Miles’ Blog » Business

Once again, only sixteen months after the last case, we’re faced with another website looking very familiar to our own.

This time, however, it only took 32 minutes from the legal letter being received, for the offending website to revert to a Coming Soon screen. Perhaps they heard about our last case, and how it ended up settling out of court?

Maybe the designer hadn’t read my previous post about the Basics of Copyright, however that’s no excuse. In this case it’s just laziness and a lack of ethics.

I’m being gentle here. I think it’s more a case of theft of our hard work and efforts and dilution of what makes our website different (especially since a competitor web company pointed it out to us). I’m being so gentle, that I’m not even linking to the offending website yet, and I am reasonably sure the grabs above aren’t enough to give it away.

So, why be gentle at all? Well, the fact is the client may have made the reasonable assumption that they had engaged a professional web company. By outing the website in question, all I am doing is pointing the finger at the client and not their supplier(s).

It doesn’t help that their web company has let their hosting lapse, so I can’t link to them. However, I will await feedback from the client, and will let you know in due course.

A spokesperson for the web company are saying that they were just ‘handed a design’, so where does the fault lie? Certainly not the client, it’s not their responsibility to visit every page on the internet to ensure it doesn’t match anyone else’s, however things certainly become less obvious when we look at the web company.

The supplier to the client, in this case a web company, has a duty of care that they’ve made sure all their designers, contractor or not, have a reasonable understanding of what design theft is and isn’t, and that they ensure they only employ designers with a reasonable professional understanding.

So, what could a client do? I’d suggest asking that all contracts state that the suppliers have taken all reasonable precaution to ensure that all imagery, photography and design elements are properly licensed. They could ask to see these licenses (a big ask), or indeed ask if the web company has professional indemnity insurance, and if so, does it cover copyright infringements.

Meg over at Blogpond has a great post about Blogging and Plagiarism, which is also worth a read.

I’ll let you know the outcomes of this case over the coming weeks.

Image: Screengrabs from Bam Creative website and similar designed site.

Since the social networking application, Twitter, hit the popularity stakes, there’s been a silence from Twitter Corp, the crowd behind it, as to how they are going to make money from it. I know Web2.0 is about getting investors to fund cool things, but eventually someone has to start seeing income, otherwise wages, technical infrastructure, ping pong tables, office leasing and everything will become the past.

Here’s a few of my thoughts on ways they could monetise Twitter, not all of them I would agree with (nor would most users I imagine);

1. Allow for inline advertising from ‘twitter bots’. Especially if there was very low volume of tweets, and no method for users to block them.

2. Create a real-time media monitoring service, where companies can get notified every time a key word or phrase is mentioned on Twitter (either by twitters own tools, email or weekly PDF report, linked to the individual tweets).

3. Text advertising on the web interface. I’m thinking Text Link Ads, Google Adsense, etc.

4. Offering paid ‘premium accounts’ which allow for either more tweets per day, no maximum cap on people you are following, posting of multimedia, etc.

5. Charges per inbound text. Many people are using the SMS service - perhaps a simple 55 cent per inbound text system would help pay the bills?

6. Licensing for other application uses - Ebay could embed mentions of products with the actual product. Technorati could add tweets along with posts, blogs, videos and everythign else they index.

7. Selling of generic statistical data - I’m thinking great statistical data here, such as how many times did CompanyX or ProductY gets mentioned last month. Trending graphs could be created, and compared to competitor companies or products.

8. Stand alone Twitter servers for intranets - think of it as a massive LAN messaging system. Similar to Google selling their Google Appliance, Twitter could be used in organisations of hundreds and thousands of employees as a simple messaging system (Miles, you have a call on line 13!)

9. Marketing information - those with the most followers could be considered ‘centres of influence’. Being able to target these users would be gold in a marketers eye. Perhaps advertisers could message them, tweet to them or *gasp* get their email addresses.

10. Create interactive surveys - send a tweet to 10,000 twitterers, and ask them to …post @yes for yes, or @no for no… kind of simple surveys would be a great tool for companies.

11. Sell official Twitter merchandise. Everyone else does it. Who doesn’t want to buy a Twitter tee or Twitter beanie?

12. Sell the company. I know, not very original, but there’s surely got to be at least two companies starting with Y or G who would love to get their hands on Twitter.

Who else has suggestions? I’m sure we can whip up a list for the Twitter team, which includes at least one they may not have thought of.

Image: Screengrab of a default twitter tweet screen.

Since starting to accept advertising back in April 2006, I have been amazed at the growth of opportunities which this humble blog has had. It took about 2 months for me to be able to afford that lunch per month, as I suggested in the original post, then within six months, I was selling enough advertising (mostly through Text Link Ads [aff]) to buy lunch every second week.

Now, fifteen months later, I’m making enough from advertising on here, that I can afford a eating out for lunch most days of the week.

