Closer To The Ideal

A very interesting conversation about the failures of crowd-sourcing (they are discussing the way images from the Library Of Congress (LOC) were tagged by users of Flickr):

This blog post caught my eye (hattip to george!):
“Lick This”: LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing

The author argues that finding good content in the user-generated comments, tags, and notes is like finding a needle in a haystack. Using an LOC photo, the author explains,

There are 20-30 notes on the photograph and not one contains useful historical information to give context or help us understand the photograph. Most are throw-away jokes or comments, “I love this fabric!” and “Lick this” (referring to the woman’s forehead!). Most of the rest of the notes refer to the woman’s appearance or the composition of the picture. Almost useful is a little nested debate about the authenticity of the photograph–how staged was it?–but the discussion is hard to floow, involving hovering the mouse over each box to see the comment.

The author, Larry Cebula. a Public Historian at Eastern Washington University and Assistant Digital Archivist at the Washington State Digital Archives, argues,

The notes are mostly smart-ass remarks, the comments are empty, the tags are idiosyncratic. The frustrating thing is that there really is some crowdsourced gold withing the flood of junk, such as the transcriptions of hand-lettered signs in the windows of the Brockton Enterprise newspaper office in this photo.

There follows a good discussion in the comments, so go check it out if this subject interests you.

I looked on the comments on some of the images, and I agree that there is a lot of waste. Some photos have 20 or more people who simply posted (on the photo itself) “Cool pix!”

For my part, I am a big believer in the potential of crowd sourcing, but I don’t see many sites capturing that potential. I think crowd sourcing works best when the crowd can be offered some kind of incentive, perhaps with a raffle, or a prize, or something free, or an outright offer of money. Some kind of incentive would, I think, raise the average quality of the responses.

Darren Hoyt and his wife discovered a remarkable scene one day of a turtle, a frog and a spider. They took a photo of the scene, which became popular. And then, sad to say, some newspapers began stealing the photo without attribution:

Apparently, she first discovered the photo and backstory in OK! Magazine, one of England’s sleazier tabloids. I hadn’t given permission to any magazine, so I started Googling around.

Turns out another British publication, the Daily Telegraph, had also published the photo, initially crediting it to WENN (World Entertainment News Network). WENN is largely known for supplying paparazzi/celebrity photos to the entertainment media.

In fact someone from WENN had contacted me months before, but I’d refused to provide a hi-res photo unless I was told what in what context it would be used. I never got a response, but the photo was taken from Flickr anyway.

The lady at WENN seemed a little startled that I’d called their London office directly. She agreed to remove the photo from their database, but offered little in the way of an explanation, apology, or disclosure about how much money was exchanged for the photo. Since then I’ve been told the photo had been scooped up and sold by mistake, and would be removed from WENN’s database. Mistake or no, I suspect this isn’t uncommon at all.

My dad had a popular lecture that he used to give to amateur photo clubs about the value of the occasional great photo. During his 57 year career, he took 700,000 shots, of which he would immediately discard 90%. He was left with about 70,000 high quality shots that got picked up by stock agencies and other organizations that agreed to represent his work. Of these photos, about 80% never made a single sale. Only 5% had multiple sales. The best 2% (of the 10% he did not discard) accounted for more than half his income.

When I was a child, I heard story after story about the surprise best sellers. One morning in 1970 he walked out the front door with a camera in his hand and, seeing a butterfly on a flower in the front yard, took a picture of it. He had taken dozens of other butterfly photos, but for some reason that one went on to make $17,000 over the next 15 years (triple the figure to adjust for inflation).

One 4th of July in the early 1980s he took some night shots of the fireworks, which he then comped together in his darkroom using traditional photo overlay techniques (this is more than 10 years before Photoshop). Though he had dozens of other fireworks shots (which didn’t sell), this one went on to make $36,000 over the course of many years.

His biggest surprise was when he went to Morocco as part of a tour for other professional photographers. For two weeks they were taken around in a bus to famous spots. He recalls one time they all got out at a famous mosque and stood their photographing its golden dome. He looked to his left and to his right and saw 15 other professional photographers clicking away. He thought to himself, “I’ll never make any money on these shots. We are all pros and we are all taking the same shot.” But the next day they were out in the desert, photographing a ruined, abandoned fort. There were no other human beings in sight, only the bus and the bus driver and the photographers. But then my dad looked off to his right and in the distance, saw a man, dressed all in white, come over a sand dune. The scene reminded my dad of one of his favorite novels, The Martian Chronicles, a scene of infinite desert, and there in the middle, the impossibly lonely figure of a single human being walk across a vast expanse of pure sand. So my dad took that shot, which the other photographers did not think to take, and that became his best selling photo of Africa. Several encyclopedias and travel guides bought the rights to it.

In the late 90s the arrival of Photoshop and CDs full of royalty free images changed the industry, and it became harder to make a living, but my dad found that the top 1% (of that 10% he had not discarded) of his photos continued to generate some good sales.

He worried a great deal about amateur photographers who were giving away the rights to their photos without realizing the value in the occasional photo. When Flickr emerged, he had some deep reservations about their too casual promotion of the most open Creative Commons licenses. When the story broke about Virgin Mobile using a photo of a girl which the novice photographer had marked for “commercial use” my dad wrote several long articles for local amateurs about the dangers of offering photos for commercial use without securing a release from humans that appear in the photos. It was clear, in the Flickr case, that the photographer hadn’t really understood what the words “commercial use” meant. My dad developed a lecture on this subject and was invited to speak at over a 100 amateur camera clubs in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.

All of this is to say, when we take photos, we should be aggressive in defending their value. If we wish to share them with the public, we should all do so having educated ourselves about what rights we are sharing, and what value we are letting go of. Every once in a long while, people take photos that are worth a great deal, and even when they are not interested in making money off that photo, it doesn’t seem fair for others to do so without the permission of the photographer.

This is an important story to read, for anyone who uses an online service. Steve Portigal had thousands of images, tags, and comments on his Flickr account, and they all got erased when his account was hacked.

That means that my 5000 photos are gone. Those I can upload. But all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience). All the photos that were marked by others are gone. All the groups which I participated in by contributing illustrative images are gone. All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others in is gone.

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

But the whole social media movement that we can’t ever stop hearing about is asking us to contribute content to their websites; we’re building the value for them. YouTube wouldn’t sell for $1.65 billion without our videos. Flickr has our photos. LiveJournal has our stories and pictures.

But is it ours? Do we know who owns it? If the data is on our hard drive, we know where it is, we may even take the trouble to back it up (I’ve got an external backup at work, at home, and online). But if the data is on someone else’s site, how can I keep a copy of it? It may be against the site rules for you to do that, in fact, as the high profile Scoble story demonstrated.