You can read more about it here and would love to hear your feedback.

http://cutcaster.blogspot.com/search/label/advanced%20image%20search

Let us know what you like and don't like.  We are listening and will build your suggestions and use your feedback to make a better product.  Can you help us by filling out this anonymous survey. It takes 45 seconds to 2 minutes.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=KWvOJ6hHzmwOTLNytpzc9Q_3d_3d%22%3EHelp

It�s time to claim your prize and enter the Cutcaster non exclusive �Christmas themed� challenge. Cutcaster has chosen the theme of Christmas for our first monthly contest!  

Drum roll please�� We are doing TWO � count them TWO separate contests, both with the Christmas theme!!  One for our hard working photographers and one for clever vector artists (although, you can enter both if you really want to � we�re in a giving mood. And to top it off your images and vectors aren�t forced to be exclusive with Cutcaster for 12 months like other sites force you to.
All contest submissions must be Christmas related to be considered � no stretching it and sending us winter wonderland scenes unless it has Santa shoveling snow from his reindeer landing strip.

Send in your most inspiring Christmas related photographs AND vectors for our monthly contest (that�s us receiving first) and in return we will be giving the winners a nice gift (that�s us giving second).  

This theme may include: a family opening Christmas presents around a Christmas trees, Christmas concept images and/or vectors, a well executed image or vector of kids running over one another to be first to the Christmas tree. You decide and win.
 
So Photographers, get your camera batteries charged and your lenses cleaned. Vector Artists get that pen tablet ready and the computer all fired up.  It�s time to compete for some money.

Have you guessed right?  Are we doing two contests at the same time? �Ya Betcha� as Sarah Palin would say.  We are doing TWO � count them TWO separate contests, both with the Christmas theme!!  One for our hard working photographers and one for hard working vector artists (although, you can enter both if you really want to �we ain�t gonna stop ya.)

Come one � come all - It�s time to compete for a prize of $50.00 to the winner of photograph submission and $50.00 to the winner of the vector submission deposited directly into your contributor account.  The $50.00 prize will be in the winners Cutcaster account within 24 hours of announcing the winners � now how that for fast.  Second and Third place winners will get their images on the homepage and blog as well as a shout out in the next newsletter.

For rules, regulations and how the contest will be judged, check out www.cutcaster.com and click on the contest link on the homepage.  I look forward to seeing everyones entries and good luck.

Christmas Illustrations
Christmas Photos
Christmas Vectors Clipart
Wrapped Christmas Presents

For those of you who are interested in the developments of Cutcaster I thought I would share some.  Here is our August newsletter.

Dear Cutcaster Family,

There are a number of episodes that have shocked me lately; The opening ceremonies of the Olympics, the fact that it is the middle of August (where has the summer gone?!), and the way that Cutcaster has quadrupled since the last time I sent out a newsletter just a month and a half ago.

What a crazy and exciting time! A number of our users are now getting sales on the site and also receiving bids from interested buyers.  If you haven�t had a sale yet, don�t worry; we are planning a big marketing push for the months of September and October so it is a good time to get more content into the marketplace or organize your old content.

We just passed 38,000 image files uploaded and have had over 15,000 files uploaded since the start of August.  That doesn�t even include all the video files we are going to release when we bring back video footage. We announced that our goal was to have 100,000 quality uploads by the end of the year.  You can bet on the year-end total amount by submitting what you think will be the year-end tally on our blog http://cutcaster.blogspot.com/2008/08/cutcaster-year-end-goal-your-help.html (www.cutcaster.com/blog) to win a cool prize. 100,000 files is a very doable goal and we are well on our way to accomplishing it!

Since the number of files is growing and we are still a small group of people running www.Cutcaster.com from behind the scenes, we need everyone�s help titling, describing and keywording their content. Take a quick moment to check out your keywords and make sure that your keywords accurately describe each image. If you need help let us know so we can target your content and organize it better.

