Dana Blankenhorn

A Solution to Your Imaging Problems

I caused big problems, for myself and my employer, back in April when I used an image, with credit, but without permission on one of my employer's blogs.

I have always been more interested in solving problems than causing them, however. Despite my poking at critics, I knew both I and Chris Buzelli are in the copyright business, and believed technology could create some common ground.

The good news, I've found, is that a Web permission engine exists. The folks at Picscout called to tell me they've been in this business for almost a year, and best of all they have a competitor, LicenseScout, which has been in the business a while longer. (Competition is always good. It helps a market grow.) LicenseScout sees its mission broadly -- including all kinds of content -- while PicScout is focused on images. 

The difference between PicScout and a regular photo agency is that everything's automated, and can be integrated with browsers and search engines. For image owners, it integrates with a service called PhotoShelter, aimed at increasing sales of images for re-use. (The picture above leads to this sales page.)

Amy Love, PicScout's  vice president of marketing since September, was kind enough to lead me through it.  The heart of the offer is ImageIRC, which indexes images through digital fingerprints, maintains a metadata registry on the images, and offers an API through which buyers and sellers can connect.

The result is a suite of software-driven services:

• ImageExchange, which identifies images with metadata and throws up pricing information, then handles transactions. (There are currently versions for Firefox and Explorer.)
• ImageTracker, which lets owners of images see who has accessed them, again by following the metadata, and
• ImageQualification, which helps site owners know the status of their images as soon as they are posted. 

What has me most excited is PicApp, a spin-off that not only allows access to license-free thumbnails, but includes meta data aimed at helping sites hosting the images get more traffic. They're pitching it as a free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service for sites and a tracking system for image owners. There's a plug-in for Wordpress and a Firefox plug-in.

Most of what I have described is a service for owners and users of stock photography, and in fact big rights owners like Corbis and Getty Images are already playing. But Amy said any artist can register to have their art catalogued, free, because once art goes online it becomes an image by default. Artists can either do this directly or through the agents they prefer to use.

There's money here for someone. Reuters signed up with PicApp last month and traffic has been growing smartly as word has gotten around that friction in this market can be reduced.

I like a happy ending, don't you?

The Lesson of Van Gogh's Ear

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It is said that Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear because he couldn't sell  his stuff. And that he never did. (Image from Wikipedia.)

The great artists of the 20th century learned this lesson well. Picasso, Dali and Andy Warhol were all relentless self-promoters. They knew that art which isn't seen does not exist, and that an artist's personal style is what he sells during his lifetime.

Somehow, we've gone backward in the era of the Web.

The lesson of my run-in with Chris Buzelli and his friends is clear. No Web site can use a thumbnail of someone else's art without the artist's express permission. This is what artists say they want.

It's self-destructive.

Technically, this position even prevents links. If I write a piece of HTML code linking to a graphic image, and give the a href command properly, my browser will go to the location of that image and copy it, in the size I specify, onto the page I'm writing.

That's the way HTML works.

But to self-important artists if I write such a link I'm a thief. I'm a double thief, because I have not only stolen  art but bandwidth  to display it on my Web page. Thus you don't even link to art without permission.

What galls me is that artists believe they don't have to watermark, they don't have to use robots.txt, they can post their stuff completely in the clear. Ghanaians know to protect their images (try downloading an image from this page) but American artists can depend on webmobs.

The default with images is, don't touch, don't link. So we don't. I won't.

My purpose in writing today is not to litigate the question of legal right. Nor even the moral right to link. I won't link to anyone's copyrighted image henceforth, without a Creative Commons license or a Wikimedia address. Neither will anyone at CBS Inc., nor, I gather, any other media outlet.

Instead I'm arguing that forbidding links, or thumbnails, is counter-productive. It's as dumb as Nikkei forbidding links to its home page or the London Times charging for access.

It's as stupid as Van Gogh cutting off his ear.

A Web Permission Engine

It is insane that it is easier to use someone's text, or a video, than a thumbnail of art on a blog post.

(Artist Chris Buzelli, in the center of this thumbnail, taken when he was judging an art competition in Houston, launched a jihad against me last week, calling me a thief. His friends did as well. They very nearly got me fired, although admittedly I did not handle myself well.)

