Month: September 2009

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An Open Letter to Elisa Steele EVP & Chief Marketing Officer, Yahoo Inc.

An Open Letter to Elisa Steele

Dear Elisa,

Thank you today for sharing your vision for the new Yahoo! over at the Yahoo! blog today. Your new tagline “under new management…yours,” is refreshing indeed. Sometimes it takes new management to shake things up. I applaud your spirit in suggesting that “I” Thomas Hawk ought to have a say in how Yahoo’s management is run going forward.

In your letter to all of us you write:

“The core of our message will focus on YOU. It will celebrate all of your individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. That’s because Yahoo! really is all about you — we’re constantly evolving to give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t. We want you to make the Web your own and are designing products to put you in the driver’s seat of your Internet experience. Our new brand positioning reflects that.”

I thought that that I’d take a few minutes out of my busy morning browsing photos on Flickr (I browse hundreds a day) to share with you just exactly how you might “celebrate” my individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. Mostly I use Flickr on Yahoo — and boy do I use it. So most of my remarks will be about that.

I thought I’d do this specifically in the form of a wish list. I hope that you are actually sincere in your stated pledge to put Yahoo under “my” management and would take a second out of your equally busy morning to respond to some of these requests — the same courtesy I’m sure you’d extend to any of your other Yahoo managers. By the way, many of these wants, needs, interests and passions, are not just mine, but are shared by many of your other customers.

1. I’d like you to remove the ban on my account from the Flickr Help forum. Censorship sucks Elisa, c’mon, we both know that. Being booted from the Flickr Help Forum indefinitely for pointing Help Forum users to a relevant new blog about Flickr’s censorship practices ought not to get you banned. Don’t shoot the messenger Elisa. I’m sure you can appreciate the irony involved in censoring someone for talking about censorship. It’s personal and it’s petty. And it’s not very nice. Banning someone from the Flickr help forum really ought to be a an action of last resort.

You should consider reviewing the banned list from this Forum and reinstating my account as well as many of the others who are banned there like my good friend Pierre Honeyman. Saying Flickr is all web 2.0ish and is about transparency isn’t really true when you ban people from the help forum. How can we all sing kumbaya together in the campus quad when the security goons won’t let some of us in? Tear down those walls Elisa, tear down those walls.

Oh, one other thing. Let’s lock less critical threads in the Help Forum as well. When we do that it only makes us look foolish when others outside of our little community point out that we’re censoring threads about censorship by locking them.

2. What the hell is up with NIPSA (it means Not In Public Site Areas, in case you’re not familiar with the dreaded acronym)? Why you gotta go be like that? Flickr has a whole public content moderation system, so why the need to secretly apply hidden flags on individual images at Flickr? If you are going to censor people’s images, be upfront about it and let them know.

Don’t label an image “Safe Photo” as moderated by Flickr staff and then secretly remove it from search and other public site areas behind their back just because the image might include critical comments about Flickr. The fact that your recent “galleries” feature won’t allow users to create “galleries” that contain NIPSA photos (another dumb restriction), by the way, is only highlighting how many people (me, included) are currently being secretly censored.

3. It scares me to know that Flickr has no way to recover my content if it is maliciously destroyed by a hacker, myself accidentally, or most scary of all, some of your overzealous censor-happy underlings in the Flickr Censorship Bureau. You may or may not be aware that recently Flickr users have lost *thousands* yes *thousands* of images permanently due to these sorts of actions.

People are putting years of their lives into their photostreams at Flickr. This is more than just about their photos by the way. It’s about living part of your life inside of Flickr. And to think that all of that can just be destroyed permanently and with no recourse with the touch of a button, well, that just’s insane Elisa. Seriously, Stewart Butterfield (back before he left to go mine tin) mentioned that it was a “mistake” for Flickr not to be able to recover deleted content over *two years ago*. The fact that Flickr still has no way to recover deleted content and, as admitted by your staff, ins’t even working on it, well, that’s wrong.

4. I think it’s about time for a rewrite of the Flickr TOS/Community Guidelines. Have you read these lately Elisa? Did you know that you can be deleted from Flickr for being “That Guy.” That’s right. For being “That Guy.” Who is “That Guy?” Is it me? I hope not. Is it Jerry Yang? I doubt it. Is it Carl Icahn? Wait, don’t answer that.

