The World Wide Wide Wide Wide Web

Posted on January 29, 2010, 5:13 am, by Thomas Hawk, under Fine Art.

The great thing about the web is that it makes publishing so simple and cheap that virtually anyone can do it. This allows even the most obscurest of content to find a home. It allows people to turn their own private little passions (whatever they are) into quality online magazines really.

Yesterday this guy published one of my photos of a painting that I took at the Art Institute of Chicago. I love how Flickr can become a resource for all of the obscurity that runs free on the web.

Who would have thought that there would be an entire site devoted to the works of the French painter William Adolphe Bouguereau?

Just imagine the possibilities of all of the content that will flourish in the next 20 years online. It’s this free passion-driven long-tail content that will continue to chip away at TV, movies, popular music, museums, print media and books as more and more of it comes available and as better and better tools are created to help us find whatever our itch is that needs to be scratched. What an exciting time to be an artist or publisher with an unprecedented historical opportunity to disseminate your work.

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January 29, 2010 at 3:09 pm EricaJoy

"The website at thomashawk.com contains elements from the site thomashawk.com, which appears to host malware – software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent." Whaaaaaat?
January 29, 2010 at 3:12 pm Roberto Bonini

i got the same warning. Whats up Thomas
January 29, 2010 at 10:19 pm Thomas Hawk

Hey so apparently this is related to a hack that happened to my blog a few weeks ago that Aaron Brazell was able to clean up and fix for me. It was a pain in the ass. He said that the problem now though is that Google has my blog/stylesheet blocked because they still think it's malicious(?) It should be fine now though and Aaron says that the Google block should go away in 90 days, but does anyone know how I can contact someone at Google and get them to check it out to get the block off sooner now that it's cleaned up? grrrrrr.
January 29, 2010 at 10:22 pm EricaJoy

Let me see what I can do.
January 29, 2010 at 10:34 pm John Mueller

Hi Thomas, there's still some hacked content on your site -- check out http://web-sniffer.net/?url=thomashawk.com/wp-content/ or http://web-sniffer.net/?url=thomashawk.com/wp-content/upgrade/.oem/microsoft-autoroute-europe-2009.html
January 29, 2010 at 10:38 pm John Mueller

Your blog uses content from those folders, so users who use a browser with the SafeBrowsing-API will see the malware warning. Once you've removed the bad stuff (*do it now!* :-)), you can request a malware review in your Webmaster Tools account. It'll generally get processed within a few days (usually hours) and the label will be removed. You can find out more about that process at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=45432
January 29, 2010 at 10:39 pm John Mueller

... and finally, try to figure out how they were able to hack your site so that you can be sure that any security holes are plugged properly :-). Good luck!
January 30, 2010 at 2:19 am Thomas Hawk

thanks John. Will keep trying to fix it.
January 30, 2010 at 2:28 am Russellreno

Excellent post Thomas. Where do you spend you FF time now that you aren't posting current events like did last year? I spend more time on FB following my IRL friends now.
January 30, 2010 at 9:13 pm Thomas Hawk

Russell, spending most of my time in DMU on Flickr these days. A vibrant intimate community of photographers and non-photographers even. I'm pretty involved there and post every day. All are welcome. http://www.flickr.com/groups/censorshipsucks/discuss/
January 31, 2010 at 8:42 pm Thomas Hawk

thanks for the advice John, I think I got it cleaned out and resubmitted my blog using Google's webmaster tools. Hopefully things are looking better.
February 1, 2010 at 4:27 am TrafficBug

Keep us updated of the progress!
February 1, 2010 at 9:00 am John Mueller

It looks like it went through :-) -- I don't see the malware warning anymore. Thanks for fixing it! It sounds like it took (apparently) less than 12 hours from your review request to the malware tag being removed :-).
February 1, 2010 at 5:55 pm Thomas Hawk

GREAT! John, thank you so much for your helpful advice.
February 1, 2010 at 5:56 pm EricaJoy

Thanks for answering the bat (G?) signal John. :)