What struck me as much as anything about the job is how this stuff is increasingly central to any smart marketing team — and how little of the technology that you’d be involved in doing this job existed five years ago in any form anyone would have known about.

National Hockey League Jobs:

The Manager, Social media and Business Development will be a member of the digital media team reporting to the Director of Digital Business.  He/She will be responsible for maximizing the asset value of the NHL’s extended reach on social networks as well as creating social media activations for campaigns related to sponsorships, ad sales, partnership marketing, and league marketing initiatives.

RESPONSIBILITIES/ESSENTIAL DUTIES The position will be responsible for however not limited to the following duties: Managing the Social Media plans and activations for NHL events (onsite and offsite), NHL marketing initiatives, and NHL sponsorships / partnership activations. Developing creative campaigns for partners / agencies, implement and execute all activations on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and develop pricing/selling models around the NHL’s extended reach on social networks. Co-develop communication plan for social media with editorial, communications and PR team (tweets, posts, pictures, etc.) Creating a pipeline of social media sales prospects and exposing the League’s extended reach via social networks to League partners, clients and prospects to deliver incremental revenue. Working with the NHL’s internal and external resources to develop brand- and audience appropriate activations on the League’s social media channels; integrating the League’s social media channels into broader partner activations to deliver incremental revenues. Sales pitches and business case development and delivery. Identifying and vetting new social networks of interest to the NHL that both extend the League’s reach and are strong candidates for monetization. Identifying and vetting social media partnerships and opportunities that grow the League’s reach, carry financial opportunity, or expand content offerings.

QUALIFICATIONS The qualified candidate for the position will be an expert in social media with intimate knowledge and contacts at the most popular and emerging social networking platforms.  They will be experienced in developing and closing sales and partner opportunities, able to develop creative concepts in the social media context and be well versed on trends and data in brand spending on social media marketing.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at National Hockey League Jobs. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Tech people keep saying that artists can make it without the distribution systems, and they all trot out Jonathan Coulton as the example of someone who has made it on his own (by the way, he’s amazing). He offers his music for free, or you can buy it, and he does great. Hooray, there’s one guy making it. One guy.

Okay, you can add Radiohead and Louis CK, but both made their reputations over years in the old media system and only now have the power to make independent new media work. That’s three, so I’m still seeing a lot of artists left out in the cold.

Here’s a question to think about as a new artist-friendly distribution model evolves…

The employees of the old media distribution system did a lot of work, like promotion, financing, and obviously distribution. Who is going to do that in the new model? The artists? Does my favorite author now have to spend a couple hours a day on Facebook? Because I really want my favorite author working on the next book, not tweeting or other garbage that could be handled by someone else.

The problem with the old model was that the distribution system forgot who they worked for and started to think they were the important part. The new system will turn it around and put the creatives in charge. Maybe the band of the future will sign a record company to a deal instead of the other way around.

There are actually a bunch of people making it. But they tend to be smaller, they tend not to have a big PR machine pumping them onto the networks. The old system tended to push massive success towards a very few, whether it was Stephen King or Michael Jackson. There was a middle ground where you could grind out a living (and occasionally someone would turn that into a very lucrative business, like the Grateful Dead did). And there was a huge mass that the old systems didn’t want anything to do with at all that never got a break. And in most cases, they old system was right (ever sit down and read a slush pile in a publisher’s office? Seriously, most of it, be glad they filtered the worst of it away).

But yeah, that also limited access to some good talent as well. And as this new model evolves and matures, eventually the old system will figure out how to find and pull talent out of the pool and turn them into the next Stephen King or Michael Jackson and they’ll continue to be the promoters and publicity pushers for the elite super-earners. But their role as gatekeepers is diminishing, and will die off.

thank god (but that also means that we need to find other ways to protect ourselves from that slush pile, folks; in whatever form it takes).

Does this mean your favorite author will have to spend time pushing themselves on Facebook? When starting out, yes. But look at someone like Trey Ratcliff. He’s just hired something like his tenth employee. As his business grew and his revenues went up, he brought people in to take on parts of it. That’s always been the case with small businesses. That is the model we’ll see moving forward. The talent (whether singer, video maker, photographer, app developer or author) will continue to do the parts they’re good at and enjoy doing; as their income grows, they can farm out other parts — bring in someone to help with marketing and publicity, or proofreading, or formatting their ebooks, or handling Facebook. Whatever is not economic to do themselves, but needs doing.

This is nothing new. But it does mean you can’t succeed JUST by being a good talent; you need to be able to run your business, too (or get successful enough to hire someone to run it for you); in fiction, agents sometimes took that on. For that matter, that’s a common case for pro sports, too. I expect you’ll see the agent role mutate into more of a business manager instead of a submission broker.

The model for this is well known; it’s not new, and it’s been used successfully for a long time. What’s really happening is that all of these talent-centric industries are moving to that model with increasing speed, and the transition is at best unsettling for those caught in the middle. And it’s going to create problems and failure for some, and opportunities and success for others.

Which, honestly, sounds a lot like what talking movies did to silents, and what television did to radio, back in the day. And in both of those cases, some people woke up without a future, some people moved from one to the other just fine, and some found opportunities created where none existed before. But now, just being a good writer (or singer, of photographer, or…) isn’t enough to be a successful one.

If it ever really was. (I have my doubts).

(hat tip: BW Jones)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Does my favorite author now have to spend a couple hours a day on Facebook?. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

these two bills were drafted by the MPAA and the RIAA and walked into Washington without an iota of conversation with the technology industry. I can’t tell you how many Senators and Representatives have told me that they were told by the MPAA and the RIAA that the technology industry was on board and that these issues would not impact the Internet and tech community adversely. This is no way for one industry to propose that Congress regulate another industry. I think it is absurd that one industry would have the arrogance to think it is appropriate to ask Congress to regulate another industry for them. And yet that is what went down on these bills.

