WPtouch is a great WordPress plugin that detects if your readers are using an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android device, and serves up a mobile theme for your blog. My blog loads really fast using this free plugin, and the design is quite elegant. Kudos to the folks at Brave New Code, and thanks to A Photo Folio for pre-loading this plugin. Now both my blog and main website work well on mobile devices! Below are a few screenshots of how my blog looks on an iPhone using the WPtouch mobile theme. [Tip: To take a screenshot on the iPhone, just press the sleep button and home button at the same time.]
Main blog page using WPtouch on an iPhone 3G with 3.0 software. The numbers in red on top of the date show the number of comments on each post.
Clicking through to a single entry, inline images are displayed quite nicely.
Update 8/3/2009: The upgrade to version 1.9 of this app broke the favicon and changed the display around. I can no longer access the settings for this app due to a bug, so I’ve disabled it. Hope these issues are remedied soon.
Update 9/1/2009: The app is back with version 1.9.2, and seems to be working fine.
A key part of this hierarchy is that 95% of artists never make it out of the Invisible category. Mapping the artist hierarchy categories back to the print pricing levels discussed in my previous article is an interesting exercise. My pricing categories have been revised slightly since last year. These prices are for unframed prints:
A: $50-150 for a small/medium sized print
B: $250-500 for a medium sized print
C: $1500-2500 for a medium/large sized print
D: $4000 and up.
For most photographers, Invisible maps to Level A. Having some friends that would be categorized by the art world as Emerging, this category maps well to Level C. After raising my prices last year to Level B, my print sales dried up. We all know the simple premise that things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. By raising my prices I found out that Level B barely exists for me. I know photographers who are selling at Level A, C, and D, but don’t know anyone who’s selling at Level B.
Last year I was wondering how to get from Level A to Level C — perhaps a better question is how to go from Invisible to Emerging. The price schedule just follows the trip up the pyramid. Photographer Brad Evans made a remark last year that really stuck with me when he equated the trip up the pyramid with making it to the NBA. Even if you’re quite good, odds are slim to none. It’s rarified air. This ties in well with the 95% Invisible number. I’ve found the NBA analogy to be an easy to understand answer to the question: “Do you make a good living as a fine art photographer?” And the NBA analogy answer is more polite than: “Are you crazy? Fine art photographers either teach, have day jobs, or a rich uncle.”
Anyhow….the place where the NBA analogy breaks down is that traveling up the artist hierarchy has less to do with your skill on the court, and much more to do with talking about your game. The important piece of this puzzle is that it’s not only how you talk about your game, but who you’re talking to. I’ve had some interesting discussions recently with photographers who would be filed under Emerging as to the best way to identify and engage the who. More on this topic later.
For those interested in reading more about the art world, I recommend adding both the DLK Collection and Edward Winkleman to your feedreader. I also found Sarah Thornton’s book Seven Days in the Art World to be both entertaining and thought provoking. See you on the court for a game of H-O-R-S-E later.
My friend Jay Watson did a presentation at Brooks last week. He also teaches part-time at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he hooked me up with a Photoshop teaching gig for a semester last year. Being around the 20-something set can be very educational. They are fired up. Turns out that a lot of the kids don’t read blogs — much of their online time is spent on MySpace, Facebook, and IM. So if blogs are to share our photography with a community of photographers, how do we help the kids? How about broadcasting on one of the primary channels they listen to — Facebook.
OK, you say. I’m twice the age of people on Facebook. I enjoy blogging, but social networking is not for me. Well, you might be surprised which folks in the larger photography community are on Facebook. And it’s easy to keep your Facebook page fresh by automatically pulling in your blog posts as Notes. Add me as a friend if you want:
First things first — if have a blog, Feedburner is a great way to make it easy for people to subscribe, and for you to figure out who your readers are. It’s free, and owned by a reliable company you may have heard of called Google. Feedburner has some easy to use instructions for promoting your feed if you use Blogger, or on the self-hosted version of WordPress (which is how I roll).
Allright. You’ve got a Feedburner feed and a Facebook account. You can import one blog onto your Facebook page, and the posts will be automatically imported and shared with your contacts.
