Month: January 2006

StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog: The Major Battle Arrives: Famous Photographer Michael Grecco Sues Gawker Media: Andy Goetze has the story on famous celebrity photographer Michael Grecco suing Gawker Media. According to Goetze, per Grecco’s attorney Edward Greenberg, “The suit further alleges that Gawker Media makes a practice of harvesting images from third parties and utilizing them without attribution or payment. The suit claims that Gawker Media makes daily use of images created by third parties without having obtained licenses to use such images.”

It will be interesting to see where this one goes.

TechCrunch – Companies and Products on TechCrunch TechCrunch is out with an index of all of the different Web 2.0 products and companies that they’ve reviewed so far. Amazing how behind I am in keeping up on my Web 2.0 players. I’ll have to use this index to check even more out.

Mindjack – Feature – Inside The Internet Archive: Inside the Internet Archive is an excellent overview article of Brewster Kahle’s extremely ambitious project to document the entire internet historically and to build the largest collection of digital bits in a publicly accesible library that I know of.

It’s really good to see someone do something of this magntitude with the wealth that they have been fortunate enough to make.

Earlier this month I joined FM Publishing, John Battelle’s new author driven publishing network. FM Publishing, or Federated Media Publishing, as it is more formally known, is a new start up Battelle has put together to focus on helping bloggers and independent authors market their publications into more professional media businesses.

A big part of FM Publishing of course is about advertising. Basically John and his team procure online advertisements that are then offered to various blogs in the network and profits on the advertising are shared. Bloggers have the opportunity to reject any ad for whatever reason and are not involved in the procurement process.

Although I’ve never had advertising on Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection, lately I’ve been considering it. What has started out as a hobby for me has quickly turned into a very expensive hobby for me. Recently I had to move from a shared hosting service to a dedicated server due to the traffic on the site and that runs me $149 per month now. Additionally, for a while now I’ve wanted to improve the overall design of my site. Today I just use a pretty plain Blogger template and I’m not sure the design is as good as it could be. It would of course cost money to hire a professional designer to come up with something more aesthetically appealing.

Although I do the blog on the side and don’t need to generate income from it to live on, my thought has been to use any money generated from advertisements to make the blog a better and more professional place. I’ll probably also use proceeds from the ads to purchase more photography gear for my other major hobby (er addiction) photography. Much of my photography appears on my site of course and all of my images are creative commons licensed and can be used by anyone for any non commercial use.

Even more than generating some dollars to help subsidize my hobby though, what has interested me most about affiliating with FM Publishing has been the opportunity to work directly with John and his team and to have access to their experience and expertise regarding how to make my blog better and better.

John, of course, in addition to running his own Searchblog, is also the band leader for Boing Boing, the author of a great book on Google, “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture,” and was a co-founder of Wired Magazine. I’ve admired John’s insights into the technology and media markets for a long time and, even more significantly, I admire what I’ve seen of his ethics and professionalism in this business. Already I’ve been receiving some interesting feedback on the blogosphere from John and am confident that having access to someone of his caliber will be helpful as I continue to try and reflect and comment on the technology and media markets myself.

Of course, others associated with FM Publishing are also bloggers and blogs that I read regularly and greatly admire. PVRBlog, Om Malik’s GigaOm, Google Blogoscoped, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, Techdirt, along with a small group of about 20 other great blogs. Central to participating in FM Publishing is an understanding by everyone involved of a great set of principles outlined by John which are as follows:

“Authors who join the FM network of sites hold these values in common:

Voice and Point of View: Strong voices and intelligent points of view drive robust conversations.

Accuracy: Some FM sites are journalistic in nature; others are not. Regardless, FM sites strive for accuracy regarding items we post as facts.

Community: Weblogs are conversations, not lectures. The community that gathers around each site is the essence of its value, and we treat that community accordingly. We listen and respond to feedback, and incorporate it into the way we manage our sites.

Responsibility: We take our role in the community we serve seriously, and feel responsible for our own words. When we make mistakes, we correct them. We do not seek to use our sites maliciously.

Transparency: We err on the side of disclosure to our readers. If we have an interest in something we’re writing about, we disclose that interest. We are as transparent as we can be about our site’s statistics, practices and policies.”

These principles represent an excellent foundation and framework for what blogging should be about.

