… I should’na left you, without a dope beat to step to…

Well, almost a year since my last post – yikes! In my defence, it’s been a very busy year and the lack of broadband at home makes doing anything online tricky. Must get that sorted.

In the meantime, Treehugginghippycrap has moved to new hosting and there’s still some work to do tidying things up post move. I feel like the virtual boxes are still cluttering up the virtual hallway… I’ve still been posting like a mad badger to Flickr; photosets of Ireland, Barcelona and more Stonehenge and Salisbury to come (when i get round to titling, tagging and geotagging). I’ve also started posting work related stuff on the company blog (you can find juicy GIS and survey related nuggets over at the Wessex Archaeology site)  and been thoroughly enjoying the microblogging wonder that is Twitter; more about that later.

And taking at least some of the wind out of my sails, gotta love web coincidence: The post title is taken from a classic tune called ‘I know ya got soul’ by Eric B and Rakim, one of my favourite tunes and i thought it summed things up nicely. Looking deeper, it does appear that apologetic posts regarding not posting are quite common on the interweb, and at least some use the same title as this post: I just wanted to check the lyric so googled it and found this site whose owner had the exact same idea. Brilliant. Just goes to show, if you have an idea, chances are someone else had it first. Parallel evolution, coincidence, or those quantum thought waves travelling back in time causing ripples of deja vu travelling forwards towards me; i don’t know.

Talking of ‘I know ya got soul’, if you don’t know this fantastic tune, go find it; it’s on the album ‘Paid in full’ which also features ‘I ain’t no joke’ and ‘Eric B is president’. It also provided the sample used in the chorus to Marrs’ 1987 number 1 hit ‘Pump up the Volume’ and which was reputedly the first UK No.1 to be sample based. So there you go.

You could see photos you take of your family and kids, or of a family vacation, used in a magazine or newspaper without your permission or payment to you. You would have to pay to register your photos, all of them, in every new registry in order to protect them. Say the average person takes 300 photos per year (I take a lot more than that). If a registry only charges $5 per image, that is a whopping $1,500 to protect your photos that are protected automatically under the current laws. If there are three registries, protecting your images could cost an amazing $4,500. Not to mention the time it would take to register every photo you take. Plus, you will also have to place your copyright sign on every photo.

From an article in Animation World Magazine where the author describes some horrendously bad legislation being created in the USA whereby an artist will have to register each and every artwork they produce in order to achieve the same levels of protection under copyright law currently afforded. What is more worrying (from my UK pov) is that Europe is noted as looking at similar legislation. If this happens, i would have to register each and every one of my Flickr photos in order that they can be listed as my copyright and not treated as ‘orphaned works’ and therefore free of copyright. Ridiculous! I am currently protected by the current copyright laws and therefore stand to lose protection not gain by such proposed legislation. Not to mention the logistical nightmare of maintaining registers of copyrighted works and potential for errors.
Hopefully this will turn out to be another example of the US legislators failing to understand basic principals (remember how it always used to be the way that to win an election, you needed more votes rather than more friends and relatives in positions of power?) and our legislators in Europe will not go down the same route (if only because they are arguing over the straightness of cucumbers or how dangerous barometers are). But then again, there’s nothing like a bit of new legislation to make it look like you’re doing something useful… 

Some of my photos are being used in the Schmap online guidebooks! Seems like a nice way of building a guidebook; use Flickr for the photos and WCities for the descriptive information and present it in an easy to use web map. Perhaps a bit of a cheeky way of avoiding paying for professional photos from one point of view but I quite like the messages telling me I’ve had a photo selected, warms the cockles of my heart and all that, plus the Schmap guides do give full credit and a link back to my Flickr account; I’m just glad people want to use my photos, that’s what they’re there for!
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Not so long ago, it took an age and a big old computer to browse the web. Now, it’s possible on pda’s, phones and all manner of portable devices including…

The Sony PSP, which I have been experimenting with (as well as playing a lot of Worms…). The PSP browser does an excellant job of rendering pages onto the small screen using some smarty pants Sony technology. Of course, this can be turned off and pages appear as the author intended, but it works really well for most sites including Flickr and Microsoft Web Access, although it does have memory issues if there is a lot of data. Having wireless access on the PSP means it is also now possible to cruise the web (or play Worms)whilst in the bath, relaxing with a glass of wine perhaps, without risk of risk of electrocution!