Something a little different…

Jan 17, ’12 7:48 AM

Today, instead of hastily finishing one of my own posts in the drafts folder, I want to point you elsewhere. To Greg Campbell’s blog and his latest post, Breaking on through. (Greg is an author and many of you know the movie Blood Diamond, which was based on one of his books.)

I like these personal accounts and reminders of my friend Chris Hondros, precisely because they’re filling in blanks for me as I did not have the chance to know him from way back when…

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The Rise of Crowd-Curation?

Jan 9, ’12 12:47 PM

Here’s to 2012. A year that will bring… well, what exactly?

If I knew that, I’d be playing the lottery. But my friend Faruk has an idea:

 

Let’s think about that for a minute. Crowd-curation. It really only means that many people (the crowd) contribute to the task of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition. Because that’s what curation means, according to the dictionary. Leave aside, for now, that most people’s interest – or attention span – will not actually extend to “organizing” and “looking after” any items. But the crowd will happily come together in selecting things. Sounds like it could be fun, right?
And we already do this: When we hit that +1 or Like button or the little star to favorite (is that even a verb?) each others’ pictures, videos, sounds or tweets then we are actively participating in crowd-curation by expressing to others what we thought was noteworthy or even: good.

More fundamentally, by sharing a link to content made available by someone else we’re curating the entire web: Our followers are pointed to something we think they should pay attention to.

And don’t we all enjoy funny dog pictures? So, yeah. Fun, right?

Well, not necessarily. What’s one crowd’s fun can be another one’s “holy crap” moment. Professional curators and editors will not be happy, once they realize what Faruk’s tweet really means. They might even be scared shitless — because this feels like it might endanger their livelihood. Not today and likely not this year. And as a manager of a crack team of professional journalists, I know that The Crowd will not be able to rival what “my” photo editors do anytime soon. But we also can’t turn a blind eye to simple facts of life. Often, good enough is just that: good enough. And if recent history has taught us anything, it is that changes in technology and the associated behavior patterns have impacted every profession that they touched. Manufacturing, photojournalism and everything in between has changed when technology enabled new ways of production or gave rise to new consumption patterns. Amateur photographers suddenly had technology in their hands that replaced decades of a professional photographer’s experience. Travelers suddenly booked their trips without the help of professional travel agents on websites. (But boy, do we miss them already!) Let’s not kid ourselves: There is no reason to believe editors and curators will be an exception in the long term — unless Faruk is wrong.

(But he’s right.)

Obviously, there are downsides to crowd-curation. While it has all the attributes of a good buzzword that might get your startup funded by venture capitalists, it has its limits for a society: crowds prefer what they already like and that doesn’t necessarily give rise to high quality content. (If you’ve ever tried to use Twitter’s trending topics you know what I mean.) To know if I like something I must first know that it exists. Consequently crowd-curation doesn’t necessarily ease the dissemination of new and unusual content. There is a good chance that sticking to one’s interests and surrounding oneself with people that share these interests will result in an echo-chamber that doesn’t leave room for growth. I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of this at one point or another.

And semantics matter: curation is probably a misleading term for what we’re discussing here because curation, to most people, implies authoritative selection of the best from a known set of items. What we’re talking about here is making decisions about individual items: do I like this picture or not? Do I share that link or not? Those singular decisions about singular items then combine to give rise to what’s most liked and most shared on the web, giving an illusion of crowd-curation.

Not to speak of the business interests who will want in on the game…

 

But those downsides, provided you even agree and see them as downsides, will neither keep crowd-curation from happening nor from becoming an integral part of modern life.

Of course businesses will try to use crowd-curation to their advantage. We’ll see more of what’s called viral marketing today and curation system providers will find ways to charge for sponsored upranking. Ultimately, it is too promising to rely on an unpaid crowd of consumers to exactly say what they like (== what they might be willing to spend their money on) to not be exploited.

So what’s my point, you ask?

It is to help me focus my own thoughts and to maybe encourage you to share your own. What application of crowd-curation are you looking forward to and what aspects not so much? Maybe I’m way off? Do you have a good idea for a better term? Other thoughts? Objections? Ideas?
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rnews:about and rnews:mentions in the context of images

Dec 31, ’11 10:09 AM

As many online publishers, both large and small, now move to implement rNews 1.0, the IPTC’s new data model for embedding publishing metadata in web pages, some questions are coming up.