Back in 1988 (before many of you were potty trained…), I wrote this April Fools joke for the net. the in-jokes are a bit dated, but this part sums up the attitude of the internet then, and through the years:

Note: This conference is a rescheduling of the conference originally
scheduled for October, 1988 but cancelled after the United States Department
of Commerce decided that the material was too sensitive to allow
non-American citizens to read (including the material written by the
Canadians on the committee). Because of this, the conference has been moved
to Canada, which doesn’t have a complete Freedom of Speech written into it’s
constitution, but has better things to do than worry about ways of
circumventing civil rights. Americans having trouble getting their papers
cleared for distribution at the conference should contact Professor Shikele
about setting up a direct uucp link for the troff source.

For many years, the net was too small for the authorities to worry about, and this “wild west” mentality ruled, that the rules didn’t apply. And in many cases, they didn’t. As the net has grown and gone mainstream, this attitude has continued, although increasingly, whether it’s been the companies stomped in court when they became too annoying (like Napster) or countries like China implementing massive censorship firewalls (and the accompanying controversies as companies have to decide whether to go along with them or not).

The day the net went dark over Sopa is, to me, the day the Internet grew up and became an adult. Instead of thinking we can just sneak around doing what we want in the alleys and not get caught — we now realize we need to sit at the table with the adults and talk (and argue) with them as adults. The net mobilized and forced some major and entrenched powers to back down. They won’t get caught by surprise next time, and don’t for a minute believe they’re done with this.

But, and it’s a big but — neither will we, both collectively as “the internet” and the big companies that drive the net like Google and Apple and Facebook. They clearly realize they can’t let others drive the agenda and sit on the sideline, so you can expect everyone to get more involved in the process in Washington — because like that game or not, we can no longer pretend we’re immune to it or can ignore it.

I think the entertainment industry badly misplayed their hand through arrogance, and I think they’re going to regret it.

Because I think they woke the sleeping dragon, and the dragon now has their eye on them. They won’t be able to sneak their way through Congress without a fight, and many of their allies in Congress now realize that the fight is going to require them to take sides. And I bet a bunch of them will realize the tech industry is a better side to be on.

But now is the time for those companies that represent the industry and the net to make it clear to Congress that they expect a seat at the table in future discussions. And you can bet, the entertainment industry won’t like that. Not that I care what they think…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The Day the Internet Grew Up. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

I have a confession to make, it’s been three weeks since I did any serious writing.  I’m supposed to be finished with my next book right now.  Fact is I’m a little less than halfway through.  I’d like to blame it on the holidays or the fact that I’m juggling writing, being Mr. Mom, and taking a class in programing.  Heck I’d settle for blaming it on my rampant ADD, I’m easy that way.

Truth is, however, that I’m not writing because I’m just not seeing any future in it.  The writing industry is changing rapidly right now and even if I got a contract on my last book, who knows if the market will be there when it comes out?  Then there’s the whole e-self-publishing route where no one really knows what’s going on but we know that some people are selling millions of books.  Quite frankly it sounds like there are better odds playing the lottery.  (For the mathematically challenged, playing the lottery is only slightly less risky than throwing your money down the garbage disposer.)

So, for the last three weeks or so, I’ve been kicking an idea around in the back of my head.

What if I just quit?

I mean lets face it, while I have been published four times, I haven’t cracked the level of success where I can actually make a living.  I used to be a hotshot computer programmer and, while my skills are very rusty, I can whip them back into shape.  Programmers make good money (provided you move out of Utah, which I could do).  Heck, I’ve worked in the game industry and have contacts there, maybe it’s time to resurrect that dream.

So what if I quit?

If we can set the wayback machine back to about 1995 for a minute….

I had hit that point where I had published enough stories to qualify for active membership in SFWA. I was starting to get solicited for stories for anthologies, and was right at that cusp where I seemed to be getting the acceptance knod on a regular basis. I had a novel in progress, a second in planning.

And I had to make a decision. Geeking computers paid well, and I enjoyed it. Writing SF/F didn’t pay well and I enjoyed it. I was convinced I couldn’t do both well at the same time and have a real life, too. I chose computers, and retired from writing. Why?

Because I looked at what I wrote, and where I slotted into the industry, and I saw the squeeze coming. I was a midlist novelist; I read for entertainment, my favorite books were the kind of things you picked up when you were tired after a long day at work to relax and enjoy. That was the kind of fiction I wrote, and wanted to write. If I were to name a single name, I’d say I wanted to be James White when I grew up. (those of you now going “what? who?”, well, my point. but click through and grab that volume and have a fun evening or three).

The problem was that even back then, almost 20 years ago, you could see the midlist part of the publishing world shrinking and the collapse starting. Chain bookstore buying practices was increasingly pushing the buttons on who got published; chain bookstore return practices was continuing to shred the time a published paperback was actually on a shelf where it could be bought. The first author I knew had found out their first novel sales were weak enough that the chains wouldn’t buy their next book, even though the editors loved it (he ended up going behind a pseudonym and breaking out pretty well — the pseudonym is now a pretty successful author). Advances were flat to down. The short fiction market was already shrinking. Sharecrop universes (star wars, star trek, etc) were growing and taking shelf space from the midlist, too. In talking to other authors, the midlist grind was getting tougher and tougher.

So that was the publishing universe I was contemplating. It’s possible I could have written something that broke out, but if I didn’t, I might be a book or three into it, and without a publisher because some algorithm at Barnes and Noble didn’t like my trend line. I was never a fast writer like Dean or Kris or Mike, so the multi-genre, multi-name publishing empire wasn’t an option, and I didn’t have the many years of backlist to fall back on Mike has. I had sharecrop opportunities — but I wanted to write my stories, not someone else’s.

So I shut it down and walked away from my fiction, knowing some day I’d probably fire it up again. As it turns out, my worries about the midlist getting squeezed came true, and the market got increasingly tough. And I haven’t done badly in the computer industry, so I made the right choices.

I was at Apple when they shipped iTunes, and I watched as it transformed and disrupted the music industry, I’ve watched the video side of entertainment slowly disrupt (primarily because the studios were determined not to let Apple do to them what happened to the music industry, even if it killed them. Which it still might). I’ve seen the online universe disrupt my dad’s world, newspapers, and seen this tsunami washing through all of the traditional media universes.

