WBS日本,東京電：
前号で軽くお伝えした「サダム・フセイン追悼新年会 〜1日限定ランディ・バース党〜」。

今大会は日本、いや全世界でのサダム・フセインの不人気っぷりを如実に示…

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I have seen traffic, awareness and search engine ranking of my various sites increase greatly after releasing them in widget form.

I think the web will be more and more composed of small modules intended to be used by other websites and services.

So don’t knock the widget, baby ;–)

I love these Web 2.0 hype machines like Mr. Cashmore, especially when they’re paid advisors to the company. I didn’t realize there was such a thing as a Web 2.0 consultant. Cash, no pun intended, in while it lasts, right? If I were SpyMedia I’d listen to somebody from the actual industry they’re targetting. Barry’s comments are dead on. AP, Getty, Allsport, Wireimage already dominate this market. User generated content is all the buzz but for every good piece of user generated content there’s a million pieces of crapola. Don’t expect major media to flock to services like this. If you’re hoping to revolutionize the media industry and compete with major photo services that can guarantee quality, quantity and timeliness by building a simple website and branding it as a Web 2.0 service, be prepared for disappointment. This is not a new idea and similar services have been around for years (http://www.goog...ell+photography).

Actually, the MySpace angle is just that – a journalistic angle. SpyMedia is, and always has been, about the serious business of selling photos to media companies. MySpace is the hot thing right now, so any “MySpace angle” seems appealing, but really that’s just one of the new features here.

That said, I think the business aspects are more important than the legal. Assurances over rights notwithstanding, I would love to be able to obtain quality photography and other media less expensively from services like yours but right now I don’t see anything that changes the dynamic of the business enough to draw me away from the major agencies for most of my needs. Today I can log in to an agency’s website and find fresh content within minutes. Paying through the nose for that is much more appealing than scouring 10 different services for user-created photos and hoping I can find what I need. I like the bounties feature but if I need a specific photograph urgently, I can’t post a bounty and hope that somebody delivers. Time is money in the media business. I look in my Rolodex and find somebody who gets paid to deliver and has a track record of doing so.

Again, I do think this is an appealing service for people who are non-professionals (eg. run a small website) or whose jobs/businesses don’t rely on obtaining ultra fresh content on a near real-time basis. I think you can build a decent business so long as you maintain a lean organization and don’t load up with VC money. I’ll be sure to keep checking your site and seeing how it, and the others in the space, develop. Best of luck.

I would love to hear some more of your views. I will try and talk to as many points as I can without getting to detailed.
- We have spent a great deal of time with our IP attorney going over who has rights and where. With regards to taking pictures at sporting events, we feel we are covered. We require all of our users to submit a description along with every photo that is uploaded to the site. When a user uploads a photo, along with a description, it is classified as a form of speech. This protected speech is why we feel we are on solid ground here, and have extensive case law to prove this point. I know PGA tour events don’t allow cameras, and MLB games only permit lenses

Sports. According to the rules of most of the major leagues and events, you are not permitted to attend an event, take photographs and then sell them unless you have obtained the proper permissions. Typically your ticket to these events contains fine print stating that by entering the venue, you give up certain rights. Certainly people break these rules and get away with it, but with the Internet making the wholesale distribution and sale of these types of photographs possible, it is not out of the realm of possibility that if this gets out of hand, sports organizations will take action against the distributors (like SpyMedia). Whether they win remains to be seen, but these types of lawsuits are very expensive to defend.

Celebrities and athletes. There is nothing illegal about taking photos of well-known people (or anybody for that matter) so long as there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. However do sites like this make it clear to buyers that the ways that they can use the photos are limited? Is it possible that somebody buys a photo of Paris Hilton on SpyMedia for $10 and does not understand that they cannot use the image in a commercial manner (to promote a product, merchandising, etc.). If they misappropriate somebody’s image after buying a photo on SpyMedia, what are the ramifications to the seller and SpyMedia? Is it possible that the facilitator of the transaction gets dragged into the dispute?

I see the potential of a service like this, however for anybody planning to use purchased photography for a professional purpose, I don’t think that this type of service is viable. I’m in the media business and would never use a photograph purchased from “PhotoGuy222″ in a magazine or website simply because I have no reasonable guarantee that this person is the true copyright holder and has the rights and authority to sell the photo in question. There are very good reasons we work with major agencies: you know the rights are not in question and you get access to a large collection of photos with one buy. You don’t have to browse through a dozen sites like SpyMedia and purchase on a photo-by-photo basis.

On the photographer side, most professional photographers are likely to want more robust licensing and rights clearing to protect their interests. SpyMedia is fine for the hobbyist but not somebody that makes a living selling their photography.

If SpyMedia provided more oversight and had real contracts in place with its sellers and buyers to ensure that all content being sold is legit, it might have a shot at larger success with major media clients, but it would then be competing with all the other photo agencies out there. As it stands now, its appeal of allowing anybody to register, upload photos and have them available for sale instantly is exactly why it won’t gain traction on a larger scale. That’s not to say some major media outlets won’t ever purchase anything from services like this, but I think they are already very well served by the major agencies the vast majority of the time. I think services like this will have marginal success with non-professionals looking to buy some photos on the cheap, but this is not going to be a significant business. Bounties are an interesting twist but again, major media already have resources and connections in place to obtain photographs of interest. I don’t believe you’ll see them taking the time to post lots of bounties on SpyMedia hoping that somebody comes through.

Interestingly, the barriers to entry for duplicating this type of system are very low and it would not be difficult for photo sharing sites like Flickr to implement something like this. As user-produced content distribution sites continue to proliferate, I think it will only help reinforce the position of the major agencies since they provide one-stop service and will be the only way to cut through the clutter.

These Web 2.0 companies just keep on coming, like clowns out of the clown car. …

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The Cooqy guys say they have a workaround – I tried it with Flash 9 installed and it seems to work:

http://mashable...myspace-update/