Fractallicious Reborn

Well, I finally did it! I'm out of the stock sites. As some of you know, I have been experimenting with selling my artwork online through half a dozen stock photography and microstock sites for a couple of years. While they were generating income, the experience has never been ideal. Uploading was time-consuming, especially with so many sites. It was frustrating to have certain sites reject an image for utterly arbitrary reasons, while others accepted the very same image. And I certainly didn't enjoy giving away 50% of my income to these companies for the privilege of hosting my art. I felt none did a good job of marketing or promoting my work.

I had already had my own site, Fractallicious, up and running for about a year, functioning primarily as a signpost to direct interested people to the various stock sites and other places, such as CafePress, where they could buy my fractal art. Fractallicious was successful in that regard, but once potential customers landed on one of the stock sites I had sent them to, I became a tiny fish in a huge ocean of competitors. Income trickled in in dribs and drabs.

So I set out to be my own stock site. Turns out, I sadly under-estimated the challenge involved in turning a static web site into a full-blown ecommerce application. It's been a long tough slog, with numerous technical difficulties, but we're finally there! The company we chose, Volusion.com, provides a turnkey ecommerce platform, allowing you to create an online store with a powerful database back-end, shopping cart, and merchant account services. The Volusion technology is robust, complex, and highly configurable. Because of this very complexity, it's also far from intuitive and comes with a steep learning curve. The company scores an A+ for the superb quality of their 24/7 technical support.

So, starting this week, I have eliminated the middleman! (And, no, this is NOT an April Fool's joke.) I'm partnering with my sister on this endeavour, and we're not only selling gorgeous (if I say so myself) high-quality image downloads, but also certain images printed on a variety of merchandise, CafePress-style. My rainbow designs have been very popular with the gay and lesbian community, and we're starting with three of them printed on 1" buttons, and attractively packaged as a three-pack for gift giving.

Drop by Fractallicious.com, and have a look. If you like what you see, please feel free to spread the word!

Striking Screenwriters Having an Impact

OK, time to remind oneself I support the Hollywood writers' strike. (Grumble.) I do, I really do. (Grumble.) I'm not a huge TV watcher, but I'm really starting to miss this season's hot new drama — and my newest fave — Cane. The show is about the trials and tribulations of a rich and powerful Cuban-American family, and I was hooked from the very first episode. New episodes of Cane have been noticeably absent, along with those of most other intelligent, well-written shows, for several weeks now. In their place: reality shows, tired re-runs, third-rate movies, and other drivel. Surely viewers are revolting. I'm surprised there haven't been riots in the streets.

With two fizzled awards shows and pending Oscar disaster, Hollywood screenwriters are demonstrating the strength inherent in being able to collectively withdraw labour. This dispute is about the same issues that continue to concern Canadian writers. Movies and television make billions of dollars for producers and investors, and secondary digital uses such as DVDs and Internet downloads add to the windfall. Writers want the right to share in the profits generated by material they have created — a not unreasonable position. Industry executives aren't budging and negotations broke down in December. The strike's economic costs, both direct and trickle-down, are skyrocketing daily. With the Oscars pending, pressure is surely mounting for all parties to kickstart the stalled bargaining process. They writers will win this thing. They have to.

Test Your Vocabulary and Help Others Too

Came across a site a couple of days ago that, as a writer and avid Scrabbler, I couldn't resist. FreeRice lets you test your vocab skills and donate food to the hungry at the same time. Each word you get right is worth 20 grains of rice.

You gradually work your way up the levels, with the top score around 50. I hovered between 44 and 47 most of the time, and quit when I hit 48.

Can't believe how many words I've never heard of! Give it a try. Great fun.

The World's Chocolate Shops at Your Fingertips

Here's one for chocophiles everywhere. Get your daily fix of the sweet treat with Chocomap. This new Canadian web site, sponsored by Ecole Chocolat, uses the Google Maps API to find chocolate shops throughout the world. Using the standard Google Maps interface, you can search geographically then zoom in on a location. Read brief descriptions of chocolate destinations or post your own review. There's lots of other useful information too, including recipes, chocolate e-cards, interviews with top chocolatiers, tips on cooking with chocolate, and background information about the origin and cultivation of the plant that gives us this wonderful food.

