 
Categories, Categories, CategoriesBy Keith Tuomi on 6/29/2009 3:17 PMCategories: A big pain in the butt or.. an easy way to increase image searchability.
Mechanical Turk seems to us to be the answer: photographers should not be forced to into 'monkey work', i.e. a decision that a worker of average skill levels could not do independently.
At Zymm we currently torture our reviewers with the task of categorization if members choose not to apply the categories themselves - however as a business-value item, the rare case that an informed categorization can lead to a sale compared to an uninformed categorization, weighs in the direction of 'semi-skilled' categorization by an independent workforce. In plain English; economies of scale dictate that a 'pretty good' categorization will outweigh the uncommon cases where a content creator can offer a more intelligent category than the average joe could.
If, for example the photographer knows the image depicts a Greek church and put's in the category 'Travel > Greece', VS an unknowing reviewer simply classifying it as 'Architecture > Religious', it can create more sales potential. Yes they probably already have the Greek-related keywords with the image, but the web is indexed and searched in a top-down manner (HTML hierarchy), not a metadata-up manner (keywords and other random tidbits). Odds are that a properly categorized, properly keyworded image will come out on top of an image that is simply properly keyworded.
In the long run though, it's been our experience that without a controlled vocabulary for categories which is open source and common between agencies and software, everyone will come out better off with 'pretty good' categorization instead of perfect categorization. This means the job can be outsourced as an independent task at places like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Each categorization decision is run through 2 or 3 anonymous workers across the net (more than one for comparative quality control), then passively quality controlled under the eyes of the image reviewers - while the reviewer may often be distracted looking for noise or copyright issues, they will still almost always catch a picture of a dog categorized as 'Holidays > Christmas and have the option to correct gross miscategorizations'.
What's your say on this?
1. Staff-applied categories, employ professional image reviewers to apply categories, at high cost but with 'pretty good' quality - still going to miss out on some info that only the photographer would know once in a while
2. Use a generalized, crowd-sourced service like Mechanical Turk to produce 'OK' quality categorizations at low cost - still going to miss out on some info that only the photographer would know once in a while
3. Require the image creator to categorize - 'perfect' quality, but still need to be checked by reviewer due to human error factor. Annoys and otherwise distracts content creators from doing their main task which is making content, not talking about it
4. Eliminate categories altogether, and pray that in this age of data overload, that somehow reducing the amount of data pointing to content can by a miracle increase it's marketability
So come on, we upgraded the blog to add comments (yes this was 'cool' in 2002, we know), let's hear your opinion.
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10 Beta tester slots - Google Analytics on your image pagesBy Keith Tuomi on 6/16/2009 1:26 PMFollowing a closed testing phase with some invited members, we'd like to now extend our evaluation of Google Analytics integration to 10 more Zymmetrical members.
What it's for:
- we add your custom javascript for your own personal Google Analytics account to each of your image detail pages
- you get complete, near-realtime statistics, including visitor locations, referring sites, bounce rates, etc. - everything available from Analytics
The requirements:
- you are a Zymmetrical member for longer than 3 months, with more than 50 files in the system
- email me at keith (at) zymmetrical.com to receive a non-disclosure agreement which you must fax or scan-email back to us
- sign up for a Google Analytics account as instructed on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYLyrOZSPGg. For the sitename choose www.zymmetrical.com (we have 7 more mirrors like Zymmetrical.de but this is just the test so we start small)
- copy the javascript they generate for you, and send to me
Thank you to the initial testers - while it's definitely a 'firehose' of data instead of nice, gentle sips, the good news is that it seems to be working out in privacy and performance respects, which were the two main initial concerns.
So, let's put the 'view counters' to bed, it's time to see if the industry is ready for -complete- stats!
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New Blog FormatBy Keith Tuomi on 6/13/2009 8:27 AMWe've updated this page to include comments, trackbacks, gravatar's and more.