Smartphones came along, and with them, apps, and I saw in that the path to the book reader. When I got the opportunity to go to Palm, I grabbed it, because I wanted a chance to influence this if I could. Then came the the iPad and the Kindle, and my muse rang the servants bell from her tower, and when I unlocked the door, she looked at me and said “it’s time”.

And it is. And one reason I didn’t go to work for Nokia (or Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or… — all of which I talked to in some way, shape or form along the way) was I didn’t want my “real” job to create conflicts with my ability to figure out how I and my writing fit into all of this, the way the rules at HP did. Even if I end up never doing anything significant down this path, it was a path I wanted the freedom to explore.)

That’s why Dan’s blog post struck me as it did. He published into the market I walked away from, because I saw it as — on balance — a success path with too many risks given the benefits and effort. Especially compared to geeking computers. He’s now seeing what I see as that chance I’ve been waiting to happen for almost 20 years as the end of his opportunity. And if you only see traditional publishing as your future, you’re correct.

But what is happening here is the rebirth of the midlist, which since that seems to be where Dan’s work lives, should be cause for celebration. No more “that book you spent a year writing has three weeks on the shelf to find an audience”. Instead, the shelfs are now almost literally infinitely large, and your work has an almost infinite time to find its audience. It’s ability to find an audience is now very much up to the author; that may be scary, but if you’re a midlist writer, the push you got from your publisher was little more than “here’s a pretty cover and we’ll pray” anyway, and heck, find a good artist to do covers for you…

So my advice to Dan is this — you beat the odds in a big way by getting published in the old markets; this isn’t the end of times, but the beginning of a better time where you can succeed, and better yet, have a big say in that success. Read Dean and Kris. Read Mike Stackpole. Read Passive Voice, and start understanding how you can take advantage of these new opportunities. Go see what Lawrence Block is doing.

There are a lot of unknowns in this, but out of that, a lot of opportunity. A much better opportunity than existed back when I walked away. And 2012 is where it looks like it’s all going to come together.

(via Passive Voice)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Why I walked away from my fiction. and why I’m back…. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Apple makes their announcement. It merely includes one puppy, a pony and a rainbow. No free coffee.

And the usual suspects jump on Apple because the product isn’t what they decided they wanted, even though that was clearly not what Apple ever intended it to be. This is somehow Apple’s fault.

The big criticisms coming back at the announcement seem to boil down to:

It’s for the iPad only, and it isn’t a publishing environment that can be used for other devices or platforms (like the Kindle).

And the licensing says if you sell it, you have to sell it via Apple’s iBook store.

Horrors.  And, evidently, that kind of licensing is unprecedented.

Well, no, it’s not. If you view the iBook store as a platform, which many pundits have already declared it to be, than the new Apple book publisher tool is the equivalent of its SDK. And it’s not unprecedented for a company to limit use of it’s developer tools to its platform. We did that with webOS, where if you wanted to build webOS applications and sell them, you had to sell them through our store.

Matthew Ingram @ GigaOM worries this puts this content deep into Apple’s walled garden, and I sympathize, but there’s no licensing restriction that keeps you from publishing your content on other platforms using other tools; merely not using this tool to publish on those platforms. That’s a standard business decision about going cross-platform. If the market warrants it, you take your source code and build it for two platforms, only in this case, those platforms are iBook and Kindle instead of IOS and Android. In my mind, it’s a non-issue, just like it’s a non-issue to worry that publishing Angry Birds on the iPad might keep it off of other platforms. It won’t — if there’s a market for it. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Apple to “not make it easy” to publish on competitive platforms, that’s not in their self-interest.

Much as I want a multi-platform, one-button, publish my stuff everywhere tool — I fully understand why Apple wants to see some return on the investment it made in its tools, and I never expected Apple to create that. Ultimately, Apple is about selling hardware, so the way you do that is target the results of the tools to the platform that runs on that hardware. That’s what Apple did.

The alternative is to charge for the tools up front. If they did that, we’d simply be having a different argument, and the chance of adoption would go down dramatically. Now, if you want to do content to give away, you have many more options then if Apple charged $99 for this too. And if you plan on charging for it, well, don’t complain about Apple wanting a piece. That’s business.

Thinking that Apple should build a tool and give it away for free that enables you to put your content on the Kindle store and sell it? Incredibly naive, if you really think they should do that.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the publishing tool I was hoping to see, primarily because of these licensing restrictions. On the other hand, what I wanted it to be was never what Apple intended to build, and I didn’t really think they would.

I do think, however, that now that we’ve seen how Apple built this, it’s only a matter of time before some third party does build a tool very like it that does spit out a PDF and a Kindle doc and an iBook doc from the same tool. Apple has defined the direction, and (not surprisingly), targeted it to benefit Apple. I know this upsets some of the geeks, but hey, ultimately they have to pay the bills somehow. In this case, by convincing folks to put content on iPads instead of Kindles and Fires and TouchPads (hah. just kidding) through building really good tools to build it with. (and that’ll work. Just watch).

These tools will arrive for the other platforms, now that Apple has (again) set the bar. It’s not like Apple built a closed platform; others can build tools to publish to iBook as well, without the licensing restrictions. And they will (it should be Adobe, but it won’t be, I bet).

And this is a 1.0 product, in a new market they’ve been involved in for less than 24 hours. Free Coffee takes time to brew. And it’s far from unprecedented for Apple to build the basic product, stick the flag in the ground, and say “we don’t really know where it goes from here, so we’ll ship it and innovate as we find out where we need to go” — they did that with iTunes, and it didn’t turn out badly (and with iAds, where it didn’t turn out so well). You have to start somewhere, and if you wait until all of the features are thought out and implemented, you lose, because someone else will have shipped something first and pushed the market away from you.

The only problem I see here is the common one with Apple announcements: it’s not the product people fantasized it would be. And my guess is that like other times when the tech echo chamber roundly raised up in horror over not getting enough free coffee and rainbows, the criticisms will be ignored by those the product was really intended for, and it’ll be a nice success. Which will only annoy the pundits even more….