So, how did I do it? Well, I certainly didn’t do it with any intention on making much money. I didn’t follow most professional blogger suggestions, and keep my blog ‘on topic’ or even post daily, I didn’t use any trickery with SEO or the like, it turns out that a few posts of mine got big in the blogosphere, and that created link bait, which took my in bound links from near zero to over 3,000 in a short period of time.

This created a Pagerank of 3 and advertisers using Text Link Ads [aff] started seeing the search engine benefits of a PR3 blog linking to them. That, and my link for sign ups through the $100 worth of free text link ads [aff] campaign, mean I get ongoing revenue from those who use my link to start selling text links on their blogs too.

I also have Google Adsense and Auction Ads [aff] unobtrusively in the sidebar as well, however they probably only bring in 10% of the revenue, compared to the text link advertising I get both directly and through Text Link Ads [aff], who pay not by click, but by month instead.

What would have happened if I had followed the advice, and designed the blog around revenue? I don’t know, but maybe I’ll try it with another blog soon!

Oh, and a big thanks to the advertisers who appear on this blog right at the moment, and keep me in lunches. They are;

• iPod Accessories
• Concert Tickets
• Discount Laptops
• office furniture
• Apple Notebooks
• Perth website design
• australian web directories
• backpacker jobs perth

So, do you make an income from your blog? What works for you, and how did you do it?

Image: RAIL road sign, Northam WA

Last night, I did a talk at the regular monthly Port 80 event in Perth, entitled ‘Branding is Bullshit’. It’s a topic I have been exploring recently and given my traditional graphic design background, I felt if anyone was going to talk on the subject, I could get away with it.

Unfortunately, I had spent the day with far more inspirational speakers, including His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, and given the fact I had queued since 4.50am that morning (that was cold!), I was not the best I could have been.

I tried a new presentation style called ‘Let’s get this over and done with quick, so we can all eat pizza and drink more beer’. I however believe that a 10 minute presentation done in 5 minutes by someone who had less than 5 hours sleep the night before probably doesn’t make great viewing or listening.

The slides are available here. As you can see, it was far more a verbal manifesto (aka rant) than some thinly disguised education session, however it was reasonably well received, and by all accounts, at least it had people thinking, which was what I was trying to encourage.

An mp3 will probably turn up over at the Australian Web Industry Association podcasts page eventually.

Thanks to everyone who came along and listened. I hope it made sense. I appreciated the heckling was kept to a minimum.

Image: Part of a slide from the presentation.

No matter what you call it, Spec Work, Free Pitch, etc the concept is the same. I’ll get a handful of designers or studios to come up with a handful of concepts for my website, and the winner gets my business.

Great concept? No! There are no winners here.

What’s in it for the client? They get to pick and choose amongst mediocre designs, which you can bet your shiny crayons haven’t been well briefed or developed. Why? I hear you ask - well, why would you spend much time on the prospect of possibly getting paid down the track?

This recently happened to me - in fact, the offer was given to me, but I turned it down. Sad part of this whole affair was the prestigious nature of the prospect, who, being a university, should really know better.

Free pitching devalues your work. Why would I want to pay for your time, if you are happy to give some of it away free?

Free pitching hurts all of your clients. Someone needs to pay for your time and materials, and there is no doubt you’ll make all of your clients pay for that priviledge.

Free pitching produces crap work. You aren’t going to go through the entire scoping and discovery process, when you aren’t getting paid. Nor is the client going to spend that amount of time with five of you, knowing they will kick four of you out soon enough.

Free pitching makes the client look stupid. The client deep down knows it’s a dumb idea, just like it’d be a dumb idea to allow me to obtain a degree from them, and if the education ‘works out’, I’ll pay for it later.

Free pitching hurts the entire industry. Cowboys who are willing to ignore all sensibilities and continue to do this speculative work encourage others who aren’t as well educated to compete, by doing the same. Great! An entire industry of free workers.

Free pitching is a big sign saying ‘We’re going broke’. If a client isn’t willing to pay for your time now, why would they later? What is the actual reason they wont pay? Is it because they are teetering on implosion, or do they honestly think it’ll save them a few bucks? Do you want clients who penny pinch anyway?

Free pitches encourages less planning. Encouraging you to spend a couple of hours whipping up some pitch concepts means the client doesn’t want you to actually explore what their communication goals are, what their requirements ultimately dictate or any of that ‘boring stuff’. They just want to see the ’shiny things’ and throw all professionalism to the wind.

So, the end result of our recent ‘opportunity’? Well, alongside my own firm turning them down, there are rumours that a number of other Perth web companies did the same. Good work team - we don’t need these cowboys telling us our work is not worth charging for. Let’s pray they don’t teach their students to ask for free work.

Want to read up further on this subject? There’s a great site called No!Spec and Australian Graphic Designers Association have a great article in PDF here.

Image: Powerline & Sky.