Artists' bleating aside, I am no thief. Crediting and linking to the source of a thumbnail is just what Google does. It's legal. The "whole art" is not being "taken." A thumbnail is being displayed and linked-to. The artist is being credited. (I usually like to find a place where the art is being sold before using a thumbnail.)

Still, if an artist doesn't want their work to be circulated, if they don't really want to be part of the Web yet have a Web site at the same time, that should be their right.

I just want to know beforehand. I have a right to this. To say, "assume the answer is no" is not good enough. Because that not only censors writers regarding popular art, but art that wants to be publicized as well.

My biggest problem is this nonsense of requiring human interaction before another site owner can know what the deal is. The result is that known artists prevent the work of unknown artists from seeing the light of day, and determinations of artistic merit are made by agents, by elites, not by the people. In the end even good artists are victims in this system.

So how can we tell the status of a thumbnail, in such a way that those who think their thumbnails are art can "protect" them, while those who want their work publicized have a way to reach the market?

A Web permission engine is my modest proposal.

How I Stole the Mona Lisa

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It was a piece of cake. I went to my friend the Google. He found her quick and sweet.

I downloaded her, and I sized her to fit on my virtual wall.

Here she is. Nice, huh.

Of course, you say, there's no copyright on the Mona Lisa. True, but that doesn't mean this image isn't subject to copyright. It doesn't mean people aren't trying to make money off her and trying to keep me from placing her here.

Take, for instance, Andrew Hall of Portland. He created a 300 pixel image of her hanging in the Louvre. It's got his copyright notice. He's selling prints of it. I don't think Leonardo da Vinci or the Louvre is getting a cut.

No matter your view on the law, or of me, there are important issues at stake here, which Mona and I would like to discuss with you.

A Different Kind of Publisher Wanted

During the bottom of the last recession, I self-published a book on Moore's Law (right).

The idea was to examine how technology had changed the world in my lifetime, to look at the past, present and future of Moore's Law, its antecedents, and its relations.

A marketing "expert" suggested I call the finished book  The Blankenhorn Effect and I did -- to my shame.

Not that I don't like me. I do, very much. Not that I don't like being associated with change. It's my beat. But in retrospect that title was over-the-top. Change isn't about me. I'm just an observer of change.

In the end the book sold only a very few copies. I didn't push it very hard. But it's still available at Google Books, and I still get a regular stream of checks from an online publisher.

These checks inspired me to work up an update, which I have now begun. And I would really like a publisher, although it will have a new title.

Moore's Law 2010: Better and Better, Faster and Faster

I'm rocking right along. I've actually edited half the old draft. I'm planning on adding a few chapters so it's not really halfway done. But the work itself is going amazingly well.

Now for the really important bit.

The Online Newspaper of 2009

I have now been a paid blogger (not here -- there) for over four years.

While my former colleagues in daily journalism are dropping like flies I'm hanging in -- thanks largely to my wife.

I have learned a lot.

• Readers genuinely prefer style over substance. I could spend all day researching and interviewing about a new tool and draw no audience. I could spend five minutes writing, in effect, "Microsoft sucks" and people rush to the rail.
• Brands matter. By that I mean a publisher brand can define your audience based on the advertisers and readers it targets. Most individuals can't do this. A few did by getting in early and staying both persistent and consistent. But publishers have proven their worth in the online world.
• Incentives need to match expectations. I am proud to say that ZDNet has a business model, one that apparently works. But that model is entirely geared toward page views, not editorial quality. It could be tweaked and, over time, I expect it to be tweaked. Tweak yours regularly.

All this said those who claim the "daily newspaper is dead" are only talking about newspapers that were dead long ago. Let me tell you a few things that can turn your daily paper into an online money-maker.

Open Source Process

The video above is more than a good song. It says a lot about the times we live in.

First, it's a collaboration among musicians in Africa, Europe, America and Asia who did not meet to record. They are singing the song of a Jamaican.

