An Obnoxious Vanguard?
April 25th, 2012
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
We’re busy with our final preparations for fotoFringe London 2012, the picture buyers’ fair which is being held tomorrow in King’s Place, a newish office block and conference centre where The Guardian have their offices, near King’s Cross.
And it’s an article in The Guardian that I want to write about. A friend in Euskadi alerted me to this one (thank you Peta) because it’s one of my favourite topics — the freedom of photographers to use their cameras.
Stonehenge, Trafalgar Square, National Trust properties, a whole bunch of places in the USA — the list of places where photography is banned or restricted lengthens daily. Now, unsurprisingly, we can add the Olympic park in East London to the list.
I’ll never get to see this place because all my ticket applications have proved unsuccessful. However I am permitted to contribute substantially towards it through a hike in my London rates over the next ten years. So I’d like to see some pictures of it.
The Olympic venues are technically private property (purchased using our money, but when did that ever restrain our dear leaders?) so control can be asserted over what can and can’t be photographed within the precincts. But not on the public spaces surrounding the venue, of course.
The Guardian thought this could be interesting, so they sent a couple of photographers and a video to test the temperature of the waters. They struck lucky straight away when they ran into an incompetently and incompletely briefed security guard whose debating skills and command of English were no match for the fiercely well prepared Guardian hacks. He simply attempted to stop them filming in a public place. They refused. Reinforcements arrived.
And here — well, you know I’m on the side of the photographers, but this was outright provocation and harassment. The Guardian hacks were milling around, pushing for a reaction. But they came up against an intelligent, articulate and reasonable security supervisor who conceded they had a right to photograph on public land but as this was a sensitive area — the Olympic Park’s security centre — it would be most awfully kind of them if they could possibly desist.
The Guardianistas hectored and interrupted. They tried to photograph the armband name badge of an old fart security guard who looked worryingly like me, and he tore it off to prevent them. Bad move. The hacks loved it.
I want photographers to be able to photograph what they want when they want where they want, within reason and without causing offence, upset or danger. Yes, there are security concerns. Yes, there are privacy issues. I’m less impressed by the “we own it, therefore we should profit from it” brigade. I personally find papparazzis distasteful, and I believe they were the major contributing factor in the death of Princess Diana.
Our cause isn’t helped by photographers manufacturing an incident where none existed. But every movement needs an obnoxious vanguard.
Doesn’t it? What do you think?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/apr/23/olympic-park-security-guards-journalists-photos
The Feminisation Of Marketing
April 20th, 2012
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
… or Feminization if you’re American.
At the Digital Minds Conference last Sunday, part of the London Book Fair (from which I’ve only just surfaced, so please excuse the tardiness of this thought) there were three keynote speakers. I’d always thought there could only be one keynote speaker, who would be The Keynote Speaker, but the conference world appears to have left me behind. Or common sense has left them behind.
One of the excellent keynote speakers (there were two) was Jim Griffin of OneHouse LLC. I didn’t know him or what he does, but I listened obediently. And what he had to say was good. I sat up when he announced “Every time someone has to click on your website, you lose half your audience.”
Of course you do! I do it myself! Like most youth, I suffer from diminishing attention span syndrome, and if I find a website is making too many demands on me, I will wander off elsewhere. Memo to self: must ensure that the new iteration of fotoLibra has as few jumps as possible. There’s a great art in this, and for someone as prolix, verbose and effulgent as I am, it is extremely hard to pare what I want to say back to the core. E.g. that 32 word sentence could have been written in seven.
Griffin went on to advocate the feminisation of marketing. In a few swift sentences he describes the shift from the Alpha Male marketing of the late C20 to today’s softer, more insidious techniques. And he’s absolutely right. Ten years ago companies would unblushingly describe their salesmen as ‘thrusting’, ‘aggressive’, ‘potent’ and displaying a ‘robust’ attitude. They might have well as stated their policy as “Wham! Bang! Thank you Ma’am!” Make the sale, move on. Scored! Or as I saw in one memorable, boastful but educated piece of grafitti: VIDI • VICI • VENI ( you can look it up for yourselves if you need to).
When I interviewed Jeff Bezos for The Times back in 1996 he told me that he’d chosen the name Amazon for his company because he wanted it to be the biggest damn retailer in the world and the Amazon was the biggest damn river. It seemed like braggadocio at the time, but they’re on their way. And they’ve done it through the feminisation of their marketing, not through the big swinging dick statements of their founder.
Jim Griffin pointed out that Amazon knows what you like to read. It knows your birthday. It knows the sort of music you listen to, the films you watch. It probably remembers the colour of your eyes and your wedding anniversary. It’s a woman, for God’s sake. And the customers keep coming back. Amazon isn’t interested in a one night stand, it wants a long term, loving relationship. As long as you keep giving it money.
