Freedom of Choice
The Internet is touted as the great equalizer, anyone can compete on an even playing field with the big boys, I call bullshit. The reality is that because anyone can put up a website everyone does which leads to an incredible amount of noise. Even when I am looking for sites or information about a specialized topic my search is generally censored by Google, and those who pay for a high ranking. Companies with good ideas generally sell out to the big boys as soon as they become big enough to be a threat. How can democracy be returned to the Internet, in particular related to photography and videography? Easy, producers of content (that's you and me baby!) need to band together, using the tools that scare "the man" to death, to get noticed. A single photographers website is like a needle in a haystack, even with excellent Internet marketing it is unlikely to be seen by the average surfer. A group of photographers, however, can make a much bigger presence marketing together than they can as individuals. The sum is greater than the parts as they say, and is this case I estimate the sum is an order of magnitude greater than the parts. So how does this group get noticed? By using the Internet oligopoly as it's own marketing tool to capture eyeballs. A perfect example is MySpace, lots of eyeballs are on MySpace and at first it was just teenagers talking to each other. Bands soon realized they could setup a profile to get those eyeballs talking about their music, and even visiting their own website. The same strategy could work for Amazon, EBay, YouTube etc. What about technology? Don't I need a kickass website that will stand out? I say absolutely not. This puts the small guy at a competitive disadvantage compared to the big boys who can support large programming departments to build specialized technology. To compete you need to leverage the powerful open source community that built the Internet from scratch, and continues to offer the best tools for free. Think of it as your own IT department! This is the true Internet where individual consumers and producers are connected to one another using technologies such as RSS feeds, Pod/Vodcasts, BitTorrent distribution and online chat forums. For those interested in videography take a glimpse of the future at http://getdemocracy.com. A revolution is upon us where consumers are becoming producers, and big media is afraid of this. They will try to use their money to kill anything that threatens them. However, the lone website is dead. Drowned in a sea of parked websites with no content, vanity websites with nothing but blather (my website here is a great example) and a search system that is broken. Our creative content combined with the techniques outlined above can offer consumers an alternative to the homogenized, any-town USA, regurgitated content that is so prevelant today. And now, ducks in a pond! Actually these are some HDV tests from yesterday.