- The End of Keyword Spamming?
Via Lee Torrens: Dreamstime introduced a feature that allows contributors to see which keywords resulted in their photos being sold. This is a great move towards more openness from a provider’s perspective. I can see how this will influence photographers, will allow them to review their keywords and clean them up, remove keyword spam (I mean really who thinks that keyword spamming actually works!), and most importantly it will allow photographers to better understand how users search. And Lee is right: I would expect this to be adopted by other microstock firms.
- My Domain Kingdom for $750,000?
Yes. Via Silicon Alley Insider: CNN acquired ireport.com for a wooping $750,000. ireport.com will support CNN’s amateur or user contributed video submissions of current events.
- Behind the scenes from a photographer’s point of view
John Harrington has a fantastic video and script up about coverage of how photographers work when they are covering a State of the Union Address.
This is awesome. Kudos to John for taking the time to get this out.
One of the primary positions is the head on position; in addition there is a left position and a right position on either side of the chamber. There are also corner positions and a rear position known as the reversal position. Now in addition one of the very unique positions that’s been added in oh the last 5 or 10 years is the floor pool position.
I am not going to spoil things for you but there are great conversations about photographers, cameras, and photographers editorial angles (what they were trying to aim for in the photographs shot). Nice work John. A big thank you!
- The Future of Copyright
Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) has a great little article in The Guardian titled “Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses”. This is something that I have been thinking about for quite some time. Since we are in the business of tracking images and videos, fair use and copyright infringements are daily conversations at Idée (in a good way, we are idealists after all!). I have to say that I agree with Cory and it is high time we started thinking about a copyright overhaul. What we have had in the past is simply a set of copyright rules that apply to everyone “from Sony Pictures to your neighbour’s eight-year-old” but the world has changed and then came the Internet….
“We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.”
and there is a way for you to get involved and shape things.
- Sticks and carrots
It’s been said that companies manage their staff with sticks and carrots. At Idée carrot cake is the motivator of choice. One of the nice things about our neighbourhood is that the George Brown Faculty of Hospitality is right around the corner. Though their counter is sometimes empty and unstaffed, it is often are loaded up with delicious treats made by the student chefs. This means there’s always lots of delicious baked goods around the Idéeplex, but unfortunately for me, no enforced calisthenics program.If you would like to enjoy delicious treats like these we are hiring!
- Everywhere Girl, The Book
If you’ve ever worried about photos from your past coming back to haunt you, get to know the story of the Everywhere Girl. Over a decade ago she was a young actress posing for a series of stock photos. While she’s no Mona Lisa, in recent years her photos have made their way into royalty-free collections and crept into print and web designs the world over. First chronicled in Paul Hales’ technology blog The Inquirier and later by Idée’s own CEO Leila, the Everywhere Girl now even has her own blog. While fans have been compiling her images with the human eye for years, no method is better suited to this kind of task than image-recognition technology.We indexed a series of Everywhere Girl photos using PixID our image recognition technology and have been monitoring the appearance of the Everywhere Girl. Here are the interesting results from our book cover monitoring project:
The Let’s Study Series of Christian books
- Top Mugs of 2007
2007 was a banner year for celebrity crime with eight mugshots breaking into the top 500 most used entertainment images of the year. Using the image recognition powers of PixID, we analyzed thousands of print magazines and newspapers to compile a list of the most used mugshots of 2007. Here they are in order of ascending popularity (least to most).
8. Actor Jason Wahler (The Hills) gets 30 days for alcohol related charges.
- Mona Lisa Gets Around
According to our PixID Image Monitoring Service, the Mona Lisa is one of the most used and abused images in print advertising today. Just using our image recognition technology, we compared millions of images against our growing collection of scanned print magazines and newspapers. The results were astounding – Mona Lisa really gets around.
Here are the most interesting sightings of Mona Lisa in advertising world:
PixID spots a tiny Mona Lisa in this Absolut advertisement
- Colr.org Palettes for Multicolour Search Lab
If you’re a colr.org user you may have noticed that the community-created colour palettes link directly to a corresponding colour search on our Multicolour Search Lab (Alamy Set). Whether it be modern teal or gentian blues, colr.org has got you covered.
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