Month: June 2006

aTypical Joe: A gay New Yorker living in the rural south.: No TV: a trend? aTypical Joe asks the question, “is no TV a trend of the future?” And it’s an interesting question for sure.

“last night over dinner with two couples here I learned that neither has television at home anymore. One couple cancelled cable, the other cancelled satellite and they don’t bother with over the air. Both have wide-screen high-definition units that they use only for their Netflix DVDs. And both watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report online.

So I’m wondering, we all know people who have dropped their landlines in favor of cell phones, do you think there’s a similar trend developing where people will cancel their television services and replace them with DVDs and web surfing?”

And Joe’s question gets me thinking. In my own situation my wife watches a lot of TV in our house and our kids watch some children programming so I can’t see myself cancelling my cable or satellite service.

But if I were single I would definitely cancel my service. Why? Simple reason, I only watch two shows on TV right now, Big Love and The Sopranos.

Sure, I’ll catch an episode of CSI SVU every now and again because it’s there but it’s certainly something I could do without.

These days I’d much rather be blogging, or processing my phtotos, or playing around on Flickr or Zooomr, or organizing my digital media and music library, etc. I really have no room in my life for TV anymore. And while it’s nice to watch the occasional movie and what not, there is no reason why Netflix couldn’t fill most of my programming needs, and for a lot less money.

Although most people aren’t yet distracted enough by competing entertainment to kick TV out of their life, I wonder if Joe’s right and this might not be a trend that we are even starting to see now with some early adopters.

About The Image: The three giants: stock photography consolidation An interesting piece from about the image on the state of the stock photography business. (Thanks Alan!)

Huge revenue numbers from the top three players in the stock business. Getty did $735 million in revenue last year, Corbis did $228 million and Jupiterimages did $124 million. Impressive.

One of the things we want to do at Zooomr is to help the pro/am photographer monetize their photostream within the photosharing space. Stock photography certainly represents an avenue for this. Talented pro/ams shouldn’t be paying to be a part of a photo social networking site, they should be paid to be there.

This is not something we are doing in our version 2.0 release, but it is something that we hope to build over the longer term — but we need to figure out how exactly to do this, something we hope to do in the months ahead. There is so much talent in the pro/am photography space and there is such an opportunity to bring fresh new images to market for those photographers who would like to participate.

Tom Raftery interviewed me for the PodLeaders podcast show. We talk about my photography but also a lot about the cool new things that Zooomr is going to be doing. Tom’s a great guy who has intereviewed a whole host of some great tech leaders and technologists over the past few years. You can listen to and download the podcast here.

Come join us this Thursday evening at 7:30 p.m. at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. It’s one of those rare places in SF that actually sells PBR beer, has wi-fi, and interesting people to shoot of course (this would mean you). Bring your camera, your laptop, your prints, your tripod, and anything else that you think might be interesting to share. For those who want to stick around afterwards we can do some shooting along the Embarcadero.

Everyone who shows up gets a free Zooomr Pro account!
RSVP at upcoming.org for the meetup now. Hope to see you there.

FORTUNE Magazine: Warren Buffett gives away his fortune – Jun. 25, 2006: Well hats off to Warren Buffett who is using his considerable wealth to make a difference in the world. Today Buffett pledged to give away $37 billion of stock at today’s value to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is really great to see and is the proper role that true wealth ought to play in our society. This also, according to CNNMoney, may be the largest single philanthropic gift ever given.

And so Bill and Warren are great examples of how the wealthiest in our country ought to spend their wealth in the end. But where are the rest of the Forbes 500? Where are the rest of the world’s wealthiest on giving things away?

One way to ensure that more of this money be given away is to continue to increase the estate tax. The estate tax probably has the least detrimental impact above a certain level towards the overall welfare and benefit of our society.

Personally I believe that their ought to be a much greater incentive for wealthy Americans to give their money away. I think that the estate tax on estates over $50 million ought to be 100%. Why over $50 million? Because I believe that $25 million (what would be left assuming the first $50 million being at 50%) is more than enough money to leave your children and heirs to live out their life in relative comfort. And while they may not be able to own and fly the private jets that their parents did, they still would more than likely have as comfortable a life as possible. If they were wise stewards of the $25 million left they could also certainly increase these dollars during their life as well ensuring that their children and future generations were also well cared for.

