Category Archives: internet

Why big companies are poison to the startups…

7 Replies

“If you cant beat laser cat, you probably deserve to die.”

via How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Great, great article at Gizmodo. It’s the story of Flickr and Yahoo but it could also be the story of Delicious, Upcoming, Jaiku, Dodgeball or many other promising startups being swallowed by Yahoo, Google or Microsoft. Most of the times big companies don’t care about community and innovation, they only care about monetizing the startup contents and integrating them into their big mashup of apps. That’s why Flickr lost the train on almost everything since being bought by Yahoo, infected by the disease of its parent company.

 

 

 

.

Who steals your photos?!

4 Replies


“Steal This Photo”

Photo by Decrepit Telephone

Having your photos exposed on online galleries is a great way to improve yourself as a photographer, for having your work visible and available to other people’s critique, for refining your aesthetics by analyzing and criticizing other people’s work and also for expanding the reach of your work for being visible by peers and potential clients. But there’s a big downside: having your work exposed makes it a potential candidate to photo theft. There’s no easy way to tackle this, even if you set a clear license for your photos (and you should) people will just ignore it and use them. Another option is watermarks, but there’s a delicate balance  between a small and discrete watermark that doesn’t distract from the main subject of the photo and a big enough that invalidates anyone one from using the photo, personally I haven’t found such balance.

But photographers have a great tool at their disposal: reverse image search, like Google Image Search or Tineye. An reverse image search engine works in a ridiculous simple way: working with a real image as its input to search where it’s being used throughout the internet, just like a normal search engine searches text in the internet, showing not only non-authorized commercial usage of your photos or if your free stuff is being used the proper way (I publish most of my work under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial usage) but also how your stock photos are being used by your clients.

And to make things even simpler you can find tools for your browser of choice, like Who stole my pictures for Firefox or Image Search Options for Chrome, where you just have to right click on your desired image and search it throughout the the web using several reverse image search engines available.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Duas falácias da Lei da Cópia Privada

Leave a reply

“Conforme foi salientado por vários deputados no debate parlamentar do dia 4, a evolução que se tem operado na sociedade digital torna imperativa e inadiável a criação de uma Lei da Cópia Privada que, levando em conta as novas realidades tecnológicas, proteja os direitos dos autores e dos artistas, encerrando o capítulo da era analógica que a lei ainda em vigor tem mantido como principal referência”, lê-se no comunicado.

SPA congratula-se com “amplo consenso” para aprovação da lei da cópia privada [PUBLICO].

Tal posto brilhantemente pelo Marco Santos (aliás como é hábito no Bitaites) achar que todos somos culpados é logo um péssimo ponto de partida de uma lei que é mais um exemplo do resultado de pessoas legislam sobre algo que não conhecem, à imagem do que está a acontecer nos Estados Unidos com a lei de combate à pirataria.

Partindo do princípio que uma lei que cobra uma “taxa de pirataria” em dispositivos de armazenamento é aprovada há duas conclusões que facilmente se podem tirar:

  1. Como utilizador final passo a ter legitimidade moral para copiar, duplicar, baixar conteúdos livremente uma vez que estou a pagar uma taxa que cobre esses conteúdos.
  2. Como autor espero que sejam criados mecanismos de modo a receber a minha parte deste novo imposto, ou pelo menos, ter acesso a dispositivos de armazenamento sem a tal sobretaxa.

Mas este raciocínio tem duas enormes falácias:

  1. Ao invés de repensar um modelo de negócio da primeira metade do século XX, e atualizá-lo aos novos meios e a uma nova relação entre autores e consumidores que a Internet criou , a indústria prefere enfiar a cabeça no buraco e prosseguir com a caça às bruxas que tem mantido desde o Napster.
  2. Organizações como a Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores, ao contrário do que o nome pomposo possa levar a crer, são apenas cooperativas e lobbies que defendem os seus interesses e não os interesses dos autores, que continuam a ser o elo mais fraco.

Na verdade esta lei protege não o autor mas os lucros da indústria que dele se alimenta.

 

Mais leituras recomendadas:
Pena Antecipada sobre Crime Potencial [Blasfémias]
Os links da #PL118 [Jonasnuts]
Lei da Cópia Privada #pl118 – todos criminosos até prova contrária (1/2) [Aventar]
A Lei Minority Report [Bitaites]

The Internet Is Full

Leave a reply
Media_httpcdncuration_kvnbj
via CurationSoft

Posted via t3mujin’s quick thoughts

4 reasons why I renewed my Flickr Pro subscription over moving to Google+

2 Replies
Google Plus logo

Image by Bruce Clay, Inc via Flickr

 

Image representing Flickr as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Recently my Flickr Pro account was about to expire and I faced myself with a quite simple question: Should I renew it or not? Google gave a new life to Picasa (possibly renamed to Google Photos one of these days) by launching Google+, has been growing steadily and has gained lots of popularity among photographers which have embraced it quickly as its social network, actually most of my Google+ followers and activity is related to photography.

The truth is nowadays I don’t use Flickr as regularly as I did, Google+ became much more interesting these days, and when my Flickr Pro account was about to expire I considered not to to renew it and move to Picasa. The option wasn’t abandoning Flickr, still is the largest photography community around, but changing the center of my photographic online presence to Picasa. I truly was tempted, but in the end it wasn’t enough to move.

The Lazy factor

Probably the less significant but a still valid reason , I would move a large amount of photos around, that would be painful and time consuming.

