June 6th, 2008, 19 Comments »
If you’re a regular Flickr user with Creative Commons-licensed photos, you’ve probably received a request from NowPublic to use one of your photos. I think this is a great application of the crowd-sourcing model, and they’ve got it 90% correct. I sent a feature request to NowPublic on the subject, and thought I’d share it here:
I’ve received a couple of recent requests to integrate Flickr photos into news stories. I’m happy to receive and approve them. However, your current setup obliges me to create a NowPublic account and subsequently log in every time I want to approve a photo (I’m not comfortable uniformly approving all future requests. That’s a pain point I could do without.
Philosophically, I think the question is ‘who’s doing whom a favour?’ The login implies that NP is doing me a favour by publishing my photo. I feel the opposite, that I’m doing NP a favour by permitting you to use my photo. If we work from my assumption, then it behooves NP to make the act of approval as effortless as possible.
Do you think I got this right? Or am I just whinging, and should be grateful for being asked to share my photos? And should that be ‘whom’ or ‘who’? I never committed the associated grammar rule to memory.
I’ve recognized that, personally, I feel quite differently about my photos on Flickr than I do about, say, this blog. While I strive to improve my work on this site, I feel much more ambivalent about my Flickr photos.
Flickr is really just a handy place to put and reference my photos. While I used to obsess about the visitor stats for this site, I almost never check the number of views that my photos have. It’s strictly a question of personal taste, but it’s probably that apathy that’s motivating this feature request.
19 Comments »
October 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
I just received an email announcement from NowPublic, the Vancouver citizen journalism startup. The message was about NowPublic’s new flaming policy:
And why, you may ask, do we take our time finding Flamers is and weeding them out, instead of just ignoring them? Well, flaming doesn’t just hurt the individual being flamed—it hurts the entire community. Flamers tend to end conversations by entering them; they create a hostile, circuitous environment where real discourse is quashed in favour of insults and abuse. We won’t stand for it.
It’s plainly written, and if not for its verbosity (it’s 2200 words and suitably located in the ‘fine_print’ directory), it would be an outstanding example of anti-flame guidelines. I guess they’re covering their bases. I’d be curious to hear more about the reasons behind the new policy, given my recent interest in debate within online communities.
The reason I’m writing this post is that, without any apparent irony, the email concluded thusly:
Please don’t hesitate to email flamers@nowpublic.com if you have any questions.
Cheers,
NowPublic editorial staff
Am I the only one who finds that a little funny?
5 Comments »
August 3rd, 2007, 2 Comments »
Tod Maffin (I just accidentally wrote ‘Tad Moffin’, which would be both an excellent nickname and a great couple of adjectives–”I’m feeling a tad moffin today”) wrote an insightful post about the recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis, and how NowPublic covered it:
But even hours after news of the bridge collapse was all over the cable news networks, NowPublic’s story of the collapse had only two contributors to the story (one of whom is actually an employee of NowPublic).
Their “coverage” consisted of an excerpt from a MSM article, five screen captures from CNN, and two maps. This, again, was hours after the story broke.
Tod asks an important question of NowPublic co-founder Michael Tippett near the end of his piece: “How then do you compete against the CNNs and the CBCs and the CTVs of the world who [tell their audience] ‘When a big news event happens, upload it to us.‘”
Tod’s obviously biased, but I agree that Michael’s answer feels unsatisfactory: “There are cases where people will send to us because they feel like they have a greater chance of getting their side of the story told.”
I’m biased too, because I think that’s a marketing problem. NowPublic needs to let the world–not the blogosphere or Facebook users, but every Normal Human with a phone camera–know about NowPublic, and offer some convincing reasons to choose them over CNN, Fox News et al. It’s a battle for citizen journalist’s eyes and ears, and NowPublic needs to build some powerful messaging around their platform, because they’re the new, upstart kid on the media block.
We can all point to anecdotal examples of citizen journalism’s success. As that concept travels into the trough of disillusionment, it’s going to need to prove it can work and win on every story to reach mainstream adoption.
2 Comments »
