Before you order images from Corbis, read this

Before you order images from corbisimages.com, consider this exchange I had today with Corbis customer service:

—–Original Message—–
From: (deleted)
Sent: Mar 17, 2011 1:27:01 AM
Subject: General

Corbis makes it entirely too hard to search for value images. I would like ten to fifteen RF images at $10 to $50 each but there is no way to search that way. For the last hour I’ve been going through “collections” trying to determine which ones are priced in my range – I’m just about ready to give up and go elsewhere. Any hints on how I could accomplish what I want??

(name deleted)

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From: Corbis Sales
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 8:40 AM
To: (name deleted)

Hi,

Unfortunately you will not find images for $10 to $50 each on Corbis. Have you looked into http://www.veer.com? Veer is our sister site and those images start at around $2 an image. I would suggest taking a look at that and seeing if you can come up with something on that end. Let me know if I can be of any more help!

Best,

Katie

Customer Sales and Service

Corbis
http://www.corbis.com
Order toll-free: 800.260.0444
Email: sales@corbis.com

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—–Original Message—–
From: (name deleted)
Sent: Mar 17, 2011 10:17:21 AM

I don’t understand. I see many $5 to $50 RF web images at Corbis – The Super Value Collections; about 1/3 of the Value Collections; and about half of the Standard Collections. Is there some trick in the small print that I’m missing??

(name deleted)

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From: Corbis Sales
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 9:37 AM
To: (name deleted)

Hi,

Im not sure exactly what you are looking for. You can get those images for that price at a very small size in dimensions and lower resolution. Are you planning to use them on the web? If you are looking for RF images anyway, Veer still may be your best option. Those come in the highest resolution and for half the price.

Best,

Katie

Customer Sales and Service

Corbis
http://www.corbis.com
Order toll-free: 800.260.0444
Email: sales@corbis.com

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—–Original Message—–
From: (name deleted)
Sent: Mar 17, 2011 10:53:27 AM

Yes I am looking for RF images to use on the web. Take a look at http://www.dangoldie.com/why_DGFS.html. Isn’t that 72dpi?? It’s perfectly adequate for my needs.

I have 43 items in my Corbis lightbox, all priced at $5 to $50 for RF web size 72dpi.

My original question was “How can I search by price rather than having to go through every single collection to see how each collection is priced??” Corbis customer service first answered that there are no $5 to $50 images at Corbis (????) and now you seem to be telling me that Corbis doesn’t want my business and that I should go to some sister site.

I’m afraid I would be nervous about ordering anything from Corbis, or a “sister site,” at this point. I can’t imagine what you guys are doing to earn a profit over there but you seem to be doing everything you can to lose my business. Sorry to have bothered you.

(name deleted)

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From: Corbis Sales
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 10:06 AM
To: (name deleted)

Hi,

Im sure there are images on Corbis you can use if you can find them, but Veer is a great option as well. Let me know if you have any more questions.

best,

Katie

Customer Sales and Service
Corbis
http://www.corbis.com

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From: (name deleted)
Sent: Mar 17, 2011 10:09 AM

Trust me, I won’t be having any more questions.

(name deleted)

Got a blog? You’re an idiot!

It’s taken months but you finally built your viewers up to about 50 or more a day. That’s a great sign that you are doing something productive – you’re a great big hero who is actually creating value in the world! 

So naturally, you are highly motivated to keep your blog current.  Daily you struggle to come up with new posts. After all, you can’t let your viewers down, can you?

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that you don’t really have any viewers, you just think you do.

There’s a dirty little secret within WordPress and that is that your blog stats are bogus. Your referrers are actually spammers trying to get you to click on their link.

It doesn’t matter whether you use WordPress or not. Check the number of views you had yesterday and compare that to the list of referrers. Chances are your referrer count equals the number of views that you think you had yesterday. Go ahead, click on each of the referrers one-by-one (better have your antivirus software up-to-date).

If you are like most bloggers, the referrer URLs won’t actually make any sense. There’s no mention of your blog at any of them. That’s because your referrers are actually spammers just trying to get you to click that URL.

WordPress knows this – they have known it for years and always claim to be close to a solution.

But the fact is – WordPress has absolutely no interest in fixing the problem. Why? Because if they did, nearly all of their bloggers would immediately discover that no one is reading their blogs and the whole WordPress business would cave in.

What can you do? Nothing, I’m afraid. The fact is that the number of blogs and bloggers far exceeds the number of interested viewers, by many, many orders of magnitude.

Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, but consider the bright side. Now that you have come to terms with the fact that no one is actually interested in what you have been posting, you can move on to something more productive (like spamming bloggers?).

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, the author makes convincing arguments that:

• our constant inundation with electronic stimuli is negatively affecting our brain’s wiring
• we are sapping our neurological ability to remember facts or pay attention long enough to fully digest what we read
• we may have a harder time generating empathy and interest in our fellow-man than those before us
• the Internet is causing the brain to take its first step backward in centuries

and cites as evidence the facts that:

• people watching CNN retain far more information without the headlines scrolling by at the bottom of the screen
• the more links there are in an article, the lower the comprehension of the reader
• our brains automatically overvalue new information
• ‘The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctly human forms of empathy, compassion, and emotion.”
• the working memory in our brain can only retain two to four items of real-time information – not nearly enough to keep up with a website packed with links, videos, and RSS feeds
• our inability to make the most of Internet input reduces us to mindless consumers of data
• Twitter is neurological heroin that trains the brain to be even more distracted
• Google is in the business of distraction
• the Internet is a dangerously powerful impetus to groupthink
• multitasking makes people “more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.”
• academic papers cite fewer sources when they are published online – authors are more tempted to throw semifinished work out on the Web, safe in the knowledge that it can be easily updated later
• the Internet era is less likely than previous eras to produce Einsteins, Edisons, and Tolstoys – absorbing hard-to-find texts rather than forever Googling random facts may have been a key to their development
• Americans spend 8.5 hours a day interacting with their PCs, TVs, and smartphones – “We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
• Americans check their email 30 to 40 times per hour
• American teenagers average over 2,000 texts per quarter (Q4 2008)

For more detail, see the excellent review by Peter Burrows in Bloomberg Businessweek at ‘The Shallows’: Is the Net Fostering Stupidity?