Not Building on Rented Land

Putting all your eggs in one basket that is controlled by one of the big social media suppliers may be very cheap but it is a very risky strategy. 

I am getting so frustrated by all the “little” changes in anything social media or “free” internet services (are you listening Facebook & Google, ah didn’t think you were). Failed updates to the operating systems (are you listening Microsoft) don’t help. Things like changes to passwords or enhanced “security” (aka for the service not us), buttons and functions that once worked having disappeared or just hanging.  Trying to build a coherent structure across any of these services is at risk of instant and unannounced disruption and disappearance. It is going to frustrate your loyal viewers trying to find you, as much as you.

It is the uploading and sharing of photos/images that most annoys me (and blogger/google photos is not without blame here). The quality of the actual displays on most services is not good, Compression down to the lower resolution screens at the display time is generally not great (presumably to reduce bandwidth and lag time). Flickr may be an exception here. Also it is not uncommon for images to get “lost” in the flood. Algorithmic selection on these services favours the “celebrity” and more of the same, not the original and quality and especially not the creative. So even your friends may be lucky to see your posts if you haven’t made the algorithms target views or likes in the first short time period.

Is there a solution? Maybe, we can stop using social media and the “free” services, as the place we base our net presence, because we are not in control of what they choose to show and do. However, if we want to use the Internet to reach a wider audience we can still participate but we need to build a few things on the net but on our own “properties”. They should be at least an email account (not a social media controlled undercover agent or their chat features that seem not be always listening in), probably also our own website (there are many companies that offer reasonable cost options) and domain name. These are stable places you can bring people to with confidence. Somr free or inexpensive services like email newsletters, portfolios and blogs can then be interfaced to spaces that you own and control, not total control by them (read the TOS terms of service). Once these are established you can use suitable social media to bring friends and interested folk back to your presence, with suitable links back to your own places.  

So make sure you are not building on borrowed time or rented ground. Stop chasing traffic, the distracted rabble chasing fame or celebrity on social media, they are just glimpsing works anyway as they scroll past.

Watch this space for my attempts to put this common sense logic into practice.

Blood on my hands?

 All I wanted to do was leave Facebook, so I decided to create a goodbye profile picture using a text-to-image AI art algorithm. Really puzzled why I ended up with blood on my hands? 

However, I did make the mistake of making my goodbye message public instead of just to my friends warning them not to click on any request from me, this started a flood of uninformed comments not to be so angry (which I wasn’t just frustrated) and each with convenient links to go somewhere else. If you see those please don’t click on them either. 

So my facebook account should be gone (well in 30days)

Social Media when it isn't very social

 

People are prisoners of their phones,
that's why they are called cell phones.

I'm really not qualified to deliver this rant, because I hardly use social media anymore. I'd just like too. I'm totally over all the hassles I keep getting into.  Facebook has recently started showing that I am logged in all the time (and I'm not). Which made me suspect that I was being hacked. Simple I thought! I could change my password or at worst close the account. Trouble is I can't log into Facebook, it won't let me, especially from the forgot password option. Generally it just wanted me to download apps to my phone, from which I had deleted the Facebook app two years ago. I can see my Facebook stream on a browser and others can as well. I had set up the account using the convenient OAuth authentication protocol via my Gmail account. Perhaps I could fix the issue from there? No! Also there is big a catch 22 in my logic, if I can't log in I can't delete the account. Or can I perhaps email support at Facebook. Ok get real, that's pointless!!!!

The other strange thing is I get notifications to my gmail about status messages and posts of my "friends" (I don't recognize all of them). The more I looked the harder it is to believe. What is going on, is someone or something just teasing me?

About three weeks ago I was also not able to post to either of my instagram accounts, and my phone seemed to always be a day behind what it was showing when compared to accessing the same stream on a computer via a browser. I was able to log in and therefore changed my passwords, to no avail. I then went through my followers and saw a few with just one post and flagged as private accounts and not anyone I recognized, so I blocked and deleted them then, A day later I could post again. Were these two things related or is Instagram turning into an unreliable mess like its big sister? Who knows! 

At least I can post on Instagram if I want now.