All in all I’m very excited about my affiliation with FM Publishing and look forward to writing more about it down the line. For me it gives me an opportunity to focus on what I enjoy best about blogging, the actual writing, while someone else uses their experience, clout and buying power to assist with advertisements. At the same time it gives me access to a wonderful network that I can both contribute to and benefit from. It’s a winning model for independent publishers in my opinion and a network I’m proud to be associated with.

If you’d like to learn more about FM Publishing please visit here. Their blog can be found here. If you are interested in possibly joining FM Publishing as an author or blogger you can contact Bill Brazell at bill@fmpub.net. If you are an advertiser and would like to advertise on my site or on other sites in the network you can contact Chas Edwards at chas@fmpub.net.

Oh, and if you are a web developer and are looking for work, FM Publishing is looking to hire right now.

Sony XL1 Previously I’ve blogged about the new Sony XL 1 Media Center PC. Perhaps the most exciting thing about this new PC is that it includes a 200 disc CD/DVD changer where you can load your discs and play them through your Media Center PC. While many will be interested in the unit as a place to hold all of their DVDs for easy retrieval on their Media Center PC, what holds the most interest for me is that allegedly this unit will allow you to load up 200 CDs, go to bed, and wake up with all 200 ripped in the morning in a nice convenient folder on your hard drive.

As I still get virtually all my music still on CD (hate that pesky DRM) this feature was very exciting to me. The problem with the product in my opinion though was that it only came with the XL1 Sony PC as part of a package deal. Personally I’m not interested in buying a Sony PC and was planning on customizing something of my own with more firepower from Dell once Vista was shipped and Dell had a CableLabs approved PC (most likely later this year).

According to Jason Alinen (user name, soundintegration on Remotetly Cool), he spoke with someone from Sony at CES who said that they would be offering their DVD changer on a standalone basis when the XL2 lauches:

From his post: “I spoke with some of the Sony people at CES this year and they mentioned that their CD/DVD changer will be available for purchase seperately for any MCE PC when the XL2 is launched. They said the cost would be around $600 or so. It uses firewire so as long as the dell mce has firewire you should be good to go.”

This is definitely good news and at $600 I’d buy one for sure if it really worked and could in fact mass rip my CDs for me. It’s such a pain having to rip them one by one right now and being able to do big batch jobs would be tremendously helpful. (Of course watch out for resistence from the RIAA on this product as I doubt they want you to be able to easily rip 200 CDs at once, and yes the irony is not lost on me that this product is being brought to you by the same folks responsible for the Sony rootkit).

Niveus has also announced their own 200 disc DVD changer, but apparently it won’t rip CDs like Sony’s will and is quite a bit more expensive at $2500.

By Davis Freeberg

Hollywood might be approaching VOD kicking and screaming, but independent filmmakers have found the internet to be a very efficient way to access longtail demand. Rather then worrying about their DVD sales being cannibalized, independent studios are finding that the net is a great place to gain exposure and to cheaply distribute their products. It turns out that the Sundance Film Festival has taken notice of this trend and will be allowing the public to stream about two thirds of the short films that will be at this year’s festival.

I expect that this program will benefit these films tremendously. Every year, there is always a lot of press about the Sundance Film Festival, but the public has always been forced to wait to see many of these critically acclaimed films. By allowing the public to immediately view these films online, it will lead to a higher awareness by the public and should create some word of mouth buzz for many films that can’t afford to advertise. The additional exposure could also boost sales of prior films that these producers have made.

Addicted to Digital Media – Why you will want Vista: Well we’ve heard several times now from the Microsoft Media Center folks that Vista will include significant improvements to the way that MCE (really WMP) handles large digital libraries.

Bill Gates’ demoed Vista at CES and used a PC with 10,000 songs which I did not think was all that impressive. 100,000 or 1,000,000 would have been impressive.

Previously Sean Alexander, of the Windows Digital Media Division (the Division at Microsoft that handles among other things Windows Media Player) had told me that Microsoft had tested WMP11 on a PC with 2 million tracks and that it performed. Now he adds the quip below on his blog in an entry on Why you will want Vista:

“FAST search through tens of thousands to millions of tracks in WMP11 (I can’t go back)”

Looking forward to that FAST search!

aric’s weblog — Canon 20D Replacement: The 35D Is the popular Canon 20D going to be replaced later this year by the Canon 35D? This is the rumor. See for yourself at the link above.