I really like what I saw today. I’m admittedly disappointed that it doesn’t serve my personal goals — in other words, I’m going to experiment with it, but probably not publish through it — but I’m not the intended audience. Fortunately, I actually recognize that, so I don’t take it personally. And I see how this can be extended later, and how third parties can compete against it and build on its foundations, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be too long before I do start getting the tools I want, driven out by what Apple set in motion today.

And I think this will impact the education system in a number of good ways, too. Which is bigger and more important than getting me what I want, anyway…

(hat tip, Daring Fireball and ReadWriteWeb)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Apple’s publishing announcement, and the usual commentary. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Worse, our other one has been, well, offline for a few weeks because we dropped a shampoo bottle in it and it’s been on the “we can’t fix it ourselves, so we need to get someone out here to take care of this” list.

So we got everything under control, got towels down, etc. and since it was late, got to bed. In the morning, I called the plumber, Gary, at Gary’s Guaranteed Rooter. We’d used him before when we got that slab leak that needed some major surgery. He agreed to get out here as soon as he could.

And literally, as soon as I got off the phone with him, we started getting sewage back out of the bathtubs, and up around the toilets. So it wasn’t (just) a bad wax seal, but a full sewage blockage.

And hilarity ensued. And Gary got a second phone call, and re-arranged his other appointments, and generally got his butt out here as fast as he could, pulled off a miracle or two, got everything cleared up, the toilets fixed, and just because he could, fixed a dripping sink while he was here.

I know enough about plumbing (thank you, This Old House) to know when I shouldn’t be mucking with it, and enough to have some idea what needs to be done. Gary’s now pulled out butt’s out of the fire twice, and he’s not only a good plumber who knows his stuff, he gives a damn. If you need a plumber, from San Jose up the peninsula, he’s a good option to have, especially when the, um, stuff is hitting the fan. In this case, literally.

And despite short notice turning into this oh-my-god emergency, his prices are fair. His number is (650) 766-7821; it’s one you probably want to stick in your address book for that day when you really need it, because when you really need it, you don’t want to go thrashing around trying to figure out who to call…

(And now life is back to normal, although one of the bathroom rugs is a goner; all of the towels have gone through the “sanitize” cycle, and hopefully, we won’t have to worry about this for a while. We’ve been in this house since the mid 90′s, and this is the first time we’ve had this problem. Hopefully, with a bit of scheduled maintenance, we can keep it from happening again…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Quick Recommendation: Gary’s Guaranteed Rooter. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

The Internet and politics have a way of magnifying each other’s faults. Depending upon which source you read this morning, President Obama either came out forcefully against SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy legislation on Saturday or he staked out a position enabling himself to back away from opposing it outright.

 

Buried in-between the apparent opposition and the apparent ambivalence is the most important part of Saturday’s statement, which would otherwise resound like a clarion call: “Rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right.” The actual Obama Administration statement itself may have been as good a compromise as King Solomon himself may have managed in this environment: Speaking on behalf of the administration, a trio of technology officials including the U.S. CTO came out against all the principles that the populist movement against SOPA claimed to be against, without Mr. Obama having to personally stand against the entertainment industry which supported the legislation.

It’s good to see the SOPA bill pushed back. I’m not convinced that the solution lies in tweaking the bill. The bill itself is a sign of larger conflicts that I’d like to see us help Congress grapple with, and I think if we do that, it will lead to understand how to find the compromises needed to solve the problems that led to the introduction of SOPA.

If you take a step back from the bill itself, the underlying problem is that the current laws around copyright simply don’t cope well with the reality of the internet and with digital media content in general. I don’t think we’re going to solve the issues surrounding SOPA until we grapple the bigger issue of copyright and sharing rights in the internet age.

It’s not just that the big media organizations have ben trying to protect their existing business models, but they’ve been using this transition to try to push back and reduce or remove rights that exist as well — not only have there been consistent attacks on the right of first sale doctrine, we’ve seen organized attacks on the entire concept of fair use, and as we’ve started seeing a shift to ebooks and electronic publication, even the basic concept of lending a book to a friend has been restricted; just try to lend a Kindle book to someone, even your spouse (that doesn’t share your Amazon account) — it’s now up to the publisher to allow this, or the Kindle won’t let you. Compare that to a paper book and you see how this entire fight isn’t just about stopping piracy, but that it’s an attempt to erode other existing rights for sharing, in ways that, of course, benefit the publisher (at least in the short term) by ‘encouraging’ unit sales.

So to me, it’s time to have this discussion in Congress — what does Copyright mean in the internet era, and how do we update it to deal with the realities of electronic media, of mashups. How do you reconcile a media owner’s right to choose (and license for sale) how their media is going to be used with the interests of an individual who might want to resell his legitimate copy when they’re done, or loan it to a friend, or mash it up in some fun way.

If it was up to just the big media companies, none of that would be allowed, which goes far beyond simply protecting the equivalent processes of the printed media world but in fact strips away user rights that are currently accepted there.

This is a big, hairy, complex problem. Before it’s done, both sides (the big media folks and the “we want to share this stuff” side) will have to compromise. Somewhere along the way, we’ll probably have to deal with Orphaned Works issue. We need to take a close look at Creative Commons and integrate it’s concepts into real copyright law. We need to protect a creator’s right to earn income from their work, but we need to understand where we can draw lines around fair use and make sure that concept is strengthened, not weakened or destroyed (I would love to see fair use and Creative Commons non-commercial licenses go off for a long weekend and bring back something we can use as a model here). We need to understand how personal loans of electronic media can be managed; we need to understand how to allow first sale doctrine transfers in an electronic world. The answer from the big media folks (“all of that has to go away”) can’t be allowed to be turned into the new rules — and for the sake of the media folks, too, for the more they try to lock things down, the more they’ll encourage people to go around the rules (and be termed pirates, which they may or may not be). Piracy will aways exist; a rational set of reasonable use restrictions — most people would live within and accept.

The compromises — and the fight over them — won’t be easy. But I think this is the path we need to take to get to these solutions. Until we understand how the basic concept of copyright needs to work in the internet age, we can’t figure out how to legislate making it work, and the existing copyright rules and concepts are horribly broken in an electronic media age. So it’s time to get started, and figure this out.