Why the need to force a horribly subjective contract on your users who are investing thousands of hours on your site. Allowing Flickr to delete accounts because someone is “that guy,” basically is the same as saying, “we can delete your account for whatever the hell we want.” Heck, we can delete your account because you didn’t wear purple during our last big Yahoo-love-fest marketing push that everybody needs to wear purple. A lot of the other terms are stupid too. You say don’t upload content that isn’t yours, but then your very own Flickr staff violate that rule. Let’s be specific with the TOS and Community Guidelines. It will make people feel better when the exact rules are spelled out more exactly.

Ok, that’s it for now. I’m looking forward to the next managers meeting. Plus I’m looking forward to the invigorating breakout sessions at the next company offsite. Have you thought about having the next one in Las Vegas Elisa? There is so much cool neon there worth photographing. Remember that time that you all set up that ice cream stand at CES Vegas way back when. Too cool for school!

Oh wait, no, I lied, one last thing. I’m going to post a link to this post in the comment section of the Yahoo blog, but I’m worried. In the comments section on your blog it reads “Notes: Please note that Yahoo! may, in our sole discretion, reject comments for any reason we deem appropriate. Links of value to readers are welcome, but please use them sparingly – wield spam and you’re banished forever. This is a moderated site and comments will appear if and when they are approved. We will review the queue several times daily, so please don’t resubmit if your comment doesn’t appear immediately.” What’s up with that policy? Don’t fear comments Elisa. Let everyone say whatever they want. It makes life more interesting.

Give my best to Carol and the rest of the gang Elisa and know that even when I’m not at HQ it’s still always Sunnyvale in my heart.

Yours Truly,

Thomas Hawk

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Good News, Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum to Allow Photography

EMP + Needle
Photo by papalars.

I was pleased to read this morning over at the Seattle PI that Seattle’s EMP museum will be lifting their ban on photography beginning September 26th. I’ve long wanted to visit this museum, but never have due to their photographer unfriendly policy in the past. The EMP, which is in a beautiful Frank Gehry-designed building near the base of Seattle’s Space Needle is a museum dedicated to the history of popular music and science fiction. I’ve always wanted to shoot it and imagine that the contents inside the museum would represent a photographer’s treasure trove of possible material. Flash will still be prohibited but non-flash photography will be allowed.

From the Seattle PI:

“Everyone in the museum is just thrilled this is the new policy,” said spokeswoman Maggie Skinner. “(The old policy) was kind of outdated.”

Like many museums, EMP/SFM has had a strict no-photograph rule since the Experience Music Project opened in 2000. But as more people take pictures from cell phones and small digital cameras and share them online, that rule has become almost impossible to enforce.

Not to mention a little foolish.

“From a marketing perspective, people sharing photographs is the best positive publicity you can get,” Skinner said.

The PI notes that the Seattle Art Museum is still sticking to it’s photography ban. In the article the SAM spokeswoman Nicole Griffin cites copyright concerns as the reason why they don’t allow it.

Personally I think copyright concerns as a reason for limiting photography at a museum is pretty stupid. There is no liability on the part of any museum for infringing use of photographs taken by their patrons and the vast majority of people will never use those images commercially anyways. The Seattle Art Museum should follow the lead of other major contemporary art museums like the the MOMA in New York and the SF MOMA in San Francisco, along with museums like the Met, the Chicago Art Institute and the de Young and many other well regarded fine arts museums, and drop their ban on photography as well. Banning photography in a museum is an antiquated practice designed to force patrons into spending money on overpriced books and postcards in a museums gift store rather than allowing objects and art to be shared as broadly as possible.

Anyways, nice work on the part of the EMP. The next time I’m in Seattle I’ll definitely plan on visiting.

Thanks to pjmixer for the heads up on the change in policy!

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iStockphoto Becomes the First Major Microstock Photography Agency to Legally Guarantee All Imagery

iStockphoto will announce tomorrow an interesting new twist to their stock photography offerings. Beginning tomorrow, all purchases at the microstock agency (including photos, videos, illustrations and audio) will be guaranteed up to $10,000 in damages at no additional cost to the image buyer.

iStockphoto is also announcing a program where image buyers can pay 100 “credits” ($95-$150 depending on number bought) to get additional protection on photos up to $250,000 in damages. “There are certainly millions of images available on the Web, but most are not cleared for commercial usage,” said iStockphoto Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson. “Creative Commons images can be perfect for some projects, but there are little to no formal inspections on those files, so iStock offers a much safer and suitable alternative when using multimedia.”