Emboldened by this success I followed one of the notification links in my Gmail, ignored the request to download any app to my phone and got to my Facebook stream (but not logged in). I tried logging in (no Oath option, in fact nothing). But I felt my phone vibrate and there was a message that looked a lot like a two-factor authentication message with a code/ This is puzzling but when I looked at my browser, I had logged in. Amazing! So I immediately changed my password, no problems. I logged out and was able to log in again. Very strange. I also looked through my friend requests and messages (dozens & dozens). Sorry folks I haven't been ignoring you. There were about a dozen friend requests from people I don't recognize so I deleted them rather than confirm. All good but it still looked like I was still continually on-line even though I logged out. Perhaps someone is teasing me afterall.

An hour or so later I seem to be off line. Hopefully I can get back to using social media to keep in contact with my friends and groups.

PS The caption on my bitmojie cartoon at the top of the post came from a cartoon I saw on Facebook as I was wading through the issues above. However, when I went back to find it so I could acknowledge the source and I can't find it. Damn you Facebook!

Yet Another Facebook Fail

 

I don't use facebook much at all. I was promped to use it when instagram continually cropped my lastest inktober post to square!

So I decised to post it to facebook. Well that didn't get far. Despit getting a code to my phone it wasn't recognised. 

Three codes, three times!

Is this really facebook? No matter facebook be gone. 

Automatic Classifying the Subjects in your Photos

 One holy grail in the AI applications in Photography (or any visual art) has been the potential ability to automatically see into the binary files (that are photographic images) and use that in searches. For a decade or so google has claimed a lot of progress, starting with the really useful ability to find cats in photos. Ok I’m being a cynical but I have been tracking the claims in google photos, auto labeling things and places. It can look through the great dumps of photos its backup & sync tools is daily uploading. Are things improving? You can enter a term and be “surprised” (on the first couple of occasions) that it will find some photo you have forgotten about. It does also pull up a few clearly bad matches. What I have noticed is the really obvious things google misses in many selections. So I’m really not seeing any significant improvement.

For a while at least flickr had a feature that would add tags at the time you uploaded your photo. If you bothered to check you were able to delete incorrect terms of add your own.  This seem a better approach to me but alas it seems to have fallen by the way side now.

Moving forward I’ve now trying out a slightly new alternative Excire (it has been around as a plug-in for lightroom as Excire Search for a while) which primarily groups and classifies your images to create a hierarchical set of keywords. It can then write these keywords to sidecar files, which will then allow this information to percolate into any other software that reads this format. I’m only using the trial version which unfortunately doesn’t give me the ability to write these files, so I have check it yet. Its classification strikes me as both friendlier to use and possibly better than either of the above.

It also have the benefit that you see the grouping visually and they are laid out from best match at the top to just possible at the bottom. Further you don’t have to change modes (eg. go to new screen to make corrections). You just select the image click on it and you can make changes to the keywords on the left tab or albums on the right.

It strikes me as perfect to be run as you first upload/ingest your photos. Helping you to rank and cull but giving the incentive to better keywording of your images. I already have photo mechanic (no AI features as yet) which I love and use (but not so much for keywording). So I’m Impressed but not ready to jump ship just yet, for keyword Shangri-la.  However that time is much getting closer.

who gives a TOS?

Google are about to updated their terms of service (TOS) and it is very refreshing to see an on-line service provider, firstly notify its users about the changes and also focus on those aspects that let the user control what is to be shared. However the common click to accept terms, expressed in very verbose legalese, are seldom read by most of us. we just want to join up not spend half and hour or more trying to figure out what is meant.

If you are creative type and produce original works it is really in your interest to review the TOS of all on-line services you use. Many services assume ownership of anything your uploaded into their services, Facebook and Instagram assume you given then very draconian rights over redistribution, Dropbox which one held part of the middle grade have recently changed to claim more rights over your content.  Flick/Yahoo! and google+ are generally considered better. Terms of Service are fine, and necessary, they cover such things as the services right to cancel your account if you do bad things and the fact that they may take little or no responsibility for what you upload, most don’t claim they own your content but that statement will probably be followed by a clause that you “grant them non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post”. If you are not ok with this perhaps it is best not to use that service!

If like most of us you have tried to read the fine print and are still uncertain, here is a community (ToS;DR Terms of Service Didn’t Read) and website that understand and they aim to address and fix the biggest lie on the web “I have read and agree to the Terms” in one click!