Another question:

Amazon and iTunes must have lots more products than we have files.

any other commercial sites that have to handle large number of files and sort them for their customers?

Is there anything we can learn from them for stock sites?

Not necessarily. There is a huge world of business people who have never heard of stock. Certainly here in Germany there is loads of room to grow. The webdesigners of the world may know about stock sites, but all the smaller business companies?

I know that many people steal images from the web, but once the time you spend searching for the right file from image sites like flickr is more expensive than going to a stock site...plus whenever countries start paying attention to digital content rights.

China, India, South America, Middle East???

This is an issue not only for siock photography, but to any kind of application where you have lots of data - websites, of course, also many separated databases and servers within an organization.

Anyway, I am ok that old non-selling images may be even discarded like some sites already do. The only thing that scares any of us is how dependant we are on the site search swings. I used to have one image selling very well in IS (for my standards) and then out of nowhere it stopped selling.

Keyword spamming is impossible to avoid, given that we can always edit them. Keyword categories like Alamy uses is an intelligent choice to help the search engine, but it's too late to apply that in the micros (remember the pain when disambiguation was introduced?).

I also believe that the search engine is the solution. Search for "blue hat", "soccer ball" or "USA flag" in IS, DT and FT and see who has the best results.

The idea of regional tweaking is interesting. If I am a buyer in Brazil and I search for "football", I want soccer football, not US football. I guess the same apply for most European buyers. BTW, I went to all three sites in portuguese and IS did not find anything with "futebol"? 

I�ve been looking a lot at the itunes and amazon stores and wondered what we can learn from it. The most important insight it gave me how extremely important it is to establish yourself as a "brand", as an artist, so that people remember your name, your portfolio, your style.

No matter how many artists there are in the itunes music store - there will also be new songs and new bands and their success in the store is directly linked to the strength of their brand.

Musicians of course do a lot of outside efforts to create a following - concerts, events, interviews, website, fan events. But they always have a recognizable style. Billy Ido did make a Xmas Cd, but usually they stay within one genre with recognizable elements.

But for the stock artist I think it is important to really see your portfolio as your webshop, that you want to draw your own loyal following of buyers to. Even if people try to copy your style, you will still be way ahead of them if you offer a very comprehensive, well executed portfolio in your favorite subject. If you move deeper and deeper into a theme either by subject (everything about animal vets) or a special style (all grungy food shots) it should help your portfolio survive longterm.

You can even combine different file types (photo, video, vector...) around a certain subject or a certain style.

Doesn�t mean, you can�t shoot other things in between, but a speciality is important.

From this I would suggest that it is in the interest of the agencies to strengthen the customer awareness about the individual artist. Many customers are not even aware that the images, like music, are produced by individual artists. When I started buying images, I thought the images are produced by the agency. And apparently Getty has a large collection of images that were shot for them.

So just like world of music can survive with a sheer endless number of songs because we all have different music tastes, I think stock sites can hold a huge number of content to cater to different visual tastes.

On istock we already have "friends" what used to be called creative network. But unfortunately a lot of the networking in the visual community is moving towards facebook. This is good for facebook, but not for the traffic on istock. Nobody is going to search facebook for stock artists.

In general I hope agencies encourage both buyers and sellers to spend as much time on the site as possible. That will again minimize the risk of the buyers going elsewhere. And for the artist it might be helpful if they received more information about their customer type. For instance we could be given information in which countries our images were sold. Or at least the information: private buyer/commercial buyer.

We could use this information to become more aware who our buyers are and target them better. Not just with images, but with all social media. For instance, if I know my Xmas images where mostly being bought by private individuals, I would maybe create blog posts about private christmas ceremonies, home decoration etc...if my buyers are more commercial clients, I could create a blog post that focusses on easy xmas cards for companies (just an example, you can probably come up with something better).

So encouraging the artists to think of their "brand" and to educate the buyers that they are working with as individual artists encourage both to interact, could help manage huge amounts of images.

You go from just "doing searches" to matching up "visual interest groups".

So the networking function should be encouraged and enhanced, looking at the circles on google seems like an interesting soltuion. Otherwise - how about allowing buyers to collect artists with personal notes somewhere. And please add a simple anonymus "follow" function. As a buyer I don�t always want to "network". Sometimes I just want to follow without being seen (and without announcing to a competing webdesigner which artists I prefer).

Regarding learning from the way Amazon's search handles millions of books, actually Amazon may be learning from microstock.

Amazon did not have a 'real' keyword search for paper books - when users searched for books by keyword, the search engine searched using only the title and subtitle/description of the book. Authors/publishers did not submit lists of keywords the way that we microstockers do.

Now Amazon is allowing users to 'tag' products with keywords. Something like the way that iStock tried to use submitters to crowdsource the keywording of images in the 'disambiguation' program.

Sure, but then one would look for "futebol americano", as we call it. In this aspect, I would expected IS to do a better job with its CV. An image tagged "soccer" would be translated as "futebol", and one tagged "football" would be translated "futebol americano". But then the bikini you call thong here is "fio dental" ("dental floss").  Someone typing "fio dental" might be looking for the bikini or the tooth cleaner, but wouldn't be surprised with any of these results.

It is still an issue however that a UK buyer wants soccer if he types "football". I guess there are many English words with completely different meanings. We have this problem with Portugal too.

good point

I think we should convert the CV to use the urban dictionary....

Interesting article on CNN today:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/07/20/google.chairman.interview/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

"Looking back on his decade as Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt said the company should have focused more on connecting people -- a hole that allowed the emergence of rival internet giant Facebook.

Fundamentally, what Facebook has done is built a way to figure out who people are. That system is missing in the internet as a whole. Google should have worked on this earlier," Schmidt, now the executive chairman of Google, said in an interview with CNN."

I guess this ties in with ideas floated above - you can have as many images and contributors as you want if you connect them well.