What if you go off and start buying from someone else? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in the future there’ll be some built-in module to penalise disloyalty.
They could call it Alimony.
The end of the Credit Card Scam story
April 12th, 2012
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Having been ripped off by a Nigerian scammer (details here) we asked our local MP Elfyn Llwyd (Plaid Cymru) if there was anything he could do to help.
He was as outraged as we were that the issuing bank knew of the fraud two months before coming to HSBC and demanding that $800 be removed from the fotoLibra account, by which time of course we had disbursed the money. He said he would write to the Chairman of HSBC.
Which he did. He received a reply from David Lewis, Head of HSBC Customer Relations, absolving the bank of any responsibility and arguing that it was fotoLibra’s fault for accepting ‘cardholder not present’ transactions. This amazing statement ignores the fact that 10.7% of all retail sales* are now made via the internet, every one of which is a ‘cardholder not present’ transaction.
Mr. Lewis concluded
There are some steps the merchant/retailer can take to minimise the possibility of fraud, for example asking for the numbers in the post code of the card holder and only delivering to that address (as fraudsters often ask for the goods to be sent to another address other than that of the registered cardholder).
That might have been relevant if fotoLibra delivered boxed goods to physical locations. But we don’t. We permit the download of digital images to an email address. There’s no connection to any part of the credit card.
Maybe a credit card could be linked to a fixed email address which would form part of the verification process? No, that’s probably far too simple. Isn’t it?
We are most grateful to Mr Llwyd for his concern and his response. That’s exactly what MPs are for. Full marks.
*Office for National Statistics, February 2012
Join the Conversation
April 11th, 2012
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
This Sunday, as part of the London Book Fair, the Digital Minds Conference will be held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster, London.
The organisers have told us to get there in good time because public transport in London sucks on a Sunday. In fact the real reason is because security at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre is so paranoid it will take you as long to get into the building as it takes an innocent Brit to get into the United States via JFK. Last time I visited I thought I saw the words “anal probe” being mouthed by the security guards. I vowed never to go again.
But all the leading lights of the ebook world will be there (if they’re allowed in), so attendance is virtually compulsory. Many sessions and seminars are taking place. Bill McCoy, the Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (they create and maintain the EPUB ebook format, the standard for ebooks) is chairing one session called Join the Conversation – Digital Platforms and Standards. This consists of round table conversations on a wide range of topics steered by industry ‘experts’, with three subject sessions and approximately 18 different tables covering a variety of angles.
The reason I put ‘experts’ in quotes is that I am one of them — my table theme is Photographic and Illustrated Ebooks. This will be an informal round table discussion with 12 people on the design, production, marketing and future of illustrated ebooks. You are welcome to join in. I’ve been asked to host this as a result of the publication of our first forty ebook titles by VisConPro’s digital publishing arm, Heritage Ebooks.
There are over 1,900 photographs in Heritage Ebooks’ Follies of England series, the majority provided by talented fotoLibra photographers. It is the biggest digital heritage ebook project ever published. And we created it to demonstrate a new method of visual content provision to digital publishers, fotoLibra’s advanceImages system.
Now we have a chance to sit down with other digital publishers and talk through what we did and how it works. It’s a great opportunity for us. And I hope it will prove useful for participants.
If you can’t run to the conference fee of £399, I’ll be happy to meet with digital publishers for free at the London Book Fair next week. We’re on Stand T905, through the kind courtesy of our hosts Publishers’ Marketplace.
Lessons Have Been Learned
April 5th, 2012After every cock-up, politicians appear on our TVs to hang their heads and admit that “Lessons Have Been Learned.”
Well, now it’s my turn. As many of you will be aware, the fotolibra website suffered a calamitous collapse last week, and as it fell it brought the Heritage Ebooks site down with it, as well as all our back office tools — admin, banking, invoicing, Datacash, payments, mailing systems and more.
The good news is that the only thing we actually lost was time. No images were harmed in the making of this booboo, no data was lost and no accounts were compromised.
I’m delighted to tell you that fotoLibra is back up and running after our calamitous crash. Everything is back to normal.
You can upload images again!
If you use fotoLibra DND, please quit the application and restart it before attempting to upload.
Two questions: how do we stop this happening again, and what are we going to do about it?
Well, Lessons Have Been Learned. We are studying a cloud computing model to run in tandem with our physical array of servers and RAID 5 disks which live in a server farm in Manchester. If one system goes down, the other has to be there for it. That’s redundancy.
Redundancy (which has a different meaning in the computing world to what it used to have in my chosen career path) must be at the forefront of our plans. When a system fails, another system must step seamlessly into its place.
What are we going to do about it? Firstly of course we must apologise to all our users, buyers, sellers and browsers. We let you down, and we are very sorry. I am personally desolated — the fotoLibra website has been live since March 2004 and in that time it’s never been down for longer than ten minutes, and then only for service upgrades. I was rather proud of that; but then pride comes before a fall.