Our move over to Amazon�s web services platform is complete and I am happy to say that we have increased the speed of the site so things are running much faster at Cutcaster. You will notice a difference when you check out the homepage, and it will only get faster as we continue to work on more ways to speed it up.

Here are a number of new features that we have rolled out over the last month:

1.   Must faster and streamlined FTP and http uploading process that parses out IPTC data and doesn't drag you down uploading for hours.
2.   We added the ability to �friend� contacts on Cutcaster; send site messages to other people who are members of Cutcaster and post comments to each other�s pages. 
3.   We added similar image results to the media details pages so you can find similar content without having to go back to the search areas.  This should help buyers find a variety of similar images without having to do multiple searches.
4.   Public clipfolders are now available on the site and are our version of lightboxes, which you may have seen on other sites. We added a featured clipfolder to the homepage to help get contributors more exposure and sales.
5.   We have added free images to the homepage to attract more buyers to the site and get your work more exposure. Free images at Cutcaster
6.   Exclusive spotlight on the homepage.  We need exclusive content and will pay out more for it.  Ask us about it.  If you have images that you want to test out on our site make them exclusive, you will earn more for them.
7.    The Cutcaster Forum www.cutcaster.com/forum is here and ramping up. Go there and say hello and join in the conversation. 
8.    We now offer vectors and you can upload and set your prices for your vector illustrations.

We are always listening, so please keep the feedback coming! 

In addition, if you want your images and illustrations to be seen by more people, you should read this little post we wrote about getting more interested traffic. 

Also submit/add your studio link to search engines like Google and Yahoo, which is a great idea for getting traffic, or you can link to them from your MySpace, Flickr or personal webpage. Remember to use your referral links as well so you get paid more.


Here are some write-ups on content we want:

Top 14 Best selling categories at Cutcaster http://cutcaster.blogspot.com/2008/08/top-14-selling-categories-for-last-two.html

Smaller and Popular categories we need http://cutcaster.blogspot.com/2008/08/smaller-and-popular-categories-we-need.html

We have been asked for these types of images http://cutcaster.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-have-been-asked-for-these-type-of.html

Desired content we need http://www.cutcaster.com/info/contents

If you need specific content please let us know and we will put out a request for you.

Hope the rest of August goes as slow as possible and you all enjoy the last bits of summer.   

Best,

The Cutcaster Team

We have been working a ton of fixing the sluggishness that the site was experiencing. It is hard work diagnosing these things. Here is what we have done so far so you should notice an improvement in the time it takes to load pages.

Total page size has been reduced significantly by removing the rollovers which we will put back up once we fix this issue. The home page now clocks in at 886,551 bytes - down from 3.5MB - about 1/4 of the page size. I've also added GZIP compression to almost all the files being served by Apache, which also made a significant different.

Play around with it and let me know what you think. I've also started compressing certain files which were fairly large. As an example:

1. The background image bg_top.gif was 80KB - I compressed this to a
jpg

2. I compressed the prototype.js library

3. I compressed the SpryValidationTextField.js

I've looked around the site and many other files / images can be compressed similarly - such as all the images on the My Studio page so I will have my hands full this weekend but you should notice a difference.

If any of you can offer any other suggestions for things that we can do please let me know. This will help everyone especially me. Your expertise is greatly appreciated.

We have been working like crazy to get your suggestions and awesome feedback up on the site and I wanted to update you on a few things, which were just released.  As always I would love to hear your thoughts and am here to learn and listen. So let me know what you think and if you see any bugs or ways to do things better.

The FTP is now working smoothly.  There were a lot of people who helped us make that process really simple and easy to do so I thank you. Upload away!

We re-organized our backend to make our search engine a lot better.  We now have an advanced search, which we are still tinkering with but will be releasing even more cool new filtering techniques in the next few days.

And lastly we have launched our referral program which is a nice way to earn a bit of extra money as you all know.  It will pay 5% of all royalties received for people who sell content to the referrer and 10% of all the royalties to people who buy content.

Let me know what you guys think and thanks.

John