As I mentioned over on esculents, I got a photo in this quarter's Spice. They asked, I said sure. I'm kind of excited about it. People on nowpublic ask me to use my stuff all the time. I say no.
They're both unpaid (well, Spice sent me some copies of my issue and gave me a subscription). So what's the difference? It's pretty simple: attribution, attribution appropriate to the media.
Spice, like most print media, hooks you up with a photo credit. It's not a link, but hey, it's print. That's exactly what you'd expect from the medium.
Nowpublic does print your name, and it does link. But the link doesn't go to source material (in most cases the flickr page). Instead it goes to your nowpublic profile. You can link your flicker profile from there, they say. Sorry, not good enough.
I have 2,150+ pictures on flickr. That's not that many by flickr standards. Why would I want people to have to sort through that just to find something that they should already have a link to?
It comes down to expectations. In print, you expect a name. On the web, you expect a link back. Nowpublic defies convention and it feels dirty, like you're giving them something and getting squat in return. Bleh.
2 comments:
hear hear! now public needs to understand how attribution on the web works!
they should also develop an "opt out" feature for flickr users. now public users' email to me gets treated as the spam it is. (i deal with this almost daily, hence the annoyance and the desire for a "leave me the fuck alone!" button.)
let me reiterate, i'm all for letting people use my photos on their blogs AS LONG AS I GET THE LINK BACK TO THE APPROPRIATE PHOTO. now public can jump off a cliff for all i care.
I didn't mention it out loud, but nowpublic is for profit (you don't get 10 mil in VC because you're doing the world a favor). So they're making money of those photos, or planning to. The least they can give us is a little link juice.
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