You are a young photographer and would like to earn some money with your pictures. As always, the Internet is a great resource to earn money, no matter what you’re selling.
If you are an amateur thing are pretty easy, you have to get your photos on a stock photography website. Here you create a photographer account and start upload your pictures, which may or may not be approved.
Currently I don’t know any stock photography website that doesn’t check what you’re posting. Now let’s see the ups and downs of selling your photos on the web.
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You want to be more than a occasional blogger. What you have to do is set up your own blog on a dedicated host. The best free blogging platform is Wordpress. The next post shows you in small steps how to do such a thing.
First let’s see the requirements:
- A host which provides the storage space, an Apache with PHP support server and MySQL databases (I use Dreamhost but the connection is pretty slow as I’m located in Romania, not USA, where the host is)
- The latest Wordpress version. (currently 2.3, which can be downloaded here).
- A text editor (you need to modify some files). Use something that doesn’t inserts spaces and other junk chars (don’t use Notepad, I use Dreamweaver).
- A FTP client. You need it to upload the Wordpress files
- A domain name. Usually the host allows you to buy one, but you can use a registrar like GoDaddy.
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You might not now, but the company that owns Wordpress and Akismet is called Automattic. If that’s not important for you what’s matters most is that it acquired Gravatar, the website that hosts your picture and links it to a specific email address.
If you comment on a blog that has a Gravatar plugin, when you mention your email it will be automatically linked to the image you’ve uploaded on Gravatar.com.
Now my educated guess is that the next big Wordpress version, probably 2.4, will incorporate gravatars by default. That’s not nearly as impressive as Tags, the biggest addition to Wordpress 2.3 but it might be a good step in the socialization direction, bringing commenters closer to blog owners.
Before Wikipedia existed, the only answer to the "what is X?" question was Howstuffworks, an excellent website where you can find out today what are and how various things work.
Once Wikipedia surfaced the web, with a much broader article database, Howstuffworks slowly but surely sunk into anonymity. Today, the website was acquired by Discovery Communications, owners of Discovery Channel and Animal planet TV channels.
What implications this acquisition has? I would bet my rent money that the new Howstuffworks will attempt to shake Wikipedia’s position as the world’s biggest encyclopedia. I’m curious what content model will they implement: user generated and moderated content or in-house creations. One thing is for sure, Discovery intends first to upload around 100.000 hours of documentaries and include Howstuffworks in their TV schedule somehow.
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