Enough breast-beating. Let’s look to the future. Assuming we have an even more robust system, we still have to have a contingency plan. As for the images, which were unharmed in this little unpleasantness, as well as our existing RAID 5 storage and possible future cloud back-up I am planning to physically secrete caches of hard drives full of images in various undisclosed locations in Snowdonia. Just in case.
One of the worrying things about last week’s crash is that it took our mailing system down with it, so we were unable to tell everyone.
There needs to be a line of communication with fotoLibra users set up outside our inhouse systems. And it appears some kind Americans have already thought of this, and have created things called LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. In exchange they want our souls for all eternity, but it’s just the price we have to pay.
fotoLibra has opened a Group on LinkedIn, which will be my preferred way of reaching you. It’s a professional networking group, and I promise I will link with you if you ask me.
There is also a fotoLibra Facebook site, which will be run by our redoubtable web editor Jacqui Norman. She will link with you, but I won’t, as I have reserved my Facebook visits for keeping an eye on my extended family.
Finally, there is Twitter. Now I am not a chatty man, so this will be difficult for me, but I will try and post something every day. The content will most likely be taken from my commonplace book, so it will largely consist of wise thoughts, pithy sayings and the world according to my friend Dede. I hope that sometimes you will find it fun and amusing. From time to time there will be something of interest to fotoLibra users. Please follow me @fotoLibrarian.
This way, if there ever is another problem, we’ll be able to let everyone know — and you will know where to check if you think you are having problems with the fotoLibra site.
So join the new fotoLibra Group on LinkedIn
and join and ‘Like’ the new fotoLibra Group on Facebook
and follow my Twitter feed.
Please sign up to join these groups — if you can also put up with my disconnected ramblings, of course.
And please stick with us. We’ll be even better as a result of this crisis.
Payment Requests
April 4th, 2012Whoa! All the bits of the fotoLibra site seem to be springing back to life, particularly the fotoLibra Payment Requests. Poor Yvonne has been flooded over the past hour with fotoLibra members cheekily asking for money for their picture sales.
This is outrageous. How dare they demand the money that’s owed to them? Why can’t they be happy with the postcard from sunny Rio de Janeiro, as traditionally sent by fleeing accountants?
But no, they want to be paid, and as we have sold their pictures, I suppose we’d better shell out.
I’m the one who suffers, you know. She doesn’t like writing cheques, so she takes it out on me.
She’s much happier making bank transfers, so if you haven’t already fed in your bank details, do it now — sign in, go to Control Centre> Account> Payment Preference (5th button down in the LH column) and fill in the three boxes. Simple. And the money will go straight into your account.
If you’ve sold a picture, that is.
As you can probably guess, this is me marking time until we get the go-ahead from Damien that it’s safe for fotoLibra members to start uploading images again. So I thought I’d do a little housekeeping, such as asking members to set up more bank transfers. It makes life immeasurably easier for us — well, for Yvonne, and by extension for me. I don’t normally have time for it.
I’m expecting the go-ahead any minute, but I’ve been expecting that since last Friday. I suspect it will be sometime tomorrow.
I promise I will let you know!
SEO, as you will know, stands for Search Engine Optimisation. We do it in-house, and we’re reasonably good at it. Of course, we could be a lot better.
But every hour we get emails from hopefuls who have stumbled across our URL and want to help us improve our rankings. Here’s one which was cooked up earlier:
Please forgive the direct approach. My name is Alan and I work as a Consultant in your market sector. I have been looking at your website today and would like a few minutes of your time to have an informal chat with you.
I really like the site, but you may be curious as to why the site isn’t ranking, and with that in mind I wondered if you would like a free SEO audit of the site looking at keyword density and a detailed analysis of the back link profile.
That should give you an excellent insight, and hopefully allow us to develop a plan for getting the site into some top positions.
The audit is FREE and with no obligation. So do please get in touch.
Kind Regards
Alan
At least it was polite. And it came from Britain. Were I to reply to him, this is what I’d like to say:
Hi Alan
Thanks for your email.
You are not a known consultant in our market sector.
You write: “I really like the site, but you may be curious as to why the site isn’t ranking,”
Well, it is ranking. And it’s ranking exponentially better than yours. Your site’s Alexa ranking is 22,713,269.
Ours is 52,212.
It works in reverse — the lower the number, the higher the ranking. So your site is virtually invisible to the outside world.
And you want to sell us your advice?
But I can’t be bothered. I’m too busy waiting for the fotoLibra RAID 5 array to rebuild and for our very high-ranking site to be fully functional again.
Rebuilding
March 31st, 2012As hundreds of you are aware, the fotoLibra site suffered a catastrophic failure on Wednesday afternoon. I haven’t been to our server centre, but I have been dreaming of smoking, charred lumps of metal every night.