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 Zymmetricals Blog (Archive) 4/10/2009: Stock on a Hot Tin Roof | (Published by Keith Tuomi) | A post on the Microstockgroup got my gears turning about standards and rules when it comes to stock. The key quote I took away "I want to run my own restaurant, but no one will come in unless they know it's approved by the health inspector." i.e., there should be some kind of established standards in stock the way modern cities apply health code standards to restaurants.
I think the best Thai food I ever had was found after walking around Bangkok randomly, it was from an establishment built on an empty lot with an assemblage of random junk and some corrugated sheet metal as a 'roof'. When they laughed at me like an executioner being told to make it "very quick", for asking for it "very spicy", I knew I was on the right track.
Would it pass a health inspectors check? Not a chance, without greased palms.. but it remains in my memory filed top under 'Thai food'.
Now, does this analogy contradict Zymmetrical's review agenda - sure. We are going for, to the best of our abilities, an efficient, sanitized norm. A seal of quality that reassures clients that every effort has been made to deliver a proper experience. The thing is is that sometimes you can find gold in unexpected places. The "long tail" is just as effective in stock photography as it is in general search engines for a phrase like "Madison Wisconsin Real Estate Broker" - for relatively little effort invested in promoting that specific search concept, you can reap a potentially large reward. Sometimes location is everything and relativistic standards are secondary.
It's a big problem that the Phd's at Google still struggle with daily: what content gets to the coveted first page positions and what remains as just an afterthought 9 pages later. If Twitter was judged at face value simply by how much money it generated for Google historically, it would be nowhere right now as it simply hasn't been a monetary concept (until recently). A -TREND- is a persistent anomaly and while it is useful to monitor trends, no one probably would have predicted 9 years ago before the advent of the blog, that a website that lets you type only 160 characters at once would become something like the next advancement after blogs.
For all the doubts and grey area that photography and illustration reviews can generate when performed by humans, we still come out on the winning side relying on our Review staff's wit and know-how, due to the fact that there is no possible exact defined set of rules - the odds of creating a search engine (content selector) that delivers a "perfect" result every time are the exact odds that humans will always make the same choices in the same circumstances, over and over: extremely low. Buyers, just like sellers, take chances on brands, concepts, and even technical details ("hey, I can justify my time cloning out the unneeded parts of this photo because it's unique").
Now you've gotten this far in my ramblings, what is the payoff? In the very near future we will be launching ZyNet 1.0 to overthrow the humans and robotize creative imagery to absolute efficiency. Wait, no. Second try: in the very near future we will have an enormously useful tool to enable us to make the hard choices in quality vs quantity more efficiently. Will we achieve Stock Singularity? Not likely, as the science of capturing images of culture will always be more of an art. Will we be able to make the hard choices in a more fair and rewarding manner, definitely. Stay tuned.
| | 3/25/2009: I, Creator – a personal journey | (Published by Keith Tuomi) |  Passion in Art combines with Inspirational Guidance in “I, Creator – a personal journey”
Photographer/Writer (and Zymmetrical contributing Artist) Robert Gebbie uses emotionally charged self-portraits to illustrate his words of hope and encouragement. Learning to cope and deal with depression is a difficult road to travel. In this book, Robert bares his soul, and asks you to do the same. To look into yourself, to see your commitment to your spirit, and to follow it.
I, Creator – a personal journey is available through Blurb.com. The bookstore is located at
http://www.blurb.com/user/RGebbiePhoto
The book is available in paperback (ISBN 978-0-9824214-1-3) for $24.95 as well as hardcover with a dust jacket (ISBN 978-0-9824214-0-6) for $34.95.
| | 3/13/2009: Crosstown Traffic: transportation theory & image search | | (Published by Keith Tuomi) |  Mathematician Dieter Braess of the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, is a pioneer of a unique theory in network design: it's one that says when all the moving things on that network logically look for the most efficient route possible, adding more network capacity can actually have the paradox effect of reducing the overall network efficiency.
