First, I'm glad he did this live stream. I believe it was good for the steemit community, and good for showing people how to come to and use steemit.
Mining: Witnesses do not mine. There actually is no mining in the traditional sense anymore. A fixed amount of steem is added to the ecosystem every day. The closest thing to mining is simply using the platform. You are mining it by posting, commenting, and voting. This is a huge deal. You don't have to worry about massive electricity or how many MHASHes your rig can produce. You can mine here as good as anyone else just by using the platform with any PC, Web Browser, phone, tablet, etc. You don't need to purchase a data center to rule mining. You just need to be involved and post interesting things.
Photos: There are a lot of easy ways to add photos now. You can drag and drop them, you can copy and paste them directly into the post. You can also select them...
New people... "Can I get into trouble for using images I find searching on the web?" Just give credit where credit is due. I usually add a line that says something like Source: I got this image from here at the bottom of my image. Some people just credit it in the beginning or ending of their post. You technically won't get into trouble, but there are people in the community that try to monitor plagiarism and people getting rewarded for work they did not create. If you do not properly credit your sources they may down vote your posts which can ding your reputation and reduce how much you earn. So simply give credit to where you get things from if they are not your original work and you'll be fine.
Topics: - Post on anything that interests you. Be open and genuine. It may take some time but you will begin to get people interested in your posts. I recommend not worrying about the path to making the most money. That tends to be a path to frustration and disappointment. Instead post about what interest you and be happy with whatever comes your way. Have fun, and if you keep at it you will make money while having fun. If you focus too much on how much you are or are not making you'll likely not have as much fun.
EDIT: Not Safe for Work: NSFW Topics and images: - We have a very open community. This includes some children. If you post anything that includes subject matter that you do not feel a child should see in some minds, and or something that is very blatantly visually violent or sexual then make sure one of your five tags for your post is NSFW. This will hide the immediate visibility of your post. People will see it is there but they will have to either choose to REVEAL it, or they will need to set their settings so they always see such posts. This is not censoring you, as your post is there, but you are giving people the OPTION of whether they want to see that type of content or not.
Here is an example of one of my NSFW posts and what it looks like until it is revealed...
Welcome to steemit.com, busy.org, and esteem.