Damien, our Technical Development Director, is on site and we think he has been sleeping in our data shed in Manchester. He’s been there three days. New servers and hard disks were delivered yesterday,
Down time
March 30th, 2012I hope you can read this blog. It’s balanced precariously on an elderly fotoLibra server, woken from long retirement, to chip in at our time of crisis.
Yes, as hundreds of you have noticed, the fotoLibra site is down.
All systems read Go. Everything tested fine. The servers responded happily. But there was no fotoLibra site to be seen.
Any images uploaded to the site before Wednesday midday are safe and well. Do not worry. If you managed to upload after that time, which is unlikely, the images may have been lost. Have another go later.
After 24 hours attempting to diagnose and rectify the problem without success, I ordered a new server. That arrived this morning, and is being installed as I write.
We do have a contingency plan, and a further part of our yet uncompleted diagnoses is to find out why that didn’t kick in as planned.
Many, many apologies to all of you who have been inconvenienced by this down time. We are reassessing our 999 strategy and we plan to set up LinkedIn and Facebook fotoLibra groups and a fotoLibra Twitter account, as well as my own rather dull Twitter platform. More details next week.
The fotoLibra site should be up and running later this evening. I will post again when it is.
Not for your eyes only
March 26th, 2012
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
Our latest analytics tell me that 9,328 unique people visited the fotoLibra Pro Blog in the last month and it had 19,999 pageviews. Damn. Only one to go.
Today I want to tell you about fotoFringe 2012. Now you’re all unique, and you’re all lovely — but I don’t actually know who many of you are. I inform fotoLibra buyers and sellers when I’ve posted a new blog, as well as most people I know. My high-flying niece Shân always obliges with an out-of-office auto-reply — “I am out of the office on business in the US / Switzerland / Australia / Chile / Singapore (insert exotic location here) and will only have limited access to e-mails.”
67.76% of you are from the UK, 9.42% from the USA, 22.82% from elsewhere. What I would have expected. I don’t know if these visiting figures are good or bad, or what to compare them to.
But from the comments that are made, most respondees are photographers.
So this blog posting isn’t for you.
This one is for that rara avis, the professional picture buyer.
Now because we are so cripplingly shy at fotoLibra, we never get out of the office. We seldom dare to speak in the office either, we just email each other. Jacqui never even leaves her eyrie in Snowdonia. So we are terrified of picture buyers and very nervous about meeting them. But we want to and we need to, because the ones that we do meet are all so sweet and kind to us, not frightening at all. It’s just that … well, have you ever tried cold calling? Have you ever received an unwanted telephone call? It is the most disheartening, dispiriting experience for both sides. Even if the caller is offering something the answerer may want, now is almost always not the right time. Today I’m sitting here in Harlech, baking in sunshine, and the phone has rung three times in the past 30 minutes. I am alone in the office, and because of the vagaries of Welsh telephony the phone is four rooms away from my computer. I can choose to be with one or the other; not both. Three times I have jumped up to answer the phone; three times a bland recorded voice says “Our records show you may be owed thousands from Personal Protection Payments.” There’s not even anyone to shout at. So I rant to a keyboard which dutifully records my raging fingers.
Get to the point, Headley. We do have a chance to meet professional picture buyers, and it’s called fotoFringe. The first event was last year. We gulped, we set up our trestle table (this is not major league stuff) and we were astonished and delighted by the picture editors, researchers and buyers we met and by the number of them! I calculated we made 58 good contacts during the day. It was the best exhibition we’ve ever done.
Until April 26th this year, of course, when fotoFringe 2012 takes place at King’s Place in King’s Cross, London. It’s bigger than last year. We hope it will be even better, although it’s hard to see how it can be bettered.
We will be able to look picture researchers in the eye (we hope), shake their hands, and show them the wondrous imagery our talented members have assembled. We can tell them about Picture Calls. We can tell them about advanceImages. We can show off our extremely user-friendly new website (we keep hoping).
Maybe we’ll make 59 good contacts. So if you are a picture editor, or researcher, or buyer, we hope you’ll find time to come and see us at fotoFringe. If we’re hiding under our table in terror, there are 89 other picture libraries to meet there. Entry is free; all you have to do is register here. The show is only for professional picture users, so photographers aren’t allowed — the fotoFringe organisers, led by the redoubtable and lovely Flora Smith, say:
“This is a privately created and managed networking event for professional picture users and picture libraries, conceived, created and managed by TopFoto as fotofringe London.
“It is not a forum where we are seeking new contributors. This private one day only event is not open to photographers, service providers, nor the general public.”
Sorry about that. But you can email us at fotoLibra at any time, or ideally participate by commenting on the blog. After all, 19,999 pageviews can’t be ignored.
Oh — but by reading this, YOU must have personally taken it up to 20,000 pageviews. Thank you very, very much!