And I think we can, with some work. People like to rag on the DMCA, but as someone who’s dealt with it both as a content creator and as an administrator, it’s not awesome, but it works, and it has the checks and balances needed to generally let both sides have a say. There are flaws in it, and flaws in how some sites implement it (not everyone handles appeals and the process beyond the initial take-down well), but overall, I think it does a better job than it’s given credit for many days. The one thing I think it’s missing is a “vexatious litigant” aspect where people who are found to be abusing the system can be banned from making new claims; if we added that, it’d be a hammer to help keep some of the media companies that have been “over enthusiastic” about filing take downs in better check (imagine if Youtube had the right to tell, say, Universal, that they’ve filed too many failed claims, and therefore, they can file no more claims without doing so through a court for approval. That might slow down some of their enthusiasm for taking down stuff that falls under fair use, and give people more incentive to push back when they do).

I’m worried that if we don’t start having this discussion, we’ll end up trying to solve these issues by using the existing laws and processes, and they’re broken. And if we try that path, that’ll work to the big media’s benefit. So what I suggest is it’s time for us not to go to Congress and fight SOPA, it’s time for the tech leaders to go to Congress and start lobbying to help them get educated on copyright and our need to update it to the digital realm — and through that, work for a solution to these issues that SOPA is trying to fix (by taking a fireaxe to them…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The President’s Post-SOPA Challenge: All Right, You Come Up with a Solution!. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

To be honest, I think it makes the feed too noisy, and I’m not thrilled with it. I keep hoping that Google will release an RSS feed out of Google+, which I think would make a better option for this. Or maybe I’ll go see about creating something with iffft. I’m also thinking that maybe this could be a custom app I build that I feed stuff to, that spits out the articles once in a while. In other words, I’m doing this until I decide what a better solution is and I get that built.

My general view of what I want to post on the blog looks something like this:

• Photos, with or without some supporting content (generally short, 1-2 paragraphs)
• Long form writing (> 1,000 words), where I work on a topic in more depth and spend some time putting the article together. In general, when I go beyond 2,000 words, I’ll tend to split it up into multiple parts, because I find really, really long form gets unwieldy and people stop reading.
• Short form writing (200-500 words), a quick note on something that doesn’t need in-depth analysis.
• Links, which optimally are in a digest/list format. These are designed to give those links some visibility and Google juice, and are to bring to your attention stuff I find interesting and well-written. Please note “interesting and well-written” may or may not include “agree with”. These are things that I don’t feel warrant my commenting on, though, because I find blog posts that boil down to “hey, this is neat, read it!” ungodly awkward and boring…

The link setup has annoyed me since, well, forever. I mostly like how Daring Fireball and Duncan handle it, but I still think doing links as a once-a-day digest reduces the noise factor and pulls them together better. I’m at the point where I’m ready to build a quick web-app that I can feed it to and a cron job on the back end to suck it out once a day for posting. Hmm. I wonder if I could do something like that with evernote and a special tag? (Hmm. have to go explore that…)

In any event, the Twitter feed stuff is “good enough” for now, but not what I want long term. And I’m open to suggestions on ways to solve this problem, whether it’s something off the shelf, wordpress plugins, or other ideas. But I hadn’t thought about doing it via Evernote until just now; I have to go look into that…

I should also note in passing that I killed my 500px.com account today. I can’t say anything negative about 500px, I simple never figured out what I wanted to do with the site that made it worth investing time into building the site up or putting effort into posting and interacting over there. In my continuing effort to not let “keeping up with my social media stuff” take over my life and lead to information bankruptcy, sites like this have to fit into my long-term ideas for where I want to have my stuff exist. I could never find a way to use 500px that seemed like it added anything, it all seemed to duplicate other things i was already doing.

I like 500px; they do a good job of displaying images and taking care of photos. Their social media aspect is decent. At some point, I may figure out how to leverage the site. When I do, I’ll go back. Until then, I didn’t want something that never got enough time and energy to stay up to date hanging around looking vaguely abandoned (which it mostly was).

It’s not you, it’s me (and in this case, I’m not just being polite…).

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A couple of minor “where I am online” updates…. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

As Sullivan points out, the iPhone and the Galaxy are getting the exact same speeds. That’s because AT&T’s network is actually HSPA+, which the iPhone supports but refuses to call “4G” even though AT&T does.

Why does AT&T call it 4G? Because they were one to two years behind their competitors in rolling out an actual 4G network. In other words, when all hope fades, lie.

In AT&T’s parlance, real 4G is “4G LTE”.

You didn’t hear this from me, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if asking the right people, you might find out that AT&T wasn’t the only carrier seriously working to play the “Faux G” marketing naming game…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Faux G. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Comments Still Off – Matt Gemmell:

Just over a month ago, I switched comments off for this blog. I wanted to post a very brief follow-up on that decision.

 

In a nutshell, it was definitely the right move.

but a number of people with a clue have chimed in, including:

• MG Siegler
• Matthew Ingram @ GigaOM
• Fred Wilson
• Siegler (again), with a cameo appearance from Daniel Ha, a founder of Disqus
• Brent Simmons (with a reference into the emacs vs. vi religious war, now in it’s 55th year. hint: I’m a VI guy [see note 1])
• Macstories (via MG, who seems to like this argument)
• Josh Constine @ TechCrunch

That’s some heavy talent with a lot of experience in dealing with the practical realities of this issue. Who’s right?

They all are. It comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish and what you want for your own blog or publication.

I will note for the record that this discussion happened across the various blogs for the most part, and also note for the record that if it had happened in the comment section of any of the blogs except for Fred Wilson’s, it would have gotten buried and almost nobody would have seen it because comments are notorious for not ending up in RSS feeds, search engines and the like, and most rational people get to about the third troll in a busy comment area and bail out, because they have better things to do than wade into the mosh pit.

Which is my way of noting that while comment sections definitely can work (and do, if you work at them), most comment sections fail the “why am I looking at this?” test pretty quickly, Fred Wilson’s blog being a notable exception. And Youtube being a site that proves the rule beyond any need to argue, because, as usual, absent landlords end up breeding slums.

