I found these toys in a public sandbox in Davis Park in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Salt Lake City. The toys were placed by the last children who played in the sandbox.
The images might be suitable as a stock photo.
While I uploaded the image to my photo site I decided that it might be suitable for a discussion of foundational issues.
I have not been posting of late because I keep tripping over important foundational issues.
There are many foundational issues tripping around in my brain.
For example, I think it would be fun to create a blockchain base system for selling stock photos. HIVE is a great platform that would allow people to discuss stock photos, negotiate prices for stock photos and even buy the images. However, there are many important things HIVE lacks.
For example, I compressed the image for this post to 720x431 px. The image is 108kb . This is a great size for publishing on HIVE. But is not sufficient for other platforms.
The link for the image goes to a page that shows the image compressed to 1280x766. This image is 299KB. It is suitable for image sharing sites like Tumblr. It is not suitable for printing.
A professional publisher who wanted to format the image for a publication is likely to want to original file which is 6.6MB. I don't have enough funds to host the full image on personal web site. Selling this image to a professional publisher would require an hour or so work on my part.
I think it would be possible to use HIVE as the base for a microstock system that competed with the big microstock firms.
To do so; one has to address many foundational issues.
Competing in the microstock game would require millions of images and terabytes of storage. Microstock firms usually require that photographers upload the original file. Their software generates images of different sizes.
One can a GD library to create images of different sizes. To do this one has to answer questions like: What are the preferred sizes for images on HIVE?
I have been on HIVE/SteemIt for 40 moons. I have yet to encounter a post telling me the preferred image size for posts. I've asked this simple question on different communities in HIVE and have never gotten a response.
I decided to compress images to compress to a 720px width. I have no idea if this is a good choice.
A stock photography program would need to have images optimized for display on different sites. The site might include large format images with watermarks to help users select images and have display images optimized for the needs of different sites.
The original files should be in near offline storage so that microstock users who need to hd photo could download hd image.
A stock photography system would have millions of files. A decent image serving program would need a decent naming convention for the files.
HIVE generates weird crypto hashes for file names. Hashing creates unique names for the files. The hashes lose the SEO benefits that come from using human readable file names.
To compete in the microstock world, the HIVE image servers would need a naming convention that would put the images at the top of search results in image search engines.
Image hosting leads to questions about hotlinking. Hotlinking is the practice of using one image on multiple sites. There are legal questions involved in hotlinking. When site A hotlinks images from Site B, it actually uses resources from site B to display its page. Hotlinking without permission is a form of theft.
This page on yintercept.com provides an example of a hotlink. The page shows an image from another site.
When done correctly, hotlinking can save bandwidth and build traffic.
One can also use hotlinking to group files.
Imagine a situation where multiple people engage in a discussion about a topic on multiple web sites. People engaged in the discussion could use hotlinked images to visually and physically connect the discussion.
A well designed image server that promotes hotlinking wouldn't just save some bandwidth and provide SEO benefits. The image server could help hold together discussions over multiple web sites.
If I were designing a stock photography site, I would want to take the design process a step beyond the simple selling of images. I would want to design a system that actually encouraged the development of ideas.
So, lets say someone wanted to use my toy image on their web site; I would encourage the person who bought the image to give me the URL of the place where they used the image. I would then link to their page. My stock photography web site wouldn't just show the image. It would provide a full index of the places that use the images.
A long time ago I registered the domain protophoto.com to be an image server. I never found anyone interested in the idea. I have had thousands of ideas through the years that simply sit on a shelf. This brings me to the really big problem.
It would be relatively easy to use HIVE to create a killer stock photography web site. HIVE has a payment structure and social networking system that other stock firms lack.
The hard part would be integrating the image server with the HIVE blockchain so that people could share the images.
Creating an image server that integrated with HIVE would involve communicating with HIVE developers.
Writing code and building servers is easy.
Getting people to communicate is next to impossible.
I've worked on dozens of projects that I had to let go through the years simply because I was unable to find people who were willing to communicate.
I've noticed that I am not the only person who has this problem. There is something in our modern society that is making it harder and harder for people of all walks of life to communicate with each other.
It is as if there is something built into our modern world which is undermining the ability of people to communicate about a large number of important issues.
Let's look at COVID19. It appears that COVID19 triggers a devastating immune response. There are things that people could do to improve their immune systems and reduce the severity of the disease.
Immune health is an important issue during a pandemic. Oddly, there is something in our modern system which stifled an important discussion.
The issue of an image server is minor compared to the pandemic. But they both seem to share a common problem.
There appears to be something in our modern system of discourse which is undermining people's ability to communicate.
The image server issue really doesn't matter that much to me. The communication issue does.
The greatest foundational challenge of all is figuring out how to create a system where people can communicate.
Anyway, I haven't published anything on HIVE for the last several weeks because all the posts I want to write seem to boil down to foundational issues that I cannot resolve.
