Thomas Hawk's excellent side-by-side comparison of photo collections

Source: ThomasHawk.com - Getty Images vs Flickr

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Thomas Hawk: "Below are three searches that I selected at random. Las Vegas, candle and clouds. Now click through to the search pages for these terms at Flickr and at Getty Images. Which one is better? Is it clearly better? If you were a marketer would it make a difference to you which one you pulled your images from?

Las Vegas Getty
Las Vegas Flickr

Candle Getty
Candle Flickr

Clouds Getty
Clouds Flickr

Now let's take this a step further and enter into the long tail of stock photography let's do a search for Tujunga (a small town in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up) and Mount Tam (a local mountain in Marin here in the Bay Area).

Tujunga Getty
Tujunga Flickr

Mount Tam Getty
Mount Tam Flickr

Interesting what you get here isn't it? You see with 400 million images in their library Flickr is the better stock agency for long tail stuff for sure. The problem just is that Flickr hasn't figured out how to turn this on yet."

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GYI: The Internet transforming yet another industry

Minus a third (nearly $1 billion) of its market cap in 5 days, Getty Images (GYI) is seeing the tangible effects of ...

1) supply replacement -- vast collections of photos online serve as alternative supply for people searching for photos to use/license.

2) demand displacement -- new use cases such as use of photos on blogs require new licenses such as royalty free or Creative Commons -- the terms of traditional rights managed licenses simply don't work for such use-cases, regardless of the price.

While more and more photos will be licensed and used (e.g. to decorate blog entries etc.) this additional demand will likely be satisfied by photos which are $1 or less, photos which are taken by eye-witnesses and immediately available (e.g. directly uploaded from cameraphones), and photos which are more readily found (e.g. users do image searches online from their favorite search engine).

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Gulf Ethanol Advances Production Plans Based on Texas A&M Sorghum Plant

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gulf Ethanol Corporation, (OTC:GFET), has advanced its plans for an enhanced ethanol production facility along the Texas Gulf coast that could use the new sorghum plant developed by Texas A&M as its primary feed stock, Texas A&M University and Chevron Corp (NYSE CVX) recently announced the major new alternative fuels initiative.

The development of "freakishly tall sorghum plants" was designed as an ideal feedstock for Ethanol production by Texas A&M. "Standing nearly 20 feet tall, these plants are more than twice the height of regular sorghum and yield double the crop per acre. They can survive on little water. They have been bred not to flower, thus trapping more energy within." (Source: Brett Clanton, Houston Chronicle)

"This is a new paradigm for bioenergy production," said Bill McCutchen, deputy associate director at Texas A&M's Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.

The Department of Energy has announced nearly $400 million in funding for the establishment of three bio-energy research centers, "while oil companies including BP (NYSE BP), Exxon Mobil (NYSE XOM), and Chevron (NYSE CVX) have given money to universities for biofuels research."

"Because we see sorghum as the ideal non-food feed stock for ethanol production in Texas, we embrace the Texas A&M initiative as a key step forward in providing economical feed stocks for our Texas ethanol plants," JT Cloud, Gulf Ethanol's President explained, "The long term success of ethanol as an alternative fuel must be based on the development of efficient non-food sources for ethanol production."

Last month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry outlined a new bioenergy strategy that will encourage more research at state universities on noncorn ethanol and other renewables, with an eye toward getting them to market faster. As part of the effort, he pledged $5 million to Texas A&M for research.

About Gulf Ethanol Corporation

Gulf Ethanol is focused on developing ethanol production along the Gulf Coast. Gulf Ethanol is committed to using non-food feed stocks for the production of ethanol rather than corn or sugar cane, which have now been shown to be expensive fuel sources that negatively impact food prices. For more information please visit our homepage at: http://www.gulfethanolcorp.com/gulf_ethanol_investors.htm

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Panasonic's Oxyride vehicle breaks 65mph on AA batteries

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Filed under: Transportation

Sure, watching a wee remote controlled, all electric vehicle hit nearly 200 miles-per-hour is quite impressive, but moving a vehicle large enough to stuff a moderately sized human into with just AA cells is, well, world record worthy. Reportedly, the newly revamped Oxyride managed to maintain an average speed of just over 65mph and hit a top speed of 75.8mph, all while being powered by 192 AA batteries. Unsurprisingly, the promotional stunt rocketed Panasonic into the Guinness Book of World Records for speed attained with a vehicle solely driven by dry-cell AA batteries, but we still wouldn't look at purchasing 192 batteries (each way) as an efficient method of powering your commuter car.

[Via AkihabaraNews]

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Google Maps add YouTube Videos

from CenterNetworks - by Allen Stern

Alright so you read the title and said, "WTF" out loud. Why would anyone want to tie YouTube videos with a Google map? Unlike the absolutely stupid and useless street viewer option, this one makes sense.

Imagine you are planning a trip to Los Angeles and want to see what the clubs are like that Paris Hilton goes to. Now you can. Or if you are heading to Paris, check out which bistro has the best steak before you get there! In all seriousness, I could see this as a huge plus for travelers. But see below for the negative, videos must be geotagged and not everyone will do this.

Check out some additional release information on Mike Abundo's Blog. For the mashup to work effectively, videos must be geotagged when uploaded and then you need to install the mashup. Took four seconds to install.

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