Now, I use Disqus on my blog, and Akismet, and I have almost no spam problem, because my blog is small and generally ignored by the spammers and trolls. I’m also pretty careful to vet comments and back links and don’t encourage trolls and don’t post trackback links that point to spammy sites, which I think discourages them from trying a bit. And mostly, because I’m small I don’t get lots of comments in the first place. If I got popular (hah! not likely) and started seeing high numbers of comments (I wish!) I might change my mind and go commentless without feeling guilty. I think right now, they’re a net positive to my site, but I long ago stopped seeing them as necessary, required or some kind of freaking inalienable right like some people (mostly trolls, I think) do. Heck, if I were a troll, I’d demand free places to do my trolling and insist on no adult supervision, too. I’d love to spend other people’s nickels to spread my opinions…

So my bottom line is that comments are useful, but are mostly broken. You need to put too much work into them to keep them useful — even disqus, which I think does a better job than the others I’ve looked at. But I’m not sure “nuclear” is the ultimate answer here, either.

Some suggestions:

I’d like a way to configure Disqus to turn off commenting after a period of time (like 30 days, or after 3-4 days of no comments); there is little reason to carry on a conversation after it dies down the first time, and so open comments (and trackbacks on blogs) after a couple of weeks is useful only to spammers; reduce the places they have a chance to lay their stuff by turning comments off on older material.

I’d like a way to feature good comments, give them a visibility that doesn’t exist right now. Great example: The Online Photographer, which as far as I can tell, is manually editing them into the body of the article. It’d be awesome if Disqus supported a way in the admin interface to click a checkbox “feature this” and have them appear “above the fold”, so that we can start curating the good comments into the conversation stream as a way of giving them visibility, instead of only trying to keep the noise down by moderating out the worst stuff.

But really, this is a job for a reputation engine. Disqus is well suited to implement this, and spread a reputation across all sites that use Disqus. Allow a site to define what minimum reputation is needed to display them on a site, and track the +1 and abuse flagging back to the Disqus user to generate their reputation. the trolls will sink, and a site owner can choose just where to draw a line and say “below this, you don’t get on my site”, either by not accepting comments or not displaying them. And then let a disqus user override that on an individual basis if they want. even a decent reputation setup with some minimal metrics would make it a lot easier for a site to choose whether to display or dump the trolls, and if someone does post a troll note, let the other users vote it into oblivion if they want.

I think there’s still a lot of life in comments. Fred’s blog shows the possibility, just as this discussion about comments shows how well the alternate possibility (distributing across many blogs) shows how well it can work as well. But to make the kind of environment Fred’s fostered work without the kind of fostering that someone like Fred (or Teresa Nielsen Hayden does at Making Light) we need better technology underpinnings. Most site owners/admins/moderators don’t have the “touch” to guide a community into becoming what Fred and Teresa have. Or maybe they do, but not the time or will to make it happen.

But isn’t that what all this technology is about? finding ways to enable these things and free humans from having to drudge through the grunt work? And moderating comments is drudge work. serious drudge work. With some thought and some code, we can enable the community to self police itself here. So why not do it?

(and just because I can, here are some previous rants on this topic from previous rounds of this discussion: 2008, 2003, 2011 (think comments as critiques here)

Note 1: my infamous emacs vs. VI joke: What’s the difference between an emacs user and a VI user? Give the Vi user a file and set of changes and they will sit down and edit the changes into the file and then go to lunch. Give it to an Emacs user, they’ll sit down and code a macro that they’ll use to make the changes automatically while they’re at lunch. Afterward, both of them have the changed file, but the Emacs user has a macro that he’ll file in his library of macros and never touch again in his life.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at we’re having the comment fight again…. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

and so I did, just because it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time.

Definitely, I’ve done worse. At this point, I plan on filing it, and it’ll probably never see the light of day again, but you never know. But what the heck, it was fun just playing with it.. (and in case you’re curious, that’s Univers as the type font, just because I figured if I used Comic Sans, someone’s head would explode).

Have fun. comment on it if you wish.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at because I know my wonderfully ugly blog logos annoy some folks. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Yes, Verizon Still Wants $2 From You:

When Verizon says it won’t charge $2 for online payments, it’s saying it’ll get $2 out of you in some less obvious manner. Some victory.

I don’t think so. This (unlike the Bank of America land grab) doesn’t seem to be designed as primarily a money grab, and I think that’s one reason Verizon backed down so quickly.

If you look back at the original announcements and read between the lines a bit, what they really want is for people to sign up for Autopay. This $2 fee was added to the payment options that people who haven’t/won’t do that use.

So this was really a strategy to encourage people to shift to autopay, where (indirectly) you’ll help them drive down their costs because they don’t have to worry about collecting or reminding people who forgot or who realized that they could afford to pay the phone bill OR the rent, and chose rent. It’s about putting the phone bill on automatic, which is good for Verizon, by adding incentives to move away from the services that are used to pay the bill monthly.

It’s clear they didn’t expect the backlash; should they have? I dunno, but I can see why they missed it. But as soon as it hit, give them credit, they realized that out here in the real world, it wasn’t about “incentivizing users to move to autopay”, ti was about “greedy damn Verizon bastards!” and they pulled it, because it wasn’t really about the money, and wasn’t worth the controversy.

I wonder how many users already screaming at Verizon about this are already on autopay and not affected by this. And I wonder if there’d be this outcry if the bank of america money grab hadn’t happened and sensitized people to this…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at (no, they don’t. sort of) Yes, Verizon Still Wants $2 From You. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Ed Bott has this right.

The Android update (or lack thereof) fiasco isn’t really about getting users to buy new devices. Carriers actually don’t want users to get new devices — that’s a cost for them. Nor is it evil or nefarious. It’s just reality. The carriers and OEMs don’t want to deploy resources to work on these updates, so they don’t.

Worse, it’s unlikely they ever will. The interests are simply not aligned here.

