Category: Digital Culture

An Image is Worth What Again?

Yeah, it’s a week to jump all over Google, but what the hell.  Following up on yesterday’s post about YouTube’s forceful negotiations with independent musicians, I realize that music and motion pictures get a lot of attention while photography too often gets swept aside.  And not just professional photos, any photos.  Still images, wether professional or amateur, are a critical asset for any website that wants to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and attract viewers.  In fact, major sites like those belonging to legacy publications spend a substantial amount of resources not only licensing high-quality images, but also optimizing those images for search using tags and metadata.  This is because one way in which both users and site owners find one another often begins with a basic image search.   “What does former Poet Laureate Billy Collins look like?” you may ask yourself, and Google image search provides pages of thumbnail photo results.   And until January of 2013, the layout of those pages fostered a fairly high rate of clickthrough to the sites on which the photographs appeared.

But early last year, Google introduced a new interface for images that is admittedly user-friendly, but according to sources like Define Media Group, the new search tool has resulted in dramatic decreases, some nearing 80%, in traffic to source websites.  One of the changes blamed for contributing to this decrease is the fact that the new Google interface displays high resolution images in a slideshow format, which obviates the need for a user to click through to the source site in order to see the better quality image.  Additionally, the new interface no longer loads the source website in the background behind an expanded view of the image.

What this means in simplest terms is that Google is no longer playing the role of a search engine, but is instead leveraging investments made by other entities in order to capture and keep users contained within the Google universe rather than navigate to other sites. In principle, this is exactly the opposite of the kind of ecosystem a Do No Evil search and advertising company should be promoting.  The more one image is linked to an image-intensive website (e.g.one belonging to professional photographer), the more relevant the decrease in traffic becomes.  Add this to the fact that some estimates claim that over 80% of images on the Web are infringing the owner’s copyrights in the first place, and photographs have really become just datagoop that the world’s most pervasive search engine gets to manipulate as it pleases.  A far cry from the deferential, librarian-like mission to “Take the world’s information and organize it.”

In late 2013, Europe’s CEPIC, the Center of the Picture Industry, filed an antitrust complaint alleging Google uses images without rights holders’ consent and is fostering online piracy of images.  The complaint further states that the 2013 redesign of Image Search has exacerbated the problem.  In May of this year, the European News Agency Alliance (EANA) joined the global coalition supporting this complaint.  The reader will note that this is merely one of the many antitrust complaints presently facing or recently settled by the search giant.  I don’t know, maybe there’s a pattern here.

Singaporean Arts with Musician Kevin Lester (Podcast)

We spend a lot of time talking about the pros and cons of technological disruption in the creative industries.  And each of us has our theories and predictions as to what the future might look like for a market like the United States.  And to be honest, the discussions often revolve around how we should or should not be responding to the fact that technological forces have been shrinking the industries we built through the 20th century.  In this context, I think it’s very interesting to watch what emerging artists are doing in countries where there has been no creative industry to date.

My guest in this podcast is Singapore musician Kevin Lester, an award-winning hip hop artist, writer, and producer. Personally, I think Singapore is a fascinating market to watch because artists like Kevin are really the first generation to want to build a homegrown creative industry from the ground up.  This tiny city-state only gained full independence from British colonial rule in 1965, and its robust economy has largely been built on shipping, financial services, and exports of electronics and pharmaceuticals.   Now, it is the children and grandchildren of that first generation of independent Singaporeans who want to make music and filmed entertainment and other artistic works.  And artists like Kevin are determined to see Singapore develop a sustainable industry out of what can presently be called a local scene.

Kevin has played multiple festivals around the world, and he has received numerous honors as an emerging artist.  Just last month, he released his latest EP, Put Your City On, which contains the hit song “Forever,” a piece all about Kevin’s determination as an artist and as an activist for promotion of the arts in Singapore.  After signing with the new Asian-focused label BMBX, founded by Apl.de.ap of the Black Eyed Peas, Kevin Lester rebranded himself as The Lion City Boy in honor of Singapore’s nickname The Lion City.

I spoke to Kevin at his home studio via Skype.

Learn more about The Lion City Boy at his website.

Law Gives Websites Freedom to Exploit

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post regarding privacy, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals laid bare a flaw in the Communications Decency Act 0f 1996, granting websites immunity over liability for content uploaded by individual users. Apparently, it’s a license to exploit people. The case involves former Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and defamatory material uploaded to the gossip site thedirty.com.  Jones claimed mental anguish stemming from posts related to the sexual history of her and her ex-husband, sued owner/publisher of The Dirty, Nik Richie, and was awarded  $3338,000 by a federal court.  The appeals court overturned the ruling on the grounds that Jones should not have been abel to sue Richie in the first place owing to the protections afforded him by the Communications Decency Act.

Perhaps the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled appropriately according to the law, but with regard to the spirit of the law, we’ve lost our goddamn minds, and the law needs revision.  Given the number of news-format sites that crowd-source (i.e. nearly all of them), and the number of sites that trade on salacious garbage (i.e. way too many of them), and the fact that everybody is fair game, it is simply insane to provide blanket immunity to website owners who profit on the misery of others.  But then, Sarah Jones is an attractive cheerleader, so I guess she deserves it, right?

It’s a world gone mad.

See article on the case here.