Many of these people come from poor backgrounds, yet they are able to use the same basic technology to make their contributions. See the headphones? Tracks are layered on tracks. The music is built using the Internet, the files passed around, additions made much as you would build a software program.

Which is the point. This collaboration was possible because people were using compatible technologies, because they had free interconnection, and because they shared a universal vocabulary.

In this case music. Other universal languages include mathematics, where equations look the same to a Chinese scholar or a Russian, and Java, which (like any computer language) uses the same structure whether you're Indian or Peruvian.

The Edwards Obsession

I have made an important decision.

I hate The Huffington Post. And you should too.

It's this Edwards obsession that really did it to me.

OK. I get it. John Edwards had sex with a lady, not his wife, in 2006, before he relaunched his campaign. Maybe he fathered a kid.

Frankly, big whoop.

Who is John Edwards, right now? Is he a public official? Is he even a candidate for anything? No.

Yet the bloggers of the HuffPo go on-and-on, making stuff up out of ifs and whats. Tearing their hair, rending their garments. Doing all the Republicans' work for them. Even tearing down other liberal sites in the process, for the sin of not obsessing like they do. Then complaining that the Republicans are doing this to them, when in fact they're doing it to themselves.

The Money To Do Online Journalism

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 30 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We're on the verge of a breakthrough in journalism. A breakthrough in business models.

Publishers like ZDNet, where I now work, have found some success with incentive programs based on pageviews. They have good online publishing systems and ad staffs which can fill the corners of an online page with money-producing ads. By putting the two together, everyone can make a living.

Critics will note it can be tweaked a bit. I get a lot more traffic from trollbait than from innovative, interview-driven stuff, so when I'm hungry I go with the trollbait. Over time readers will notice, and it's up to the publisher to tweak their financial incentives to keep me on the straight-and-narrow.

If we could simply take this model into local news markets, we'd have enough money to pay for covering all those events and scandals which right now aren't being covered. The zoning games played with developers. The small corruptions of the local school boards. The side deals done to lure businesses to town. An open meeting is closed if there's no one there taking notes.

In his print column for July 28 Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (left) weeps bitter tears over this. "Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff," he writes.

I know why. It doesn't pay.

This has always been true. You know how much of a print newspaper's budget goes to editorial? (This is also true for journals like Newsweek, by the way.)

8%!

That's all the writers, all the editors, the whole art department, the secretaries, the research people, everything. Over 90% of a newspaper's income goes elsewhere -- to the ad staff, to the printer, to the delivery guys, to the executive suite, to the bottom line. That's all you're really worth, Alter  -- a little piece of that 8%.

So there is plenty of room to create incentives for news-gathering. Advertising isn't disappearing. It's simply changing media -- from print to online. And newspapers simply aren't competing for that dollar. Because of attitudes like Alter's, which are divorced from the market.

The problem is this assumption of "authority" which positively oozes out of Alter's pores, and those of every other so-called journalist in this country. That's something your employer earns for you, and you try very hard not to toss away. It's a loan, not a grant, which comes from the market, not from God.

So here's the secret to making money online, doing real journalism, in 2008.

The Atomized Web

One of the greatest fears the media has about its future in the wake of the Web is it will be atomized. (Here's some good atomization, from Marren Fuel Injection.)

Large audiences will prove impossible to generate. No one will be able to afford real reporting any more. News will become just opinion.

I see this through my work at ZDNet. The business model pays writers based on traffic. The incentives are there to generate heat, not light, and to create troll bait, not detailed journalism. Some readers complain, but every time I try to concentrate on interviews the size of my check goes down.

It's a very Darwinian environment, with more bloggers added all the time, all competing for attention. It's very hard to maintain an audience without being outrageous. Some readers complain, yet their clicks are driving the site toward trivia, on the wings of that rarest of species, a viable online business model.

Blogs in general are harder-and-harder to break into. I look at the traffic patterns here, and if I weren't as dedicated to writing as breathing I'd probably stop. You can't make a living as an individual blogger anymore. You can't break into the top 1,000. You have to associate with someone, something, or try video, which itself is a shared, group-oriented industry.

There's also a model for where this is heading, one the news industry fears even while they can't say its name.

Porn.