The cost on our society for the wealthiest of the wealthy losing the ability to pass on more than $25 million or so peronally would not be that great. The benefit on the other hand would be enormous. And it would absolutely encourage others to follow in the footsteps of Gates and Buffett in using their vast wealth for the benefit of a much greater group of people on this earth.

Thank you Warren Buffett for this kind gift to the world today and for helping set an example of the right behavior for the billionaire.

Enjoyed some of the afternoon sessions of Bloggercon IV yesterday at CNET. Of particular interest was the sesssion on standards. I’ve been trying to figure a way off of Blogger and on to WordPress or Moveable Type for about a year now. Someone offered to do it for me for money and I’m sure that there are those much more technically adept than I that could do this, but it’s a pain that there is not an easy way.

I’ve blogged a bit about user portability in the past couple of weeks and I’m beginning to see it as a much bigger problem and the need for standards to build portability a more and more important thing to be dealt with.

Another thing that sucks for me right now is that I can’t get all of my Yahoo Calendar data that I’ve been using for 5 years or so onto my 30 Boxes calendar. My calendar data is essentially locked into Yahoo! Calendar.

Blog posts, calendar data, photo metadata, and even getting my RSS feeds out of bloglines and on to NewsGator and then onto Google’s RSS a few months back was not an easy thing to do. I had to put a blog post up about it and have someone show me where the export OPML file was, etc.

And if these things are tough for me then they are tough for the majority of users. *That’s* the real frustrating part. Sure, most of the geeks at Bloggercon yesterday have no problem doing *some* of these transfers. But more and more the creaters or user generated content are not sophisticated techies. They are average people with average lives who still don’t even know what RSS is. And while they may want to try 30 Boxes they will hesitate because their stuff is locked up in Yahoo Calendar.

This is a problem and one that needs to be addressed. I’m not sure who should be building the standards, or what the economic intersts are (this is in fact a big part of the problem in my opinion because there is an economic interest in *not* seeing your customer move).

But what needs to be done with all user generated content is to have systems built that have one click portability. Import in, import out. Direct transfers. And I do continue to believe that much of this must come from cooperation among competitors with each other’s APIs. API to API. Or as Marc Cantor so elegantly put it yesterday, “APIs should be about portability of data in both directions. If you’re gonna suck, you’re gonna spit. I want to come in and I want to go out. It’s about sex, life, love. What goes in, goes out…”

I’ve got a few photos of the event up here. Of course Scott Beale from Laughing Squid though is the quinesential San Francisco event photographer and he has much better and many more shots available here.

It was fun catching up with Chris Pirilo who took a shot of me here. Chris Pirilo is the first result in Google when you do a Google search for just plain Chris. That’s pretty cool. Chris and I talked a bit about user generated content. One of the things I’d like to figure out at Zooomr is how a user can monetize their photostream. Whether through selling stock images or art prints, or in other ways, Chris is one of the experts out there on how users can best monetize their content and has been a proponent and success of this with his own content and internet properties.

ZDNet’s got podcasts and write ups here. More coverage from Nick Bradbury. Jeremiah Owyang who it was finally nice to meet for the first time face to face. Kathleen Craig also has a nice write up for Wired.

G’Day World interviewed me earlier this afternoon. We talk about Zooomr, our future plans and current features, and the need for an open transfer for images and user portability in light of some of the recent conversations here on my blog and at Flickr Central.

You can listen to the podcast here.

I just had to blog this photo. It’s by Elinesca and it’s a photo that she put up for me congratulating me on the job with Zooomr. As I was going through my flickr contacts tonight I saw it and even before I saw that she put it up for me I thought, woah, this is the best photo of hers I’ve ever seen. It really is a great shot. Thanks Elinesca. Thanks for the support and thanks for the friendship and thanks for the amazing photo! It means the world.