But before you import your blog, you may want to have a look at the Facebook Terms of Use. Let me sum it up for you in two words: Rights Grab. Here’s the important part:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
Even if you think the risk is small that Facebook would jack the photos imported from your blog to use for their own devious purposes, why take the chance? Well, you can have your cake and eat it too. Here’s how to import a text-only blog excerpt to your Facebook page:
1. Login to your Feedburner account. We’re going to make a new feed specifically for Facebook. When you’re done, your Feedburner page will look something like this:
OK, you’ll note that my subscribers list has been slightly inflated to impress you.
2. Copy and paste your RSS address into the Burn a feed right this instant box. If you’re using WordPress, your RSS address will look something like this: http://www.joereifer.com/words/?feed=rss2
3. Add a useful title for your Facebook-specific feed, like Joe Reifer (Facebook), and an address to match: http://feeds.feedburner.com/joereifer_facebook
4. Activate your new feed, click on the Optimize tab, and then rock these settings for Facebook:
a. Content Type: text/xml. This excludes the precious images that are on your blog from being imported into Facebook:
b. Summary Burner: The number of characters that will appear. Just a short amount of text works well here.
That’s it. You now have a Feedburner feed that is text only and shows the first 200 characters of your blog posts. Import this new feed into Facebook, and every time you blog an excerpt will be posted for your friends that looks like this:
When someone clicks through on the blog post, they get a page that allows them to link directly to your blog, or to email your post to someone who might enjoy it. That page looks like this:
Alternately, there is a plugin for bloggers that use a hosted version of WordPress called Wordbook. I haven’t tried it, but Jay let me know it works great. Facebook seems to change their design often enough that I’d worry about a plugin breaking. I also like the statistics provided by the Feedburner option outlined above.
Well, I hope a few photography bloggers found these Feedburner to Facebook instructions to be useful. Let me know if you’ve got any other tips or techniques for sharing content — You know, for kids!
If you don’t quite have enough information bombarding you, perhaps you’d like to find a few new photography blogs to read. Here’s a methodology:
Go to the advanced search on Technorati, and do a URL search for your favorite photography blog(s). This will show you what blogs are linking to a blog that you already like.
Use the drop down menu to sort by authority (lots of links), or freshness (the latest links).
I’ve found a few interesting blogs using this method. Technorati gives blogs a ranking called authority. I’m continually surprised that some of the best photography blogs have somewhat low authority rankings. Mark Hobson’s The Landscapist is consistently thought provoking, but doesn’t garner many links. Tim Atherton’s Muse-ings currently clocks in at an authority of 87, the 79,365th most popular blog online. Paul Butzi’s Musings ranks at 76, the 93,462nd most popular.The well known Online Photographer has an authority of 341, which is 14,157 in the rankings. Joerg Coelberg’s Conscientious has an impressive ranking of 452 — the only photography blog that I read with a ranking in the top 10,000 blogs online. Weird!
So what the heck are most people reading? According to Technorati, they’re linking to blogs about technology, politics, celebrities, and lolcats (#10 of all blogs!). Here’s a list of the top 100 blogs at Technorati.
If you have a website, blog, or participate in an online community, help spread the word about photography blogs that you enjoy by linking to your favorite content!
I finally signed up for a free account at www.netvibes.com and entered most of my favorite photography blogs onto a page that also includes Google search, weather, Flickr comments, and Technorati links to my blog. The time savings over my.yahoo.com are immense — netvibes is much more elegant and customizable.
If you’re using bookmarks to keep track of your favorite blogs and news sites, the time savings of using a feedreader are even more substantial. Choose a 1, 2, 3 or 4 column layout. Set the number of visible posts based on the frequency of posts on that site. Once you’ve read a post, it’s grayed out. If you read a lot of blogs, you can create separate tabs by subject.
For a quick content assessment, simply hover over a post to see the first few lines of the text. When you click through to a post, the blog is displayed with a left hand table of contents navigation for the previous posts. You can view the blog in a streamlined feed view with plain text on a white background, or quickly switch to the website view. When you’re done reading the post, click the X in the upper right, and you’re back at your netvibes page.
Taking a cue from Musings, I’ve eliminated my blogroll, and will just keep linking to other photography blogs any time there’s some interesting content!