What many people do not know is that they when they buy and use an image for commercial purposes, the majority of the liability over any unauthorized use is with the publisher of the image. This means that even if you buy an image from a stock photography website that you are not exempt from a possible lawsuit if it somehow turns out that the image wasn’t actually authorized for sale by the creator.

Although misrepresentations are rare, they can happen (and have happened even at iStockphoto in the past), but this new immediate and automatic protection from iStockphoto means that, at least in terms of smaller claims, you’ll have more automatic protection.

What makes unauthorized photo usage even more costly, is that generally speaking an image creator can sue for even more than just damages if the infringement is considered “willful.” By offering this protection, iStockphoto gives you peace of mind at least on the first $10,000 which would likely cover most small business usage claims.

In addition to the insurance coverage, iStockphoto’s submission process involves scrutiny by iStockphoto professionals as to legal rights issues with photographs as well. According to Thompson this is their first line of defense. ““Our first line of defense has always been – and continues to be – our rigorous inspection process,” said Thompson. “The Legal Guarantee is simply an added layer of protection for our customers, many of whom are using microstock more than ever before.”

An exact determination into what kind of clearance an image might need is not always easy. Some cases involving models are pretty straightforward and need model releases. But other cases (often involving property releases) can be a bit trickier to navigate. iStockphoto also maintains a wiki where they discuss some of this less clear cut issues.

iStockphoto is a wholly owned subsidiary of Getty Images.

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FOIA Request for Emails Related to the Official Whitehouse Flickr Photostream

I submitted the following Freedom of Information Act request to the White House today via US Mail. I modeled it after another Whitehouse FOIA request that I found online here. I’ve sent two flickrmails now requesting information regarding the Offical Whitehouse photostream on Flickr to the Whitehouse account on Flickr and have received no response. Hopefully the Whitehouse, in the spirit of Obama’s oft-campaigned promise of transparency, will choose to provide the information requested based on this formal written request. I’m writing to try and discover any correspondence that may have taken place around Flickr’s decision to delete user Shepherd Johnson’s Flickr account after he posted comments critical of President Obama on the official Whitehouse photostream.

FOIA Officer Office of Administration
725 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20503

FOIA REQUEST

Fee benefit requested
Fee waiver requested
Expedited processing requested

Dear FOIA Officer:

Pursuant to the federal Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, I request access to and copies of:

All email correspondence to and from representatives of the White House and Yahoo, Inc. regarding the establishment, service and maintenance of the Official Whitehouse photostream on Flickr, Yahoo Inc.’s photo sharing service. I would also like to receive the name and contact information of the primary individual responsible for the maintenance of this Flickr account.

The scope of this request is for documents created between January 20 and September 15, 2009.

I would like to receive the information in electronic format.

As a representative of the news media I am only required to pay for the direct cost of duplication after the first 100 pages.

Through this request, I am gathering information on a case of censorship involving the Flickr account deletion of Flickr user Shepherd Johnson who found his Flickr account deleted after posting comments critical of the President on the Official Whitehouse Flickrstream.

I am seeking this information as an independent blogger for dissemination to the general public.

Release of the information is in the public interest because it will contribute significantly to public understanding of the President’s use of social media as a communications strategy as well as how the White House handles critical commentary through social media channels.

I hope that as the President’s office, in the spirit of Obama’s oft-campaigned promise of transparency, will see fit to honor this information request.

If my request is denied in whole or part, I ask that you justify all deletions by reference to specific exemptions of the act. I will also expect you to release all segregable portions of otherwise exempt material. I, of course, reserve the right to appeal your decision to withhold any information or to deny a waiver of fees.

As I am making this request as a journalist and this information is of timely value, I would appreciate your communicating with me by telephone, rather than by mail, if you have questions regarding this request.

Please provide expedited processing of this request which concerns a matter of urgency.

I look forward to your reply within 20 business days, as the statute requires.

Thank you for your assistance.

Sincerely,

Thomas Hawk

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Adobe Releases Final Camera Raw 5.5 and Lightroom 2.5

Adobe-2If you haven’t already, be sure to head over to Adobe to update your Camera RAW and Lightroom.