He’s half right. The carrier’s processes are built around feature phones, not smart phones. You don’t upgrade the software on feature phones, you replace the phone. Carriers put massive resources into testing prior to release, and then move on to the next thing. They haven’t (with the exception of Apple, who does it instead of the end carrier and told the carrier to butt out and made it stick) really gotten their heads around what a smartphone means in terms of incremental updates, and their processes are both heavily political and time consuming, which makes doing it hard for both carrier and manufacturer.

But the carrier business model is built around the idea of device churn and replaceable hardware. The concept of a phone that gets upgrades that extend the useful life of the phone for the end user is something that isn’t really a good match for their revenues. It’s not in their financial best interest to do things that help you keep that phone longer; not when you can really want that neat new feature and pay them an upgrade fee for the new phone instead.

And when that’s a $50 feature phone? great. churn away. But $400 smartphones? As Smartphones come down in price (as Nokia is working to do to bring them more in line with feature phone pricing) this changes, but when you’re talking about the list price of an unlocked Palm Pre or iPhone with a two year contract commit, to basically say a year later “well, you’ll need to buy into the next phone instead to get those features” may be “just business”, but it also seems somewhat evil to me. and I think you’re seeing pushback by users on it as well. The cost of the current smartphones puts it out of the “disposable” category for most of us, even if the carriers still want to sell and manage them that way.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at parislemon • “They are capitalists.”. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

There is perhaps no better example of a love/hate relationship than that of creative individuals and their critics. With few exceptions, the writings of famed artists, authors, performers, musicians, filmmakers, and the likes, contain some reference to their critics, usually ranging from witty jabs to hateful diatribes. Curiously, the emotion is almost reversed when polling an audience of beginners and amateurs on any given online critique forum. Ask the members whether they value critique from their peers and the favorable answer is often as unanimous as it is emphatic. Why the disconnect?

 

“Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been a statue erected to a critic.” –Jean Sibelius

The value of critique is never absolute. All critique can be both helpful and damaging, and the balance shifts towards the latter the more experienced and proficient the artist becomes.

In the back of my head, I keep coming around to the idea that some day, I’m going to go off and create a web business around a site that connects creators and critiques. Use a reputation engine like Stack Exchange to figure out which commenters are most respected and relied upon for useful feedback and give their comments feedback and relevance. maybe find some way to turn that into a revenue stream back to the best commenters (and bury the trolls and the metoos). you can turn it into a marketing system by rewarding feedback through prizes, where prizes are supplied by companies so they get proper visibility for their generosity. Publish the top rated works in some way to generate both visibility for the photographers and content that drives interest in the site.

Some day. Not any time soon, but I keep coming back to this and thinking “there’s a market here. and it’d be fun to build.” and then I lie down with a washcloth over my eyes until I stop designing the thing and get back to reality (because right now, my life doesn’t need me chasing this one…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The Value and Futility of Critique | Guy Tal Photography Journal. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Color me surprised! An unexpected email from Intuit sent to all Quicken for Mac customers landed in my inbox this morning, and I assumed it was more warnings about avoiding an upgrade to Lion or discounts off other Intuit products to which I could migrate. Quicken for Mac 2007 (and earlier versions) were engineered for PowerPC systems, and requires the Rosetta compatibility layer to run, which Apple neither updated for nor includes with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

 

Intuit. the company that makes Adobe look bleeding edge in a moving forward. Maybe, just maybe, Lion is now stable enough to dip a toe into.

This is a program area that seems ripe for someone serious to take it over. Unfortunately, when I checked around when it came time to upgrade to Lion, I didn’t feel any of them really stood up (and some that might have, my bank didn’t want to talk to, making them not so useful). Mint might have (but then, Mint is actually intuit now…), except as far as I can tell, there’s no way to pay them to turn off all of the attempted upsells and ads and going to the site simply became painful, like a run-down street of casinos near downtown in Vegas. Mint seemed so intent to convince me to do something that generated revenue I couldn’t actually do what I wanted, so I abandoned them; and I would have been happy to pay some reasonable fee — give them money — JUST TO TURN ALL THAT STUFF OFF. oh well.

So I’m limping along with Quicken Essentials and wondering why Intuit hates its customers. And it’d be really, really sad if the thing that takes this market back is a five year old port of the previous product, a couple of years after they shipped this new version. anyone see just how brain damaged this situation is?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at TidBITS Business Apps: Intuit Plans Lion-Compatible Quicken 2007 Update. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Hi chuqui,

(URL to one of my images edited)

In joining Flickr, you agreed to abide by the Terms of
Service and Community Guidelines. Flickr accounts are
intended for individual use, for our members to share
original content that they’ve created, not to sell stuff:

“Don’t Use Flickr for Commercial Purposes Flickr is for
personal use only. If you sell products, services or
yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your
account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr
technologies (including APIs, Flickrmail, etc), or Flickr
accounts must be approved by Flickr.”

http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

Please remove the URLs that link to your store/auction(s)
from underneath your photos/video, any sales verbiage or
“for sale” sets, and any group discussion posts where
commercial content was shared at your earliest convenience
so that we don’t have to take further action on your
account. 

Regards,

Flickr Staff

They are correct. I am in violation of their guidelines. For the record, here’s what my images say (with links unlinked):

Golden Eagle, Marsh Road, Santa Clara County, California. This adult eagle was harassed by a red-tailed hawk, which put it on the ground. The eagle sat there for a while, then did a test flight along the hill, finally took off and flew away. The hawk that chased it sat near by watching and let the eagle go unmolested once it was sure it was leaving.

If you are interested in buying a print of an image, or to license it for commercial use, they are available via my portfolio on smugmug.

Please stay in touch! You can follow my work via my blog (www.chuqui.com), Twitter, or Google+.  
This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission.

Tags: Aquila chrysaetos, California, Golden Eagle, Marsh Road, Santa Clara County, Top25

That exact language has been on my images for the last 4-6 weeks or so, I think. Very similar language has been on all my images for about the last 18 months. When I did it originally, I did it based on language I saw a good number of flickr users using. I could probably point to 100 or so flickr users doing what I do.

The question I have is this: why now? Why me when I’ve been doing this same kind of cross marketing to my smugmug site for over a year? Possible answers:

1. Pure coincidence. They police stuff when they notice it, and they happened to see it.
2. They’re starting a crackdown on this, and so if you’re one of those photographers I modeled my language on, you might expect email, too.
3. My criticisms on Flickr got noticed, and they decided to rattle my cage a bit.

