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New Media News Every Morning

USA Today’s Freelance Offer You Can’t Refuse?

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Freelance photogs contracted by USA Today are now getting a day rate of $375. While this represents an increase of $100, the cost to photographers is that USA Today and sister publications, TV stations, and websites can reuse the images ad infinitum, with no reprint fees paid. Other fees were reduced.

This seems like it might become a trend, with print pubs starting to disappear or go completely digital, and online revenues being new to some of them. For photographers, this is a very bad sign. Though with the magazine market decimated after 2001, opportunities for both photographers and writers dwindled. Many editors went back to freelance, so competition increased.

Add to this the fact that large book store chains have been forcing publishers to offer deep discounts (up to 40%) for several years now. Meaning that authors don’t make as much on a book as they did before the really big book chains. It seems that making a living as a writer or photographer, regardless of medium, is getting harder, not easier. A print-based workload that once would be sufficient to live on doesn’t seem to cut when online publications are involved.

Originally posted on April 4, 2007 @ 11:02 pm

Fun Web 2.0 Mashups

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Programmable Web lists some fun new web services mashups: FlickrSpy, JukeboxTube, and Ficlets.

FlickrSpy dynamically displays new photos posted to Flickr as they come in, sort of like a vertical slide show. It’s a fascinating view for those of us visually stimulated. It’d be really nice to have something like this for the “life in pictures” Digg and Twitter mashups that I’ve been fiddling with. (It appears, though, that I may have to write my own code to achieve this.)

Jukeboxtube lets you build a YouTube playlist, though I don’t believe you can embed anything to your own site.

Ficlets is a way to for fiction writers to collaborate online. If you’re not sure what to write about, click on the “inspiration” link, which displays a grid of photos from Flickr. They also display Dictionary.com’s word of the day and random “story starters” and “story enders” text.

Another web service previously covered by Programmable Web is Slideroll, which is a slideshow viewer that you can configure with your own images. Though I’m of the opinion that SplashCast’s presentation viewer beats anything I’ve seen to date. Still, what seems to be missing out there is the ability to take some sort of RSS-based custom image feed and to pipe it into a slideshow viewer. Or say, a combination of a slideshow mixed in with the idea of Ficlets. If such a progrrammatic slideshow service is out there, I haven’t come across it. Anyone?

Originally posted on April 4, 2007 @ 10:30 pm

SplashCasting Or How To Embed Alanis

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[Updated Apr 6th] Video may have killed the radio star, but will SplashCast kill the video star? Or at least broadcast TV? SplashCast – who have Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch as Director of Content – offer a brilliant way to collect a number of visual elements and present them as a slideshow embedded into a blog or MySpace page, or even into widgetized portals such as Pageflakes.

The difference is that each “slide” can be a document or an image you upload, or the video or images from YouTube or Flickr feeds. (You can’t have all simultaneously.) You can also apply background music to your SplashCast, or record voiceovers and webcam video.

While this is great in itself, it’d be nice if I could take an RSS feed and pipe it in. For example, here’s a mashup I’m trying to find a “slideshow” app for. Last month, I talked about a mashup feeding Twitter’s public timeline feed into Yahoo Pipes‘ Content Analysis module, and the results of that through Flickr to produce a sort of “life in pictures” for Twitterers. Now, what I’d like to do is have a mashup tool to take that Yahoo Pipes result and get a SplashCast-like result. That way, you get an automatic slideshow of the “Twitter through Flickr” feed.

The other problem is that you can’t eliminate items from the Flickr or YouTube RSS feed. For example, since Sharon mentioned the Alanis cover of Fergie’s “My Humps”, I created an Alanis SplashCast. [Start the player below, and click on the “Channel Guide” graphic.] But it’s full of multiple submissions of the same video. It’s also full of completely irrelevant video items – at least as far as I’m concerned. So it’d be nice if SplashCast let us remove selective feed items. Not to mention splice feeds. [Note: If you use the “search” feature to grab Flickr or YouTube content, you can pick and choose which items to add. But you cannot change the playlist order unless you do multiple searches on the same terms and pick one item each time, in the desired sequence.]

Still, what this means is that if you’re sick of the music videos on TV, you can create your own YouTube playlist, embed the player on your blog, and not take up a lot of screen real estate. And SplashCast hosts it for you. Brilliant. Bye bye MTV? Well, not yet – not until we have full control of the input RSS feeds in SplashCast, but it could be the next step towards a melding of vlogging and the million channels of TV we’ve been promised for about two decades.

Originally posted on April 3, 2007 @ 11:34 am

Brilliant Print Memes Or 1000 Journals Or Why Print Will Always Be In

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You’ve probably heard the term meme and thought, oh it’s some online gimmick that bloggers use to propagate ideas and promote each other. Well, memes can exist offline as well. Boing Boing mentions the 1000 Journals Project, where someone “propagated” journal-type books so that they’d make their way around the world. People wrote or drew in them and left them where they lay or passed them on to people.

These sorts of experiments always fascinate me. Back in my punk years of my mid- to late-20s in Toronto, I used to keep a stack of journals. One would almost always make its way with me when I went nightclubbing, and friends and acquaintances would add a little bit to the book. In more recent years, I came across a little downtown cafe, The Cornerstone, in the town I currently live in. In one of the windowsills, there’s a stack of unlined journals with some of the most fascinating text and graphics contributed by customers young and old – some regulars.

These types of memes just cannot exist online, and is one of the reasons – besides the tactility of books – why I think that paper will never go out of style. On the other hand, this meme can be facilitated online by making the existence of journals known on a website. So if you want to be part of this journal meme, check out the newer 1001 Journals, which lets you either sign up for a journal or send one out in a controlled fashion.

Originally posted on March 30, 2007 @ 2:31 pm

Fun With Twitter: WordPress Plugins

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Of course, instead of using a Feedburner BuzzBoost mashup of Twitter, you could use Alex King’s WordPress plugin, Twitter Tools. (If I’m not mistaken, Alex King is one of those names you see in the default blogroll when you set up a new WordPress blog. He has a great WordPress Theme Browser that also lets you easily download themes you like.)

His Twitter Tools plugin only works on WP2.1 and up, but it takes recent Twitterings and collects them into a single blog post. This is apparently configurable, as he explains in his Proper behavior for a Twitter archiver WordPress plugin and Twitter tools roadmap posts. (You can see an example at Fun Anymore.)

Once he has all features in place, you be able to configure the plugin to create “daily digest” posts of your Twitterings, thus turning your microblogging back into a sort of regular blogging. One really interesting feature Alex is thinking of implementing is being able to Twitter directly from your blog’s sidebar.

Originally posted on March 30, 2007 @ 8:44 am