From Adobe’s PR agency:

“Adobe today released final versions of Photoshop Camera Raw 5.5, Photoshop Lightroom 2.5 and DNG Converter 5.5, available immediately for download at www.adobe.com/downloads/updates. The updates add raw file support for five new popular camera models, including the Nikon D300s, Nikon D3000, Olympus E-P1, Panasonic DMC-FZ35 and Panasonic DMC-GF1.

In addition, Camera Raw 5.5 also includes a correction to the demosaic algorithms in the raw conversion process for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response. Adobe would like to thank the community for providing feedback on the Camera Raw 5.5 Release Candidate originally posted on Adobe Labs on August 19.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 software is essential for today’s digital photography workflow, allowing photographers to quickly import, process, manage and showcase images. The Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in helps photographers achieve greater artistic control and flexibility with their images by providing fast and easy access within Photoshop to the raw image formats produced by many leading professional and midrange digital cameras. Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw supports the same functionality for TIFF and JPEG files.

Pricing and Availability

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.5 update is available as a free download for existing Lightroom 2 customers, and the Photoshop Camera Raw 5.5 update is available as a free download for existing customers of Photoshop CS4, Photoshop Elements 7, Premiere Elements 7 and Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac. DNG Converter 5.5 is available as a free download for anyone with an internet connection. Click here for more information and to download the updates: www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/.

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My 30,000th Photograph on Flickr

My 30,000th Photograh on Flickr

The photo above represents my 30,000th photograph published to Flickr. It’s a milestone and part of my continuing goal to publish 1,000,000 photos to Flickr before I die. This photograph is from one of my favorite shoots. A shoot I did with my wife and children a ways back in this storm drain in Big Tujunga Canyon.

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Flickr Launches “Galleries”

Flickr Launches GalleriesFlickr Launches Galleries

“Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.” – John Szarkowski, On Photography by Susan Sontag

Earlier today Flickr launched their latest feature: Galleries. Galleries allow you to be a virtual curator, selecting up to 18 photos to add to an exhibit of sorts on your Flickrstream. To get a sense of what I mean, you can check out the first gallery I built myself here: Motel America. I also made a second gallery highlighting 18 recent favorite photos of mine from DMU’s Lightbox. You can check that gallery out here.

Galleries seem like a really interesting way to let you showcase some of the most interesting content that you find on Flickr. While Flickr already has faves, you might think of galleries more as super faves. Photos that you like so much, or built around a theme that you like so much, that you’ve decided to dedicate a special place in your photostream to it. I really like this latest addition and am glad to see Flickr offer it. I hope that lots of people on Flickr take advantage of it. I know that I plan on building quite a few galleries over time.

I found the new Galleries feature relatively straightforward, intuitive and easy to use. Congrats to the Flickr team for a great new feature on Flickr!

You can find Flickr’s official blog announcement on Galleries here. There is an FAQ on Galleries here. If you want to see photos of yours that have appeared in galleries so far you can go to this page here (this is for me so just change the user name in the url to your user name and you should be able to see it for you — note this feature may still be a bit buggy as I’ve already found at least one of my photos in a gallery that is not listed on this page).

Photos that Flickr or a user on Flickr designates “moderate” or “restricted” cannot be put into galleries. You also cannot add your own photos to a gallery.

I’m still not sure 100% how I feel about the 18 photo limit in galleries. While I understand the idea of forcing you to edit to include the “best,” I think that this limit might be a bit low. The most recent photography exhibits I’ve visited myself personally (Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander, etc.) all included way more than 18 photos. Of course, theoretically, one could just create gallery 1, gallery 2, gallery 3, and use links, but this seems a bit messy. Stephen Shankland over at CNET reported on this aspect as well: “unfortunately, Galleries does not lift one limit I see for Flickr. It’s good for sharing photos with others, but not so good for assembling multiple members’ photos from group events–say, a family’s photos from a vacation or attendees’ photos of a wedding.”

I do think that there would be good demand for a gallery where a user could aggregate group shots from many users, including their own, to build an “event” sort of gallery. Maybe Flickr could consider dropping the 18 photo limit for Pro accounts in the future.

Update: nonac. was one of the accounts who got to test this new feature while it was still in development. He’s already built 22 galleries that you can view here.