With the riots across the UK, we’ve seen even more cases of news organisations grabbing an uploaded image and publishing it in their newspapers, TV channels, etc, often attributing the picture to a generic “From Twitter” or “From Facebook”.

Most of these photos are actually taken from services like twitpic, yfrog, or mobypicture, who all provide apps for mobile phones to easily upload and share photos as they’re taken.

Given the number of these media outlets taking photos linked from Twitter or Facebook without attribution, and then claiming they couldn’t find the original owner, it would be an useful option to support adding a text string such as “Copyright 2011 Ewan Leith http://twitter.com/EwanToo” (or whoever uploaded the photo) to the corner of the photo, and a digital watermark hidden in the picture to reduce the impact of people simply trimming the photo to remove that copyright claim.

This seems like a technically fairly straight-forward thing to add by the photo sharing sites, and a great little addition for anyone interested in the ownership of their own photographs.

I can’t find any services which already offer this, do you know of any?

As you might of picked up from my previous post, “What’s the point of PaaS again?“, I’m a fan of the concept of PaaS, but the current offerings don’t really deliver much for me.

However, a tweet today by @reillyusa got me thinking – he asked “How would you sell the notion of PaaS? Elevator pitch please. Bet you can’t do it”, and I’m always up for that kind of bet, even if I totally fail 🙂

So here it is, my draft version 0.1, ready to be reworked based on what people say, elevator pitch for PaaS:

By enforcing the use of specific technologies and shared services by your developers though an open Platform as a Service, you can deliver a higher level of efficiency and lower on-going support costs than may be achieved through the free choice of technology, thanks to the reduction of technology islands, shared knowledge across all developers in the organisation, and sustainable architectural choices, while allowing structured additions to the platform as needs arise.

So, how bad is it?

I came across a fairly controversial thread on Hacker News, discussing a post on teamwork ground rules by Kristof Kovacs, but what really surprised me was that these rules aren’t considered just entirely normal basic things by many of the posters on HN.

The rules from Kristof are pretty simple (if worded somewhat sharply):

• Ask: If a task is not clear, or more information is needed, please ask as soon as possible. Asking is always ok. Doing the wrong thing (or doing nothing) because you didn’t ask is not ok.
• Debrief: It’s not done until you reported it done. This is often just a one-sentence email to me or to the client, sometimes a “100%” mark in the task list, or a ticket closed. It is done, completed or fixed only when whoever needed it done knows about it.
• Warn: If a deadline you know is important will likely be missed, warn me soon, as the situation is evolving, and then we can usually figure something out. If I have to learn at the moment of the deadline that it was missed, that’s not ok. (In multi-boss situations that occur frequently in matrix organisations, or if you’re a freelancer, also warn me if your workload is above what you can actually do, instead of not doing certain tasks.)