What this means in cases of complex transportation issues like solving Manhattan's traffic problems, is that in some cases actually removing routes can improve efficiency in getting people from point A to point B. A successful instance of this took place recently in Seoul, Korea recently, when city planners removed a six-lane highway and replaced it with an 8KM long park. The paradoxical result: the city's traffic flow improved greatly.
In the case of image search, we are presenting a website to clients who need to navigate based on a variety of semantic cues, such as thumbnail images, keywords, categories, and the web pages themselves. Everyone is trying to get to their destination in as short a route as possible, and will naturally congregate on the main thoroughfares of the site:
Homepage > Left at Keyword Search > Right at Image A > Right at Image B > Left at Image C > Straight to Shopping Cart >Straight to Download
In it's current form, Zymmetrical's 'streets' could be described as a relatively barren, compared to many of the common signals present on stock agencies: we have no view counters, download counters, prices, artist ranking, file ranking, and other such minutiae of info presented readily to the visitor. It's a big pile of info for the client (driver) to absorb as they make their merry way around the site (city), but the traditional school of thought has been 'the more info and pages the better, the clients can sort it out based on their tastes'.
Studies in Northern Europe, where shared streets are very common, indicate improved traffic flow and safety when traffc lights, street markings, and divisions between streets, bicycle ways, and sidewalks are actually reduced. Removing these indicators and conceptual divisions, has the strange effect of actually increasing the traffic efficiency and reduces problems. People are forced to slow down and actually look at whats going on - eye contact with that nervous old lady at the crosswalk suddenly comes naturally, instinctively.
Of course, in a website context, one visitors path to getting what they came for will not be really relevant to others using the system at the same time - it's a lonely route which is thankfully free of honking and fender-benders. That being said it's still a very important thing for our own community here at Zymmetrical that we deliver a user experience that is a bit different than normal. We don't want a 'traffic calmed' suburban neighbourhood of blind, slow sameness, but we definitely want the creatives who source content from us to feel able to slow down and absorb the content the artist's present, without the usual indicators, signs and warnings that may be present in a typical 'stock website'.
'This file has been downloaded 4433 times - Dead End!!' - well, it may not be a dead-end if you are making a brochure to promote a local seniors center, if the tree has fallen in the woods they will not hear it because the 4433 times the file has been purchased has no bearing whatsoever on a self-contained consumer group. Presenting data like that to a potential client is like throwing up more traffic lights - subjective limitation info that can have the paradoxical effect of making a clients route to their creative destination just that much more complex.
A stock agency can be paralleled to a cities transportation infrastructure in many ways: a big variety of visitors with a lot of goals, a lot of stuff to see and do, and a limited amount of real estate for everyone to get around accomplishing their goals in. Our number one goal at Zymmetrical is to provide a clean and fast little community for clients to get to their destination - today's project.
If you have a new idea as to how we can improve the daily commute, just drop it in our Idea Exchange. Other members can vote and comment on your suggestions, and we definitely take notice.
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| | 2/23/2009: Summing Up | (Published by Keith Tuomi) |  | | 1/27/2009: The Price is Right | | (Published by Keith Tuomi) | 
There's been a lot of talk recently in stock circles about changes in the realm of 'microstock' and 'midstock', that is, selling photos at lower pricepoints than traditional RF. The largest successes in the industry have thus far been in the rock-bottom fix-priced marketplaces.
Now with economic and long-term earnings prospects turning grim for many of these marketplaces, such agencies are slowly but surely raising their prices in order to combat a (partially) self-made ecosystem composed of quicksand: earnings are up across many agencies however indicators are that many are gnawing on their own arms for nutrition at this point.
