses allow creators to specify which rights they reserve and which are waived.

The following video explains how this works.

Image sharing site Flickr is a great example of Creative Commons in use. At the bottom right of each page is a section called ‘Additional Information’. This states whether the image can be used and if so, how.

Of course some unscrupulous individuals will still upload images that don’t belong to them and pass them off as their own work. Therefore, a degree of common sense is needed.

If you’re in any doubt as to the source of the content, don’t use it. If you’re not sure about rights always seek permission.

Image courtesy of Opensourceway’s Flickr photo stream - www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/4371001458

Calling all retailers.

A series of master classes with input from Mary Portas will be delivered through the National Skills Academy for Retail skills shops over the next few months.

Topics covered are:

• My shop, my future: Building, mobilising and maintaining a vision for your business
• Retail finance and business planning: Understanding the key financial factors driving your business
• Buying for your customer: Buying products to attract and keep customers and deliver profit
• Selling and service skills: Standing out from the crowd with customer service that brings success
• Creating desire: Visual merchandising and the ‘wow’ factor to set your shop apart from the rest
• Marketing for more customers: Spreading the word about your business without spending the earth
• You and your team: Developing both you and your team to create a forward-looking, successful business

“This series of master classes will help you understand what is going on out there and will give you the tools to really help your retail business succeed.” - Mary Portas

Courses cost just £200 + VAT. Find out more and register your interest at www.nsaforretail.com.

Did you know that you can convert scanned text into Google Doc format? This is particularly handy if you have hard copies of old records or documents that need to be in text format. Rather than spending hours typing them out you can scan them into JPEG, GIF, PNG or PDF format and import them into Google Docs. Their OCR technology will do the rest.

The original image is included in the doc to make it easier for you to edit and correct mistakes.

Interestingly, this came about as part of Google’s 20% time. Software Engineer, Jaron Schaeffer was presented with a problem. A colleague’s wife had found a stack of ancient family chronicles in the attic and wanted to continue writing them.

Here’s the tech bit - http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2009/09/import-scans-or-go-multilingual.html.

More info at http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/optical-character-recognition-ocr-in.html.