I decided I’d try this colour scheme from nature business, and because I’m lazy I took a picture with my phone without even getting up from my chair. Here’s what I came up with:
colour scheme from photo of my street
I haven’t tried it in a website yet but I think it might look alright, I’m going to try this next time I’m stuck.
It’s been two and a half years since Nicholas Carr wrote:
Web 2.0, by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.
He still has a point — it’s true that MySpace, Facebook, Youtube and others convert the free labour of their users into cash, by aggregating it on a huge scale and creating value in the form of an audience they can sell to advertisers. In the way that they’re selling an audience to advertisers they are analogous to conventional TV, radio and newspapers, who aggregate news and content to gather an audience whose consumption of the content is paid for, or at least subsidised, by advertising.
Carr argues that the “disturbing” difference is that the Web 2.0 companies are exploiting the free labour of their users’ contributions to an “attention economy” by converting it to their cash economy; i.e. sharecropping — the users are labouring to create value that somebody else controls. I agree that this seems disturbing.
But people are now using these websites to gain their own audience, and this gives them leverage. If you have a large enough audience, e.g. Youtube subscribers, you then have the capacity to start converting your contributions to cash for yourself.
An example I’ve noticed recently is Philip DeFranco aka sxephil, who has gathered an audience of 379,621 subscribers at the time of writing, and 14,279,986 video views since September 2006.
Phil has just recently begun a daily VLog in addition to his normal show in which he has promised to do a video per day for a year. It would appear that he’s making some cash – in his video from 26th April he gratuitously discusses how he loves shaving with his Gillette razor and how superior it is to an electric razor, did he mention that it’s Gillette?
And in the newest episode, Phil goes to New York City to meet his ‘friend’ Katie, who just happens to be the star of an impending Youtube show called Green Eyed World. In Phil’s video they frolick around in a park being best buddies and filming each other with cameras and some other stuff. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but the show looks very produced, with all its graphics and Sprite as its sponsor and FullSIX, an enormous marketing company on board.
To me, this is a demonstration of how it’s possible to use the social media sites to put in time and effort to gain currency in the attention economy, and when you have enough, you can cash in, with sponsors and by sharing your audience with others who are willing to pay.
In effect, the barrier to entry for building an audience is lower than ever — distribution costs are zero and your only production costs are what it takes to film, edit and upload a video to Youtube. It’s sharecropping, but you can make some real money!
Today somebody sent me a link to MIS Australia’s article about some ridiculous filters the ever-paternalistic Australian government is trying to foist on the Australian public for our own protection. Like, thanks you guys.
Anyway I got feisty when I realised that you can’t cut and paste from the Australian Financial Review’s MISAustralia website. As soon as you highlight text on the site, it becomes all garbled. My first, knee-jerk reaction when somebody does something on their website to make it less useful for users (like disabling right-click) is along the lines of “Errr you MORONS! WHY would you BOTHER DOING THIS?” Which is not exactly constructive criticism, but I really can’t see how doing this kind of dumb stuff on your website is a good idea.
If you don’t want your content on the web, don’t publish it there!
I can somewhat understand the mindset of fear at work here. Site owners feel that their content is sitting out there on the web ready to be copied and exploited by anyone. But here are a bunch of reasons why it’s dumb to use lame “DRM” or “copy protection” methods on your website:
You’re making it HARDER for people to share your stuff with their friends
In my case with this article, a guy at work tried to send me the link and a relevant quote from the article — but couldn’t! He could only send me the link. If a busy person can’t just quickly cut and paste the written equivalent of a soundbite to somebody else, they might not bother at all — it’s annoying and confusing. Not only that, but I might not visit your site because it’s just a boring link – there’s no snippet to pique my interest. This means less traffic for your website.
Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s HARDER TO FIND
Having garbled content is bad for search engine rankings. Don’t believe me? Try this search — it’s searching for the phrase “opponents of isp-level filtering” on Google — but restricted to ONLY on the MIS Australia website. Whaddya know, it returns ZERO results! That’s because the “protected” content makes NO SENSE to search engines. Not being searchable means missing out on A LOT of potential search traffic.
Your site will be LESS POPULAR because it’s not SHARING INFORMATION – what the web is built on
The most successful websites actively share their content to attract more users/readers using something called RSS. What RSS does is lets you share your content so freely that computers can find new stuff on your site and do the job of spreading it around for you! The only way people are going to know that your site has great content is by showing it to them. Hiding your content away is going to help nobody — not readers, because they can’t find you, and not you, because you’ll have no readers.
I can appreciate that people may be fearful about their content being stolen by web scraping. But this is actually not that big of a problem. Google knows how to deal with web scraping and has methods of determining who should be rewarded as the original publisher of content. Some kid stealing your articles and posting them on his own site isn’t going to take away all of your traffic!
You’re making your website WORSE TO USE.
So many sites that prevent me from right-clicking an image make me angry, because usually I’m just trying to see a higher-resolution version of the picture that they’ve scaled down to fit their page using HTML, but the pic is really a big, colourful picture with lots of detail that I’m missing out on. That sucks. Or maybe I want to send the picture to a friend, saying “Hey, look at this great site, they have heaps more cool pics like this one!” — just saying “hey check out this site they have cool pics” is way less powerful.
And that’s just disabling right-click. MIS Australia’s effort actually makes the site look TERRIBLE -- they have to use a fixed width font because their lame content “DRM” just uses two layers of content, one beneath the other! If you used a variable-width font the text on the two layers would never line up, and you would just get a jumble of letters. So that’s why MIS Australia’s articles look like they were typed out in the 1940s, even on a beautiful screen with font smoothing.
Speaking of a jumble of letters, that’s also what any visually-impaired person’s screen reader is going to see when it tries to read out the page. Way to discriminate against the disabled, yeah!
Your lame system can be easily circumvented ANYWAY – so why bother?
Especially the sites that deny the ability to right-click. There’s so many ways around this that it’s just pointless and makes your site annoying. If you really don’t want people to steal your images, use low-resolution pics with a watermark, because your right-click prevention just won’t work. If you really don’t want people to steal your website code, the best you can do is to obfuscate it — or don’t publish it at all! Web programmers are crafty — and often still in high-school, so they have lots of time to work around your tricks!
In the case of the MIS Australia website, to get the text of any of their articles is as easy as using /g, %27\n\n%27).replace(/< [^>]*>/g,%27%27)); })();”>this bookmarklet – roughly 450 bytes of Javascript code. Now you can decipher any article on the site and paste it all over your own website. Prepare for the cash to roll in!
Now read an article on MISAustralia.com and if you like it, click your bookmark/favorite you have just added.
Presto! The article contents will be pasted into the comments box at the bottom of the page for you to cut and paste at your leisure.
I’ll say it again. If you’re going to go to the trouble of putting your content on the web, why hamstring your efforts? Put it out there and SHARE IT, and more importantly, LET OTHER PEOPLE SHARE IT — that’s what your website is for, and that’s how you get popular!
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