Already, the site has more than 1,000 listings in over thirty countries. Definitely one for my favourites list.

New Corbis Microstock Debuts

The beta version of SnapVillage — Corbis' long-awaited foray into the microstock arena — debuted a few days ago. I've done quite well online with some of the other microstock sites, so I was curious about how the traditional stock photography giant might approach the business of microstock. They had, after all, been slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the mounting competition coming from this quarter.

So far, I'm colossally unimpressed. I uploaded half a dozen images over a week ago, and as of this writing they still aren't processed. No acknowledgment at all.

Worse, the site times out quickly after the upload completes, so that if you do not immediately enter descriptions and keywords (that's right, the site doesn't support embedded IPTC information), you're bounced out, and you have to RE-LOAD everything all over again.

I was not impressed with the lack of support for IPTC data, which is pretty standard in the industry, as is the ability to upload via FTP. The site is still in beta, so one can only hope these features will be coming shortly. If they don't, SnapVillage will fail to attract professional photographers who have come to rely on such functionality at other microstock sites.

The quality of the existing images is poor, but then — in fairness — I guess Corbis faces a bit of a branding dilemma. They need to somehow differentiate this site from their costly "high-end" site. Unfortunately for them, some of the other microstocks have really raised the bar. Sites like Shutterstock, iStockPhoto, and DreamsTime feature excellent photographers and many professional quality images.

Corbis is late off the mark, and disdain virtually oozes from this site. It's evident in the name they chose — snapvillage — the word "snap" more than a little denigrating in its suggestion of casual snapshots rather than serious photography. It's almost as if they're targetting the Flickr amateur shutterbug crowd. Indeed, some of the images look like they came straight from the worst of Flickr.

All in all a failing score. One would expect more from a company backed by the Corbis brand and bankrolled by Bill Gates.

Google Overhauls Search Results Display

Got an email yesterday from a friend, with a link to an article about recent changes over at Google. Seems the search giant has yet again tweaked its search functionality. Such news always alarms me, as I teach Internet search and this usually means extra work. This time, though, the change is a small one.

According to CBC News, Google is combining its multiple search offerings (web, images, blogs, etc.) into a single "universal search". The change is only evident at Google.com (not the various international flavours of Google) and pretty superficial, from the user's perspective anyway. A few sample images and news search results — if there are any — have been rolled into the web search results list. Google also now offers the ability to narrow by related search.

The various search types (which were displayed immediately above the search field) are now at the top left of your screen. Additional search types are available through a dropdown instead of a link to a separate page and they are reduced in number.

Compare for yourself. Here's Google.com and here's the Canadian variant.

I can't quite see the point of this. But oh well. It's not earth-shattering.

Monetize Your Blog with Job Listings

SimplyHired.com's Job-a-Matic service allows any blog or web site owner to monetize a site with paid job listings. Target by industry and set your own pricing for listings you attract, and the company shares revenues with you 50/50. If your listings are on the skimpy side, Job-a-Matic "backfills" with relevant postings from SimplyHired.com's five million strong database of jobs. Click-throughs are rewarded with a 30/70% revenue split. You can target jobs by keyword or geographically, or both. (One down side — the service is currently limited to the U.S. only.)

Job-a-Matic generates a customizable listings page and lets you create widgets and ads that you can paste into your blog or site, as I have done at left below. The backfilled listings served by Job-a-Matic are attractive and easy to read, with some useful enhancements such as the ability to quickly and easily access geographically relevant salary information. Any listings you attract are added to the database, and promoted through SimplyHired.com's extensive network, which includes MySpace and LinkedIn.

The service debuted in February of this year, and already over 600 blogs have signed on. SimplyHired claims to be the world's largest job search engine and was lauded as one of the 50 Coolest Web Sites by Time magazine.