PicApp - Free Professional Stock Images?

Image details: Cannes: Blindness - Premiere served by picapp.com

If you run a website that needs lots of stock photography, particularly pictures of celebrities, it can get very expensive. It means licensing photographs or waiting until you get a cease and desist legal threat from the owner. PicApp aims to solve this problem by making stock photographs free.

Registration is free and not actually necessary, but I would recommend you do.

What’s the catch? You don’t get a clean image, the photograph has some “stuff” along with it that actually pays for the use of the photograph. You have to decide if this is a good trade off yourself. Take a look at the example top left of this page to see what you think.

First you get the dashboard where you can search for “creative” or “editorial” pictures. Creative pictures are the “man in suit” variety, while editorial are pictures from the news, like celebrities. It’s the latter that can really hurt the old bank balance and therefore where the main interest lies.

PicApp - the best content for the best publishers

Once you have your results you can take a closer look at the images that came back
PicApp - natalie portman images

Selecting a particular image allows you to embed, in a manner a lot like Flickr or YouTube

PicApp - Image of Cannes: Blindness - Premiere

Verdict

I absolutely would NOT use this service for “creative” images. The prices at istockphoto are so low I would much prefer an image without any cruft around it. The one role I see this playing is in the celebrity field. Searching for “Natalie Portman” on stock sites either comes back with nothing or pricey. Hopefully the in-your-face aspect of the service will be worked on so the frame doesn’t detract so much from the picture, it’s early days and I know they are listening to feedback.

One element that might interest you though is in future publishers will be able to share in the proceeds. As a way to make some side money while adding some colour and interest to our pages, this could be an interesting service to watch.

Google Paranoia and the Tin Foil Hat Club

How many times have you seen on forums

“Don’t use the Google toolbar!”

“I don’t use analytics, I don’t want Google knowing what I am up to”

“Guess I can’t use FeedBurner now”

“There is no way I am getting a Reader account”

… and so on.

What is it with all the Google Paranoia?

These are otherwise sane webmasters not wanting to use services because Google might use their data. What do they think Google is going to do with it?

Now if we are talking about spammers, well they have good reason to not want Google to see their data. One click and their business could be impacted. For the rest of us, surely we want Google to see our stuff?

What is the biggest issue people have with Google? Not giving our sites enough credit. What could help Google see we have quality sites? All that analytics and feed data!

If Google sees that this blog has so many subscribers, so many get the feed via email and so many sites send traffic, that should put us above the spammer with the tricked and mislead traffic, right? We should rank higher than the sites with bought links that never get clicked and the machine-made content that gets no subscribers.

So for me, bring it on! Use everything, I have nothing to hide!

Is there something I am missing?

Top 5 Community Building WordPress Plugins

When we launch a blog, as well as getting people to read what we have to say, we are most of us looking to build a sense of community. While what we say has a big effect, how the blog works can also make a difference. Thankfully WordPress users have a good set of plugins to help:

Make it easier to subscribe or share your blog with Add to Any
This provides dropdowns for social bookmarking sites or feed reading services, making it totally easy for the reader to make a note of your location and keep coming back for more.
Top Commenters plugin and widget will reward your top commenters with a link back. Consider the link a bit of public recognition and a small incentive. Plus, you know how competitive people can be, it’s also kind of a high score table!
Make your comment area friendly with smiling faces - Add Gravatars with this easy plugin. Gravatars are “globally recognised avatars”. Basically anyone can set up a Gravatar picture centrally and any website that supports them will show your face whenever they are available, using your email address as a key. Seeing recognisable faces along with comments really helps build community.
Fire off a thank-you email to new commenters using Comment relish. We all like to feel valued, this email can be a nice touch, and also provides the opportunity to point out your feed or useful introductory content they might have missed.
An essential for creating conversation, bring commenters back with Subscribe to Comments. Just like with popular forum software, this will notify you when someone replies to your message, keeping the conversation flowing.

Have you any suggestions for great community building WordPress plugins? Please share your faves in the comments …

Is Web2.0 Culture Risking Democracy?

Over the weekend I had an opportunity to discuss all things internet with people with varying backgrounds and perspectives. Everyone there was a blogger, but with their own approach and profession, everything from health, business and music to journalism.

A straw poll showed hardly a hand full of people regularly read a newspaper or TV news. Very few read online newspapers routinely, choosing instead to get the information they were interested in from their own sources, such as blogs and Digg.

This is great news for those of us with a vested interest in social media, but what are the negative side effects?

We are increasingly in a self-service and self serving culture. I want, I need, is the order of the day. We don’t want to be told, just consume on our own terms.

Traditionally we have been told what was the news of the day. Told what is important via headlines and front page stories. Journalism was an important check against our elected leaders straying from the path. If we in the mainstream are all tracking the latest Britney/Hilton/Miley Cyrus story and overlooking anything dull or downer like politics, could democracy suffer?

There will always be individuals who hold our politicians accountable, but who will speak for and defend them? As one person pointed out, we say we dislike lawyers and journalists, but when things go bad these are the people we often need most.

You could say Digg and such like are the new newspapers, but as someone who works in social media I know how easy these things can be gamed to promote or bury a story. Also there are only so many times these sites can cry wolf before we ignore those too. We need the journalistic rigor and fact checking (even if this has been failing lately).

What do you think? Am I being overly pessimistic? How will journalism evolve to fit into a web2.0 world?

Imagining the Ultimate Computer for Travellers

I have mentioned my interest in the Asus Eepc before. It seems it is almost the perfect machine for traveling, but not quite.

My current trip to the USA has made me think about the topic again. It seems all the needs are addressed in different devices, why isn’t there one machine that does it all?

What do I need for travel?

3G for decent internet away from wifi
wifi for high speed internet
at least 1024 pixels wide screen with legible text
Good application support including Firefox or as capable browser
Decent keyboard and mouse action
Enough storage for local document download and editing

Other requirements exist but could probably live without them.

Blackberries are all the rage, often have qwerty keyboards, but software support isn’t quite what you could get with a real desktop operating system.

The iPhone is almost there, but no 3g (yet) and I have doubts that you could do real work on the small screen, even with the funky interface. Apples lock down on apps is a problem too. It seems you still can’t edit documents locally.

Nokias little tablet seemed promising, with linux and a nice wide screen, but was restricted to Wifi and fiddly to operate.

Gadgetry

My old HTC based PDA was almost there but it also had a tiny screen, and crashed a lot due to running pocket pc operating system. The little keyboard was surprisingly good for typing with though once you got used to it, and it could run Skype for both voice chat and text.

Asus seems have the best solution. They have even announced a new model to their tiny notebook with 1024x wide screen. Paired with a bluetooth 3g phone (ok, cheating a little), is this the ultimate traveling machine? Seems to tick all the appropriate boxes.

PicApp - Free Professional Stock Images?

Verdict

Google Paranoia and the Tin Foil Hat Club

Top 5 Community Building WordPress Plugins

Is Web2.0 Culture Risking Democracy?

Imagining the Ultimate Computer for Travellers

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