Google+ still has some annoyances

The Google+ has evolved a lot since its launch, all Google products are or will be tightly integrated, but still are some rough edges: user experience between Picasa and Google Photos isn’t coherent, although the contents are the same. Flickr feels more fine tuned and mature.

Flickr has a great integration

Flickr was one of the first services to make API‘s popular and the result is that currently you have thousands of apps or mashups and you don’t have to go to the website to actually being using it, you can easily take your data and integrate it in many ways: the archives section of my website is built over Flickr API.

Traffic

Flickr is huge and even on a slow week I can easily get a few hundred hits a day, and some of it ends up in my site, Google+/Picasa still can’t match this.

 

For now I’ll stay at Flikr, at least for another year, but I’ll still can be found at my Google+ profile.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Fetch Flickr feeds with photos linking to a Lightbox

Leave a reply

Flickr’s RSS feed photos link to the regular photo page, with too many links, buttons and banners distracting from the photo (specially if one of your photos gets “invaded” by award groups). The Lightbox view, with its dark background, is a much more suitable landing page for the photos published via the RSS feed.

With this simple Yahoo Pipe you can retrieve your photostream RSS with photos pointing directly to the Lightbox view! Just insert your Flickr User Id and export it any way you like.

Steve Jobs death and the social media

Leave a reply

Steve Jobs‘ death was another reminder that nothing beats social media for breaking news. I got the news while writing a blog post, having a big and multiple screens allows us to have an always opened window with Twitter stream and at some point news started pouring. Within seconds I was searching, Twitter not Google, for confirmation and reactions from tech pundits and everyone else, was even able to get some kind of live coverage from Robert Scoble’s on “location coverage” via his Google+ at a time when traditional media only had a footnote or a press release of his death..

This isn’t new for me, although in this case the news weren’t unfolding, the event’s weren’t happening as we speak (like the London riots or the Hudson river crash), Twitter has a tremendous reach. Like some time ago when a earthquake struck Lisbon and the South of Portugal. My immediate reaction after the shake was checking Twitter. Within a few minutes I could gather tons of information, feedback from all over the country and all this before it got to one of Portugal’s 24-hour news channels.

The truth is nowadays I trust more the Internet for breaking news than social media.

 

 

 

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

A few reasons to hate “flame wars”!

1 Reply

Flame Wars: The free post

I don’t really get those who treat brands like sports teams, offering blind allegiance over self-interest. That’s just zealotry. God bless that file system; my platform, right or wrong.

via If You Already Hate Windows 8 Then You Hate Technology [Gizmodo] .

 

Neither do I.

Throughout the years, I’ve been faced with flame wars in the various aspects of my life: programming language or platform of choice, operating system, camera gear brand, etc. . Fan boys that defend the lighter, faster, more stable or simply the best thing they’ve found as a crusade, feeding long hours and lengthy pages of discussions with empty arguments like someone keeps pouring gasoline to a bonfire.

I’ve seen too many Java programmers bashing vigorously .Net, programmers who don’t really grasp the main concepts of Object Oriented Programming. Console gamers that play the same game but keep repeating when it’s played in their . The endless Nikon vs. Canon feud, which is worth a post of it’s own, where in every meeting or photowalk people inevitably start counting how many Nikonians and Canonians are present, like choosing sides on a war. Some Apple fanboys, probably my favorite, that some time ago criticized Windows and praised openness of Linux and now seem to switched sides by defending a system that’s actually more closed than Windows.

I’ve chosen may brands but I never offered allegiance to any, some I’ve used for many years while I dropped others. I’ve always used Nikon gear, I’ve bought a grand total of four Nikon reflex cameras and a handful of Nikkor lenses, I was always pleased and never considered switching brands, despite finding features elsewhere that I love. On the other hand I used Windows for many years but got very tired of it, which pushed to try the several flavors of Linux, I ended up sticking with Ubuntu for it’s active community and the uncluttered, straightforward interface of Gnome, and the truth is feels more natural and fits me much better than Windows.

Regarding the post linked above, which caused me to write this rant, although my platforms of choice nowadays are Linux and Android I was really pleased with Windows Phone 7 (although I still believe it arrived too late and fail eventually) and I’m very curious to see how the Metro interface will evolve in Windows 8.

I guess that’s human nature that people like to choose sides.

Technology is just a tool, something to make your life easier and more comfortable. It isn’t a sports team or a religion to follow blindly, and since I’m openly “religionless” I’ll reserve my biased thoughts only to subjects related to my sports team.

My initial thoughts on Google+

2 Replies

My rants and praises regarding Google’s new adventure through the social networking world, updated on the go.

  • Like Google’s new look, is sleek and sexy (specially GMail’s newest themes), regarding Google+ everything is uncluttered. Pretty much the way I like a web design.
  • Can’t find a way to import external sources (big no, no).
  • Android app is sexy! The photo above is the app’s dashboard.
  • Still trying to find out how Sparks, Huddles and Hangouts will work for me.
  • I already have groups on Google Contacts, why can’t I somehow sync or import them to my Circles?
  • Still no stupid games (Farmville and such) or quizzes. Yet… Like Scoble pointed out “average users” will only start to use it much later.
  • It tends to flood your Gmail Inbox, just like Buzz did, must turn off some checkboxes.

15 Facts About Net Neutrality

Leave a reply

15 Facts About Net Neutrality [Read Write Web]