DarrenBarefoot.com

I’ve got a few of my photos on the site as well and I’ve got some mixed feelings.

Frankly, though, my issue is stats related. I have a lot of fun going out and taking pictures and I’m constantly striving to be a better photographer.

I licensed my photos under the Creative Commons because if they are of possible use to someone else, great. As someone who occasionally needs a photo for a blog post himself, I’m happy to oblige someone else.

That said, I do enjoy seeing the stats on Flickr that reflect that people are looking at my work. Rather than hosting the photo on NowPublic, I wish they would just reference the Flickr photo.

In some ways, it’s a minor complaint. I certainly understand why they wouldn’t want to depend on a third party service to host their photographs (not even sure if Flickr allows this to happen on NowPublic’s scale anyhow).

Anyhow, I hadn’t logged into the site until just recently, so I’m not entirely sure that it is necessary. I think that all you have to do is click through and ok the photo for distribution.

Cheers,
Randy

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Darren, I had the same beef. I just didn’t take the time to contact them about it. I love that my photos are being seen by more people, but I was the one that did the legwork to get the shot. The least they could do is make it super simple to approve it’s use.

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Honours English Grammar Dominatrix checking in…

The answer is, “Who is doing whom a favour”.

Reason: “Who” is doing a favour “to whom” <– indirect object. Direct / indirect objects in a sentence take the accusative / dative case: Whom.

I had to take Latin in school from age eleven, and the language of instruction for all my classes was French. As an Anglophone, I learned this kind of grammar as fast as possible as a matter of survival.

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I think you’re being awfully forgiving, I’m a lot more hard line about it.

Their site’s signup form and their emails haven’t convinced me I’d benefit in any meaningful way from sharing my photos with them, beyond the exposure of perhaps a few hundred extra eyeballs. While on the other hand, the photos they use clearly help make their service better. The value proposition is a one-way street.

The great irony is that I really wouldn’t mind sharing the photos anyway. But I never have, and won’t, because I’m simply not creating Yet Another Login for a service I don’t intend to use.

It seems blindingly obvious to me that their photo permission rate would increase drastically if they lowered this barrier and allowed non-users to approve photos. So I’ve tried to think of reasons why this hasn’t happened in the past year or two they’ve been contacting Flickr users. I came up with two possibilities:

1) Misguided attempt at user lock-in.

2) Veracity. Without an account, how else could you be sure the person authorizing usage is the photographer?

I’d hope it’s the latter. But as the photographer, it’s still not my problem.

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Correct me if I’m wrong - but if the photos are creative commons licensed does NowPublic need your ‘permission’ to use them? Could they not just use them and provide the proper attribution and license on their site?

In my view, the fact that NowPublic is going the extra ‘unnecessary’ step of getting permission via an activated NP account, seems like a blatant ploy by them to use Flickr photos/photographers as a means to pad their ‘registered’ userbase.

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It does feel like a tactic to inflate account numbers, which are pretty much useless except to appease VC, but I’ve always been happy to go through the trouble and help someone make their article a bit nicer with a photo I’ve taken. Mostly because the person making the request is decent about it and I have to like the article.

My point is that a bit of work is alright if there’s incentive, but I do agree that the registration step feels bogus.

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I think NowPublic is a great idea, but does anyone actually use it to check the news?

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Let me just chime in with some agreement, but the biggest thing to me is that on top of the consistent asking for permission, your pictures are not even featured in the story as much as an aside.

I say that if you are taking the time to use them, actually use them in the post. Make the feature so that when the user automatically grants permission, a small box within the story appears inside the post. Then if there are multiple photos, cycle through them with some sweet ajax slideshow or something, citing proper credit of the photo in text under the picture.

Sure, not the place to promote this idea, but I know they’re out there listening…

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Hi Darren and everyone,

This is Michael Tippett of NowPublic. I appreciate all the conversation here. It’s always useful for us to see what is good or not so good about the site. (We actually just rolled out a re-design that has incorporated many of the suggestions we’ve had in the past but some of the suggestions provided here have not been implemented.)
There are some interesting points raised in this discussion. Here’s how I see things…
There seems to be some confusion about our motivation to require contributors to set up accounts. The reason we do this is primarily to preserve the photo owner’s control over the picture. If there was no log-in, then anyone (or no one) would be able to manage this material. We want to ensure that if someone changes their mind or wants to change the details attached to the photo, that they are able to do so in an authenticated environment.
As far as the mechanics go, we will continue to try and make the process of signing up easier. Right now we are re-thinking the whole idea of a news ‘story’ and the way that Flickr photos fit into that will no doubt change. If you’re interested in getting a sneak peak into our development environment I’d love to walk you through some our concepts and get your feedback. Fire me an email at mtippett(at)nowpublic(dot)com.
Darren began this conversation by asking the question of ‘who benefits from this arrangement?’ My answer to that is: both parties. There is no question that NowPublic benefits from having content on the site but there is also benefit to our contributors. We have had members who have sent us stories and photos and ended up in the national media. For example, Megan Cole was the poster child of citizen journalism in the Globe and Mail recently. We also got the work of UNCULTURED, one of our most active members into the Globe (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FLAC.20071221.COGEE21%2FTPStory%2F&ord=100157513&brand=theglobeandmail&force_login=true ). The way we see it, it is in fact a two way street. If you want to see others who feel this way I’d encourage you to do a search for NowPublic on Flickr.
So thanks for your feedback. We’ll keep on doing what we can to lead the citizen journalism movement and we appreciate the support.

Best,
Michael, NowPublic, co-founder

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I feel that the requirement to sign-in to NowPublic makes perfect sense from the angle of authenticated, on-going control of images (as mentioned above in a previous post).

From the “benefit” perspective, I can see this weighing heavily on one side or the other or balancing out, depending on the popularity of the article versus the popularity of the image or photographer. I would imagine that a more popular photographer would be slightly more selective with the approval to use their images; and a popular author would most likely be the one who selects the best images to go along with the higher quality articles they write. Not to say that we’re an illiterate country, but a picture does seem to be worth at least a few hundred words these days; a good picture even more.

One of the things I’d -really- like to see would be increased configurability of the attribution - possibly a link back to the source (such as the image on Flickr or any other source). If a photographer is using Flickr as their primary image repository for public viewing, there should be a way for the photographer to set-up their attribution line, or a link-back at least to their profile. I do see the need for NowPublic to contain what it links back to, however, a general pointer in our direction (say, to our Flickr ‘people’ [profile] link, rather than our ‘photos’ [photostream] link) might be nice.

One of the problems/concerns/questions I’ve had of late is: okay, I’ve been invited to submit a few specific images from Flickr for news stories. I’m hooked and want to associate more of my Flickr images with other stories…how do I do that? You think it’s a pain to create a single NowPublic account to authorize unlimited future requests…imagine the additional workflow required to submit each of your images, copying and pasting all the appropriate title and description information, not to mention the actual image itself…for each image you care to submit. If the facility is (obviously!) already built-in to NowPublic in some respect, it really should be fully implemented so that a photographer can frequently and easily submit their work without a lot of work. I do see the value of having the content be on NowPublic, and not some remote (Flickr) source, however, I don’t want to have to submit each of my images all over again for yet another site.

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