Best Practices Not Included

Protecting Community Content

The Flickr community has been on the radar screen as some interesting things have happened over the past week. One of Flickr's most talented photographers, Rebekka Gudleifsdottir, is an art student and single mom living in Iceland. It's hard to find words that fit in describing Rebekka's work. Being a Flickr member, I stumbled across her work more then a year ago and have been following her photostream ever since. The landscapes and self-portraits she produces are moody, dark, eccentric, and nothing short of some of the most amazing photography I've ever seen. Indeed, her pictures keep me coming back to the Flickr community, check out Rebekka's photo stream. Her talent has attracted more than three million views on the photo sharing site. So, why does it seem inevitable that her success has led to some poor behavior on someone else's behalf. Basically what happened is Rebekka found out that a company in England, who will remain nameless for the time being (if you really want to know you can figure it out), was selling copies of the images she uploaded on Flickr, without her permission. To date, they've sold thousands of dollars worth of her images. Rebekka confronted them about it, and the store owners claimed that they'd bought the photo's from someone claiming to be the photographer, they wouldn't reveal this alleged crook's name, and they weren't going to offer her any sort of compensation. Now she doesn't have the means to pursue this matter in court, especially because it's an international incident. So, amidst her frustration, like anyone with a large community would do, she posted about her experience on Flickr. The flickr community responded, her story has been all over the front page of digg, and the particular photograph that was ripped off has had hundreds of thousands of views and supportive comments left. What's also happened is the infringing company has got some nasty messages from Rebekka's supporters. This is were it gets really interesting, the company apparently contacted Flickr and Rebekka's post, along with all the community's comments were without any explanation, deleted. Rebekka posted Flickr's reponse to her, on her blog.

From Flickr:

"Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account."

The Flickr community, like the Digg community a few weeks ago, went into an uproar. It wasn't until Rebekka hinted that she might leave the site when Flickr realized that they had really fucked up. This prompted Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr to respond. This was the gist of it:

"... I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up -- and for that I take full responsibility (actually, several team members are fighting to take responsibility).

There are several policies which will be changing as a direct result of this incident and the goal is that nothing like this ever happens again. Any errors from now on should be on the side of caution.

It's important to be clear why the photo was deleted: it had nothing to do with a desire to silence Rebekka from calling attention to the outfit which had reportedly sold copies of her photos without knowledge or permission and without compensating her...

So, to Rebekka: Our apologies. I'm sure you did not intend to bring on the firestorm to the extent it developed, you were not in the wrong and it was our fault to suggest that you were."

This incident in it's entirety raises many questions surrounding the censorship of content in the social media and networking space. Who's content is it anyway? Yahoo, who owns Flickr, needs to ask themselves this question. This was not a good move, they alienated an entire community. Why would Yahoo make the entire situation even more personal by deleting the community's comments that succeed Rebekka's ripped off photo. The post had over 450 comments about why selling other people'€™s stuff for profit is criminal. In addition, these posts included suggestions and advice on how to deal with the incident. Guess what Yahoo, now everyone feels ripped off! What a surprise, they clearly didn't think this one through. A prime example of an old school best practice of protectionism and censorship that will not work with web 2.0. Did someone say ripple effects? Bottom line: don't alienate your community, Yahoo should have known this by now. Also, companies/organizations need to realize that censorship will not work, it only makes things worse and accomplishes the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do.

(Photo by Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir)

How True Is This!

Joseph Jaffe is in the process of writing his second book titled "Join The Conversation". It should be out sometime in September. Jaffe decided to have a cover design contest for his book. You can also join the conversation and pick your favorite cover. This is the cover I voted for. Right now I'm the only one who's voted for it. You can see the results here. But I voted for this cover because it has significance in the place I'm currently at. How true is this! Being in the business school, and the marketing program more specifically, it used to amuse me but now I'm getting nothing short of pissed off at how disconnected some teachers are with reality. Lets be honest, some of these teachers  in the business school have never had real jobs and it reflects in their curriculum. Why are they still talking at us with their theories, models and principles; or trying to shove everything into a metric or something linear. Is this education? No, it's definetly not. True education just like new marketing is conversation. Some teachers try to create conversation but they fail misserably and it's cause they are asking the wrong questions about the wrong content. Every quarter I keep think it will get better but there always seems to be a few classes that are just a joke. For example, no one cares about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the ABC Model of Attributes, 5 Factor Theory of Personality or the infamous 4 P's of marketing. We all know there is no application to any of this. What if my employer asked me to develop a marketing strategy or campaign? What am I going to do, busted out my college text books and apply some of the stuff in there? I'd get laughed at and probably fired for incompetence. Teachers need to speak from real world experience and talk about current issues. I didn't decide to major in business or more specifically marketing because I wanted to learn about history. Last time I checked that's why colleges have history departments. Institutions need to be forward thinking and if teachers can't incorporate this philosophy into their classes and/or can't speak from true business experience because they've had very little or none at all, then they shouldn't be teaching. A PhD means nothing and it's one fucking shame that WWU's business school, to make itself look more "qualified" from an evaluation stand point, laid off almost all of its professors who only had MBA's and not PhD's. In addition, weren't most of these professors teaching here in the first place not because they had the most advanced degreee but because they had a lot of real world experience? Education within the institution as we know it needs to change. I've learned more about marketing from the free resources in reading blogs and listening to podcasts then from the "education" my parents have thus far been paying thousands of dollars to WWU for. Final thought: with the internet as developed as it is and our ability to connect with others who have very narrow and focused interests, from a learning standpoint, do we really need the institution anymore? It used to make total sense in bringing the human and informational resources together from geographically dispersed area's; but the college in its present state, if it hasn't already outlived its usefulness, in time, it surely will.