In the recent question/answer piece on Lee Torren's blog, Selling Stock Photos at Different Prices, he asks industry pros from across the spectrum of interests their thoughts on how the evolving resurgence of a fair stock marketplace should play out. Tellingly, the most resistant to the concept of an open-market system are the ones representing businesses that have the most to lose by the notion of valuing art individually instead of at a fixed price. That is, the cost of switching their business practices would ruin the business before they could achieve success in the open market, would be easier to start with a new brand altogether.
Our own CKO Paul Melcher of course pitched in with Zymmetrical's policy: we let the Artist valuate themselves and their content.
Message forum chatter has picked up on the topic, with photographers discussing open-market pricing. A key question on peoples minds: "Why should a buyer pay a 100% premium on a photo".. that is, the analogy of "Department Store A sells a chair for $7.95 and Department Store B (competitor) sells a the same chair for $14.95, but Department Store C cannot/should not sell the chair for $149.50 because it's not ethical".
Now 'Ethics and Capitalism' is probably a debate best left for the lecture hall, but let's put it this way: a customer (unless he is perhaps a movie producer making a piece on the unbearable lightness of sitting), will not buy a $7.95 chair and use it as the central prop in a production he earns $2000 from, unlike a buyer for a mid-size agency making a print ad using a stock photo. "But what about mom and pop designers who don't earn so much on projects? Shouldn't they be entitled to low prices?" comes the defense.
The answer is yes they should however the market must be open for Artists to be able to compete for each clients budget. It is hard not to draw parallels of the fixed "$1 photo", "10 photos a day sub" etc. pricing systems to concepts such as Anarcho-communism. Sound outrageous? Decide for yourself:
"The abolition of wage labor is central to anarchist communism. With distribution of wealth being based on self-determined needs, people would be free to engage in whatever activities they found most fulfilling and would no longer have to engage in work for which they have neither the temperament nor the aptitude. Anarchist communists argue that there is no valid way of measuring the value of any one person's economic contributions because all wealth is a collective product of current and preceding generations.
For instance, one could not measure the value of a factory worker's daily production without taking into account how transportation, food, water, shelter, relaxation, machine efficiency, emotional mood etc. contributed to their production. To truly give numerical economic value to anything, an overwhelming amount of externalities and contributing factors would need to be taken into account – especially current or past labor contributing to the ability to utilize future labor."
- Wikipedia
The advantage of commerce on the Internet is that we do have the tools to quickly and effectively valuate the performance and value of digital content sold, due to the speed at which things unfold, the broadness of the customer base and the insight web analytics tools give us.
So, while the (great) discussions carry on as they always do in this creative and always-interesting business, i'd like to carry on with the job at hand, and offer some great advice to people selling through our marketplace who may be wondering 'ok, an open market, now how do I know how to price my content?'. I found the following extremely valuable PDF document from the Marketing & Sales think tank Raintoday, entitled " The One Piece of Advice You Need to Get the Fees You Deserve".
Download PDF
Table of Contents
1. Convince the Buyer that Value‐Based Fees Are Best, By Alan Weiss
3. Price with Confidence! Follow These 10 Steps to Stop Leaving Money on the
Table, By Mark Burton
6. A Magic Bullet? No, a Process, By Bruce W. Marcus
9. The Best Kept Secret of the Selling World, By Jeff Thull
12. If You Don’t Discuss Value, Expect to Discuss Hours,
By Ronald J. Baker
15. Take Courage: Demand Full Price (And Seven Steps to Get You There),
By John Doehring
18. Creating Value During the Sales Process, By Tom Snyder
21. Build the Relationship One Day at a Time, By Ron Worth
24. Think of Services in Terms of Value—Not Rates,
By Gerry Riskin
28. Discounting Doesn’t Work, By Jeanne Urich
32. Over‐Serve Your Best Clients, By Neil Fauerbach
34. Maximize the Value of Work to Your Clients and Your Firm,
By Andrew Sobel
So.. put on a pot of coffee and spend some time with this one, because it's a keeper. It's focused mostly on pricing professional services, however I find it very relevant to the new (old) question of 'how much are my photos worth'.
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