Most individual IPTC members represent their respective employers and I’m no exception: Working for the world’s largest photo agency, the question how to best mark up images is often smilingly passed along to me. Most questions are easy to answer and just require a look at the mapping table between the Photo Metadata standards IPTC Core and IPTC Extension to rNews.

But in particular the rNews properties about and mentions seem to warrant a bit of elaboration.

Let’s start with our official definitions:

rnews:about – “Indicates that the NewsItem is specifically about a concept.”

rnews:mentions – “Indicates that the NewsItem contains a reference to, but is not necessarily about a concept.”

So what does that mean?

If the NewsItem is a text/article, this usually makes sense to everyone. After all, a text is (ideally) clearly focused on a certain subject, so it’s about that subject. And in the process of writing about said subject, other facts, people, organizations etc. are mentioned (but they’re not the focus of that article).

Applying this paradigm to a picture doesn’t require too much of a mental leap. Of course, there are edge cases. (We could probably fill another five blog posts just discussing those and who knows, maybe I’ll do that some day down the road.)

But aside from edge cases, what is the focus of a given image? Who is the person or what is the thing, action etc. clearly visible in the image? That’s what you should mark up using the rnews:about property – it’s essentially saying that this is the core focus of the image. What is also visible but not the main focus of attention? That’s what the image mentions, of you will. Use rnews:mentions to mark up those concepts.

As I said above, it’s not a perfect analogy and there certainly are edge cases. But the usage I lay out here is the most straightforward application of the rNews data model to images and their metadata and therefore the preferred one. With this, I’m confident that publishers and rNews consumers alike can be expected to understand the semantics of about and mentions in the context of an image.

Thoughts? Objections? Ideas?
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ÜberTwitter, Plixi and the photos you tweet

Jan 8, ’11 7:26 AM

You’re a Twitter user? You enjoy posting pictures? You are using used to use[1] ÜberTwitter? Read on…

ÜberTwitter is an app for iPhone and BlackBerry and claims to be “the #1 Twitter client in the world.” Judging by the tweets I read (mostly from BlackBerry users) that might very well be true. The app defaults to a photo sharing service named Plixi when you tweet a photo. Nothing seemed wrong with that setup.

Until now.

The celebrity photo agency WENN has reportedly struck a deal with Plixi to license photos posted on that service. Of course, it was only a matter of time until a deal like that would be made and if done transparently, it’s probably not a problem, depending on the actual terms.

I wondered if users might be made aware of that deal so they can make educated decisions about what happens to their photos. So I tested it out:

I installed ÜberTwitter on my iPhone and posted a test tweet with an old photo of myself.

When doing that,

  • I was not presented with an option to choose Plixi or another photo sharing service (i.e. ÜberTwitter silently defaults to Plixi)[2],
  • I could not change the settings to a different photo sharing service manually later on and
  • I was not presented with Plixi’s Terms of Service either.

If you read those TOS closely, the company explains that while I would retain copyright, they can sell the pictures I post as they please via whomever they please. They even state that once a partner of Plixi has copied the image off of Plixi’s servers, even my removal of the photo from Plixi would still allow that partner to keep licensing the photo.

My gut feeling says this whole scenario might be legally challengeable. But I’m not a lawyer.

If you care about who makes money with your images — especially if you or others count yourself as a celebrity – your best bet right now is to use a different photo sharing service for Twitter.

To accomplish this, I would suggest you check out other Twitter clients for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Good and easily configurable are Twitter’s official clients themselves:

Twitter for iPhone (iTunes link)

Twitter for BlackBerry (BB App Store link)

Good luck — and make sure you know what the services you use allow themselves to do with your content.

[1] UPDATE 02/18/11: Twitter has just announced in an email to registered UberTwitter users and on their website that it suspended the application for policy violations. While Twitter has not done this to address the photo issue outlined above, one of the automatic outcomes of this move is that the you now have to use an application other than UberTwitter — which also means you now have a choice of photo upload service.

[2] UPDATE 02/18/11: Vincent Baby tells me in a response to this post that the BlackBerry version of UberTwitter indeed allows you to select between two different image upload services.

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