I’d like everyone reading this to comment. You can do so anonymously if you like, or, if you’d rather, e-mail me, IM me, or tell me in person. I’d just really like to know what everyone thinks.
What are your three biggest gripes? Anything. The three things that bother you most.
I’ll be thinking about this one over the next week or two, and I’ll post my answers. I’d like to hear what you all think.
My one issue with Firefox is that it doesn’t seem to be good with bookmarks under pressure. I’ve lost mine twice, including once a few minutes ago as I was catching up with my favorite sites. I probably lost about 200 links. Maybe it’s somebody’s way of relieving me of the duty I had placed upon myself to look through the ~150 I had in the dreaded Unsorted folder.
What gets to me most is that I should know to back up. But do I? No.
While I was talking with Jess last night, she told me that the link to my blog wasn’t working from my home page. I went to see, and it worked on my computer; I wasn’t really sure what to think. This morning I came back and loaded up my morning links (including my blog) to find that my domain had expired yesterday, and Mom e-mailed me to let me know this morning, too. Whoops. Thankfully, the wonderful people at RegisterFly.com, along with having great rates for domains, allow a 30-day grace period for re-registering a name. So fear not, loyal readers, the site is set to go until February 24, 2006!
Amazing what you get with a $50 hotel room these days.
I don’t usually post links on here anymore since I’ve started using del.icio.us, but sometimes I come across a link that’s just too good to go unnoticed.
As a photography enthusiast, I’m always looking for other people’s work. I also sometimes have a need for a certain type of photo; while I was drafting prototypes for Semsym, for example, I wanted a picture of a handshake. I’m definitely not alone in my need for these sorts of pictures; the world of stock photography is devoted to that very area. Many of the major competitors like Corbis and iStockPhoto.com offer royalty-free shots but require you to pay for the photos. While this is probably not that big of a deal for a large company, I was looking for something to just put on one of my small sites. The Creative Commons movement is great, too, but the searching functionality leaves a bunch to be desired. Flickr is promising due to the volume of CC-licensed images on there, but there’s a large majority of simple everyday tourist-like shots and snapshots on there.
About a year ago I had the idea for FreeShots, a public domain stock image gallery that would, quite simply, be free. Why would people put images on there? The same reason why people contribute to Wikipedia and other sites: you give and you use. People share their photography to get noticed and to allow other people to use their work; for very simple, everyday shots especially, it’s not about compensation. Compensation, in fact, may be a simple thanks or mention of the original author in the derivative work.
Enter stock.xchng, a Hungarian site that beat me by about 3 years. The site has over 117,000 stock photos available for no cost, many of which have no usage limitations (ie, are in the public domain). The site is moderated, so all new submissions must be approved before they are displayed to the public (done to maintain the quality of the images put on the site). I’ve submitted a few photos, and they’re currently pending approval. The site literally has just about anything you could ever want, and it’s used by people worldwide. It’s a wonderful resource. You might want browse my profile there to see the shots I’ve listed (if they’re approved). I intend to contribute a lot.
To: hotline@mpaa.org
From: justin@justinrussell.com
Subject: Anti-Piracy Hotline Report
Good morning,
I would like to make you aware of an instance of piracy I’ve noticed lately online. I truly believe that everyone both within and outside the entertainment industry should the protection granted to them by the copyrights that are rightfully theirs.
Upon visiting a couple of my favorite online news sites, I read a story {1} about how the MPAA has been promoting anti-piracy with the phrase “You can click, but you can’t hide,” even going as far as to place it prominently on the domains of services that you have deemed as infringing. I am requesting some form of documentation that you have cleared the rights to use this modification of the popular saying, “You can run, but you can’t hide,” used, for example, in the copyrighted works of A Flock of Seagulls {2}, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Perry Barlow {3}. I would also like to know if you have received clearance from Boston.com to use the “You can click, but you can’t hide” phrase used as a headline to a March 8, 2000 column {4}.
Please cease from infringing the rights of copyright holders. Piracy (”the unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material”, as defined at dictionary.com {5}) is unethical, illegal, and hurts content creators.
Thank you.
Justin Russell
http://www.justinrussell.com
Sources:
- {1} http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/11/who_did_mpaa_rip_off.html
- {2} http://www.oz.net/~davester/AFOS/Lyrics/YouCanRun.html
- {3} http://arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/run.html
- {4} http://www.technologyfront.com/journalism/2000/03/dm-03-08.html
- {5} http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=piracy
P.S. I’ve never pirated a movie, and now I hate you even more.
While wading through the *sigh* 280+ links to gre.gario.us on del.icio.us and mulling over the translations of things like “quello che mancava, veramente tosto!” and “vÃtima do próprio sucesso” (and praying they weren’t trashing the site), I happened to notice that four people had del.icio.used justinrussell.com (see here) and one person had linked the still-under-construction Semsym (here). One of the justinrussell.com fans dubbed me a “social software dude” (a title I take as a compliment), and I promise that the Semsym fan won’t be disappointed. I’ll have that site up probably in the next couple of days, so stay tuned.
Can someone help me out with this? Does this screenshot from Virgin and its contrast between the video being shown and the top two reviews signify a) sacrilege, b) how far music has come in 20 years, or c) the sad state of music today?
Edward R. Murrow, “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” March 9, 1954:
Still holds true 50 years later.
gre.gario.us has ended its short run as a publicly-accessible Web service. It simply became too popular for its own good; the creator/operator of del.icio.us shut off access from gre.gario.us because it was taking up too much bandwidth.
I had a few things in mind as I created the site. Above all I didn’t think it would really catch on (at least as quickly as it did). I thought I’d get a few early adopters looking at it, and presumed I might get a little jump a couple weeks down the road with a blog mention or something. I also knew that the service basically worked around some limitations of del.icio.us’s RSS structure; it essentially meant that I used a straight system of fetching HTML pages. I don’t deny that it took a lot of bandwidth; the size of the URL page cache directory that I had was somewhere around 200 MB each day for the couple of days I had it up. I tried to make the service as courteous as possible (building in delays, caching, and the like), but unfortunately del.icio.us’s structure wasn’t helping. I knew I might have to stop the service if it did, by some stretch of the imagination, become popular.
Quite simply, it did. Here are a few quick stats:
Per the suggestion of Jon Ippolito, one of my new media professors, I’ve kept a cached page of my own results to demonstrate as an example of the service in my portfolio. gre.gario.us is by far my most successful site yet, so I definitely want to mention it with my other past works.
gre.gario.us provided a wonderful start to my Semsym collection of sites. My next top priority is to develop the site for Semsym; from there I really have way too many ideas to count. I have a few that would be pretty simple to do; I’d like to branch off from del.icio.us again, but in a nicer way.
I’ve always believed that anything is possible with the Web if you put enough time, effort, and creativity into it. The downside is that sometimes you use a system in a way that it wasn’t designed to be used, and it might not always work out. That’s fine; I’m really happy with gre.gario.us’s (72 hours of) success, and I think I was able to show a lot of people another application of del.icio.us’s simple yet powerful service. Hopefully in time my functionality will become incorporated into the service itself.
(And I promise that’s it with the .us jokes… for now. Other strange domains may follow.)
