Ok, Now I Get JPG Magazine
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
JPG Magazine relaunched last month with a new business model: Get users to upload photos to their website, and then have the community vote on and rank photos. The winners are published in a bi-monthly print magazine and get $100 plus a free one-year subscription. Read more…
A comment I just left on TechCrunch:
I think Michael (the author of the above post) gets it just right here and I agree. I think it’s a great model and they’ll do well with it. However, many social sites that are driven by user participation have also included competition to generate even more fervent use and as a long time flickr user and a new jpg user I have a problem with that. People game the system and think that winning a voting contest has some bigger meaning outside of these limited virtual communities. The flip side is also true: people can be devastated when they don’t get comments, attention, views. Some of the best photography gets left behind because people tend to follow the herd (the explore pages at flickr, for instance).
This can lead to more and possibly better photography which is great. It can also lead to amping up color saturation and contrast and sharpness to the point of garishness all to get attention.
Hopefully some social software genius will find another way to get users worked up besides competition. When that happens, I’m there.
(Source TechCrunch.)
Hey Richard — Thanks for thinking out loud about this. But I have to correct you on one thing. Competition is not the *only* way photos get in the magazine. We enable both a community voice and editorial selection. Here’s how it works: http://jpgmag.com/about/howitworks.html
We think this draws from the best of both worlds: a little wisdom of crowds, a little editorial curation. It’s a evolving process, for sure, so thanks for the feedback.
Derek: I stand corrected, great to know that it’s not just voting. Keep up the great work, your site is one of the better uses of modern web technologies I’ve seen to date. Beautiful, functional, great.