Frogs and Ravens

Donate to the Desert - Buy Some Art!

If you're here from Chris Clarke's Carnival of the Arid, you might be interested in a standing arrangement I have at my Zenfolio gallery.  I donate 5% of the purchase price on any image in the Indian Country gallery to the Desert Protective Council. 

So if you would like a fine art photograph for yourself or for a friend, and would like to help our deserts out at the same time, please stop by and take a look.  Comments are welcome.

Moving Shop

As of this month, my shop migration from Etsy to ArtFire is underway.  Please click on either of the links above to see my current offerings, which include hand-cut photo cards and fine art photographic prints.

More Photographs Added to the Gallery

This week I added more photographs to my gallery at Zenfolio, with more planned for this week.  Please stop by and take a look - and feel free to comment on them while you are there.

Facebook Blinked

So last night I tried logging into Facebook and got a "down for site maintenance" notice.  A half hour later, the Terms of Service had been reverted back to the September 23rd version.  Basically, Facebook blinked.  It has also bought itself some breathing room while it tries to figure out how to cover its butt without outraging its customers.

I'm glad of the retraction, but Facebook needs to do a lot more to restore my trust at this point.

There are two issues that are not being addressed in the various communications Schmidt and Zuckerberg have made in the immediate aftermath, and they are exactly the ones that disturbed me the most about the whole thing.

The Great Facebook Rights Grab of 2009

Like increasing numbers of people in this day and age, I have an account on Facebook.  I also have accounts at LibraryThing, Zenfolio, Redbubble, Etsy, Artfire, Twitter, MySpace, Ravelry and probably a few I've forgotten.  I also have at least 6 email accounts, a web page, and three online stores.  Then there's the two blogs I have here on Typepad.  If I had a video camera, I'd probably be adding to YouTube or Vimeo.

In short, I'm a wired woman, very much enmeshed in what the cognescenti like to call "Web 2.0."

As a result of this, and of my years blogging, I've become very much interested in the ways that various online service providers communicate with their clients and the sorts of problems that ensue when they fail to navigate this new environment successfully.  (Etsy offers an often astonishing example of what happen when communication breaks down.  See Unofficial Etsy News and EtsyBitch for discussions of this and links.)

I've also become increasingly protective of my content; the days when I believed wholeheartedly in the idea that all knowledge should be free has been replaced by the conviction that while knowledge should be spread widely and generously, the people who make the effort to produce it deserve recompense for their efforts.  That is, the trade-off of my generosity in this regard is me making enough to eat and pay rent and insurance.  I'm willing to share low-res images with the world at large, here and on my other blog and on flickr, but it's an act of temporary generosity on my part, not an abandonment of my interest in the content.  If I decide to pull those images, both TypePad and Flickr (and its parent company, Yahoo), agree, as per their Terms of Service, that any license I may have granted them in order to use their sites ends.  The licenses they require are also reasonable, related primarily to me giving them permission to show that content to people who visit my sites. 

It used to be that this was the case for Facebook as well.  Their TOS was a bit more demanding - they wanted a much more extensive license to use our stuff - but, like most such network providers out there, they included a clause that basically said, if you take your stuff off the site, or cancel your account, our right to use it ends. 

They have changed that.