Which one is it? Honestly, I don’t care. I’m not questioning the rule, I’m clearly not in line with their rules. Of course, if I’m not, a bunch of you aren’t either. What that means to you is up to you to consider. If you’re one of those photographers doing this kind of cross linking, you might want to be aware of this and redo your language to be conformant. I’m guessing if I remove the words “buying” and “license” I’m probably okay. Maybe.

My interest in flickr is so low now that it’s not worth my time to fix this. It’s not about being upset about this; it’s about flickr being allowed to deteriorate and stagnate to the point where I no longer care about being a member on it. There are better uses of my time, and better places to put my images.

So I’m going to go delete my flickr account. I don’t want to have a fight with flickr over this stuff, and the amount of work need to change this to make them happy isn’t a lot, but it’s more than I want to spend. The change will reduce the value of flickr to me even more, so that I don’t see any reason to bother. I was headed towards this decision anyway, this just means it makes sense to make it now instead of later.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to head off and throw the switch and resolve this. Probably not in the way they expect, but the way that works for me. I apologize in advance that a few thousand images will go 404 while I make this transition. I’ll bring them back as soon as I have time to set things up for them properly on my smugmug site. .

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Change of plan on flickr. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

It’s now live on their site, and I wanted to point you at it and include a copy of what I wrote here:

Try to imagine today’s society if Steve didn’t exist. Can you? The Apple II. the Macintosh. The mouse. Making computers accessible to non-technical people in general. Reinventing the music industry with iPod and iTunes, over the express wishes of the industry. Beginning a similar reinvention of film and video. Revitalising animation with Pixar. Reinventing the personal communication industry with the iPhone. And most recently the iPad. He was a fundamental part of so many societal changes, any one of which would make most people’s careers.

I am who I am today because of Steve, through the companies and the products and the technologies he fostered; more importantly, because of the people he brought in and mentored who turned into people that mentored me. Because of the thinking and attitudes he promoted and inoculated that became key parts of what I’ve become. I’m the person I am because of Steve and what he did, the opportunities he created, and the attitudes and expectations he baked into those around him.

I almost ran over Steve once outside of Infinite Loop 1 as I was coming in for a meeting and he popped into the street without really looking, [iPod division chief] Jon Rubinstein and [iTunes chief] Eddy Cue in tow. He almost returned the favour once as he drove in to work as I was in the same crosswalk.

Steve could be a tough and very intimidating person, but as much as he demanded of others, he demanded more of himself. He was involved in one of my projects at Apple, and I used to watch the team scramble as Steve reviewed ad copy hours before a launch and mark up changes. He was that involved in the details, and he was always right.

Now Steve has left us, but his memory and his legacy live on, and they will continue to drive and shape the world we live in for years to come. Nobody can replace Steve Jobs – he was unique. Each of us can choose to do something to fill a small part of the void he’s left. If we do, we will help fulfil the legacy he started in trying to make the world better for all of us. I am a better person for having lived under his influence, and I can never pay that back, but I can try to carry that forward in his

 

 

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at My thoughts on Steve in the Guardian. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Purely optional, and I don’t intend to clutter up the site or become annoying in the name of trying to drive revenue. Not why I’m here. But I figured I’d explain the return of the banner, and make a quiet suggestion that a few tips here and there could encourage me to put more time into more writing. But even if you don’t, I intend to write anyway.

Or… you could go over to the smugmug site and buy yourself a pretty photo print; a few bucks of those also ends up in my tip jar, and you end up with a pretty for your wall. and that would encourage me to go out and make more pretty prints for people to buy.

Or not. Revenue is not the primary reason I do this, but heck, new camera gear isn’t cheap. I, however, can be rented at reasonable rates, and tips are always happily accepted.

I do think there’s an interesting subtext to this decision by Amazon. It’s not JUST as simple as realizing that the jig is up and sooner or later they’re going to lose this fight — which they were going to lose. The deal is that California delays having Amazon collect this for a year, to give them a chance to try to get this set up on a national basis. If that doesn’t happen, then Amazon will deal with California directly. Because sales tax is a beast because of local taxes that are tacked on in some counties or cities, dealing with this rationally is complicated.

And I think it goes without saying that once Amazon gives in and starts handling this tax, everyone else is going to have to as well.

So my thought is this: Amazon has bought itself enough time to implement a fulfillment service for sales tax, not just for itself, for but all vendors that want to use it (for a small service fee. of course). And so a year from now, Amazon will announce this service, it’ll start collecting the taxes itself, which will make it effectively impossible for others to refuse to, and it’ll happen to have the one service vendors can use to collect these taxes rationally and correctly. Which means Amazon is in a position to generate lots of fees for handling this problem for other vendors.

Which, if I’m right, means Amazon is once again stupid like a fox, avoiding dealing with this until it is clear they can no longer avoid it, and then likely setting up a way to profit from it once it happens by creating a service others will need because it’s cheaper to hire Amazon to manage it than build the system themselves. And because Amazon finally has stopped fighting, all of those other vendors will need a supplier of that service…

We’ll see, but I’m guessing I’ll be proven right…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at I put the amazon affiliate links back. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Words don’t fail me often. they do now. Here’s what I wrote back in August. Rest in Peace.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The Passing of an era and a hero. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

So, on November 1, I’m going to raise prices a bit. If nothing else, it’ll give me the ability to start a monthly “this print is on sale this month” promotion, which right now, I can’t really do.

What this means is if you’ve thought about buying one of my prints in the past and haven’t, the next couple of weeks is a great time to do so. All of my images available on my smugmug site are available as prints if you’re interested.

To offer some suggestions, by far the most popular print to date has been this one from Yosemite:

One of my personal favorites is this one from Yellowstone, which I printed up using metallic inks, and it really rocks:

Another one I have on my walls using the metallic inks is my morro bay shot:

and it really rocks as a print, also.

Get them before I haul them out of the bargain bin….

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Speaking of pricing…. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.