Delay of Game, Imus is Out!, Google vs. Photobucket

Just a quick note to let you know that I'll be back soon.  Had to lay low and deal with some other things but I'll probably post more either Friday or Saturday [i take that back.  see you sunday.]

I know it's upsetting when I don't post regularly but, hey, Imus is out, so one bad thing got balanced by something good!

On an unrelated note, lots of smart, knowledgeable people are weighing in on Google vs. Photobucket and I have nothing useful to add.  However, it has gotten me thinking about my own problems related to photo serving.

I recently noticed a disturbing growth in traffic to the server that houses netweed and serves photos to ProHipHop without a related rise in pageviews.  I'm talking about a 30% to 40% growth in one month and that's of the bandwidth for netweed and photo serving as a whole!

[you have entered the geek zone.  proceed at your own risk]

At first I assumed it was some individual site with lots of traffic that was simply calling up the photos from my server (it's very easy to do) and kind of looked forward to addressing the issue.  After some quality time with my server logs, I soon realized that my little publishing empire is faced with the possibility of death by a thousand cuts.  Most of the offsite photo serving comes from a wide range of small sites, many of them hosted on MySpace, who probably found my site using Google Images based on the increase in traffic from Google Images during that time.

The Photobucket blockade may not really affect sites like mine so much because it seems like people use Photobucket more for their own photos rather than to upload album covers and pr pics downloaded for other sites.  And I'm still investigating whether there are options for blocking such sites' access to my shared server so that I don't have to do things like change the image description and so forth [if there even is such an option on shared servers].

But based on the last month's traffic, I have a new problem that isn't going away, one that I would have never anticipated and one that is based on the intersection of such great advancements as image search and ease of web publishing.  Maybe there will be a simple solution.  Or maybe my skills in Search Engine Optimization and my offering of images that people want to see will combine with all the emerging search and publish tools to deliver a death blow to this little enterprise.

I'm hoping not.  See you soon.

Footnote - Web 2.0 grows up:
One of the interesting things about MySpace blocking Photobucket is that, in the fairly recent past, media 2.0 bloggers would have been giving MySpace a hard time for missing what they [me included] consider the point of the social web.  This time, the smart guys all seem to be giving Photobucket a hard time for not recognizing that they should have already cut a deal to compensate MySpace:
Do MySpace Users Care That It’s Not Really THEIR Space?
MySpace Kicks Back Ads on PhotoBucket: When is a Social Media Partner Really a Partner?

Comments

[Jarrett Carter]

Imus had to go, once that money started walking out the door, CBS had to figure out who they were most loyal to. A hall of fame radio personality and his legions of fans, or the legions of dollars from advertisers.

What's interesting is how Jason Whitlock has criticized the influence of Rev. Sharpton and Jackson for this matter, and simultaneously flipped the issue on how hip-hop shelters the "Black KKK" and "terrorists."