Ja, I experienced something many years ago.
A disturbance in time, and it was not the normal deja vu.
But the story is not so interesting and by any means its difficult to tell, so Ill skip it.

And considering numbers, much of ones superstition with numbers can go away if you convert to binary or hex or something.
 666 = 3030 hex base
666 = 1010011010 binary
2012= 13152
2012= 11111011100

The fair use legislation is quite alike in most countries:

Fair use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

And the argumentation (balance):
TRIPs) Article 13 allows for uses "which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the right holder."

Point is, students are not exploiting the work, they are learning, which is a good thing, and legislation tries to encourage it.

As much as I dislike istocks abuse of us, I dislike the "words of the mastery book".
Utterly inconsistant, mix up of arguments and fluttery substances from all levels.

Basically a load of moral BS: be more anal, be more puritanic and disciplined.
The sort of argumentation you find in witchhunts and dihads.

I have an uneasy feeling.

I fear it has to do with exposure.
Since there now are so many images they cannot be exposed, the agencies find new ways.
So now we can get our collections exposed, where it was our images before, and still is?

But Im not sure of the consequenses.
Is it good or bad? is it a new level of competition?

We are still selling single images, but are our views achieved by collections?
And what do the agencies want to do with the collections? Sell them to eachother?

Maybe the emeralds loose sales because they raise the prices.

Quote from: rubyroo on December 14, 2012, 19:23

Yes, I think we have a problem here in that contributors turn against contributors at times.  The fact is we should all be on the same side, regardless of allegiances to any particular agency. 

Every contributor who takes this seriously is working bloody hard to create or maintain something stable on shifting sands.  We all know it's not easy, and we all understand eachothers' predicament better than the agencies do.

I agree. I was once an indie too. I just cannot imagine that other agencies, including Alamy, not to mention FT and DT, would allow the contributors to voice as much resentment as iStock has been on its own forums, so in this capacity, iStock is far more democratic than most agencies. Besides, you folks should understand Rebecca Rockafellar is just a general manager, her role is to manage, and not to set mandate. If you want to have real and substantial changes, you should find audience of Johnathan Klein and Carlyle management. When people praise the new face of iStock website, it is a affirmation of the employees, the front line workers, who have been working hard to make things better. It is not just and fair to insult these people and their efforts, and shoot any of your colleagues as suckers.

Can we be happier? Happy holidays, everyone.

So now, istock is democratic?
And they work hard? and all is good? they probably smile awhile.

Not correct. Istock is the banana republic of stock and it has dug its own grave.

Im just talking about the design, and I dont like it.

Yesterday I was a judge in a photo competition in a small town out in the country, and the photos on istocks page and those in the competition were quite alike. And they shouldnt be.
The general impression should also be different.

The real danger to the microstock business is entropy.
When there are so many pictures and keywords are so random that a search becomes meaningless.
We are close.
Agencies with large databeses know this, and do something: the power of few from istock is an example.
It didnt work, because its is not few, that is the problem. It is precision, and the more global we get, the more general the vocabulary gets ( pidgin, creole). So basically globalisation and crowdsourcing works against presition searches. Thats an inbuilt problem in the business. He who solves that, has an advantage.
I would suggest, working from native languages to English, not opposite as they do now.
i would also suggest a double inspection. One for image quality, and that coudl be automatic, and then a inspection for keywords, from experts, who knew the language and the topic.
There is no point is producing more pictures of footballs and balloons.

No the place has not become wierd. It is worse.
Its like a fruit storage in a banana republic, you cannot see anything except the swarms of fruit flies.
A Nigerian banana republic that is.
No law, no order, no consistency, only sneakyness and fog.

only agency going up these days is shutter, fot is on the lever. is and dt are going down.
Both massively.

My guess is that we have a huge customers migration going on.

Between dec 20th and jan 3rd there are not many sales anywhere.
But again as this business becomes more and more global, the "Christianity effect" might have less impact.
That reminds me. Why is microstock mostly used in the christian world, why does it have difficulties to get a stronghold in the Asian and Arabic world?
If I was doing marketing in one of the agencies, I would look into that question.

you can be proud, it is a very good image!

we are operating in a crowssourcing and massproducing environment.
So the agencies will not bother to give personal explanations.
OK, then we adapt to that.
On the personal level that means that I have made photoshop actions that trim my pictures to the different agencies.
SS style, IS style, whatever.
Then I just press some buttons, get the images trimmed and mass suck spammed keywords into them. And upload.
I can mass produce as well as the agencies can.

Its all about spending as little time on each image as you can both for them, and for me.
And then again, to have some competitive edge, you need to spend time.
But then its more interesting to spend the time coming up with concepts and be creative instead of sitting and photoshop things for hours.
I get the aestetics when I upload ss style to fot. So basically fot is saying that ss style is not aestetical, thats funny enough.