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I’ve never been to Blackpool before, so when the excuse of BarCamp Blackpool came along, I jumped at the chance. And since it’s a long way away, and the BarCamp was only on for one day, we took the opportunity to make a weekend of it, arriving in Friday evening and staying until Monday afternoon.

On arrival, we took a walk along the prom to see the sites and stretch legs after a long journey. Yes, Blackpool is a little tacky, but it’s great fun if you take it at face value and appreciate its quirky English seaside charms! We were also there at the right time of year  for the illuminations [right], which were certainly a site to see.

The BarCamp itself was held in the conference suite at the Pleasure Beach Casino – a great venue right in the heart of the town. We had three big rooms to use and the views from the 1st floor balcony at lunchtime were fantastic!

Alistair brought BarCamp Wifi-In-A-Box™ along, aka some wifi routers, cable and power in a wheelie suitcase. Once set up, it worked impeccably all day. I had Mr Duck [left]  helping me on the registration table – and showing off one of the inspired bits of schwag we all got – BarCamp Blackpool branded rock!

Evening dinner was taken at a fish and chippy a good hike away (a few folks complained how far it was to walk), but we all re-convened for a few beers and a magic show back at the Pleasure Beach afterwards. The site of @ruby_gem getting her head chopped off made quite a few of us giggle! But she didn’t deserve it – full marks for organising a friendly, fun BarCamp, we had a blast!

The plan for Sunday was originally that we would meet up at the Pleasure Beach for a go on the rollercoasters, but after “a few beers” the night before, and looking at the weather forecast for the day, we decided cowardice was the better part of valour and gave it a miss.

Instead, Alistair & I hired some chunky yellow bikes and did a spot of geocaching (in the rain) along the seafront. I think we covered about 10 miles in all. Great fun, even though we did get pretty soggy in the process. According to Alistair, that’s an occupational hazard of caching with me. Hmph.

A visit to Blackpool would not be complete without a ride on the famous Trams, (and besides, my Dad would have killed me if I’d missed out). So on Monday we took a trip all the way to Fleetwood on the rickety old ladies. We might have been looking for more geocaches along the way, I’m not telling!

All in all a great weekend, and I would recommend attending the next BarCamp Blackpool when it comes along! See all my photos from the weekend.

19th-Century French politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon might have coined the phrase, but it’s still pretty relevent today. As a soon-to-be-freelance web designer and photographer, I was particularly alarmed to read Sion Touhig’s piece at The Register, about how the glut of freely- (or cheaply-) available images on the web has “devasted” the freelance photography and photojournalism sector. Not only is content on the web more easy to pinch, but also the rise in “user generated content” has made things increasingly difficult. He states:

“User Contributed Content should be more accurately termed ‘Audience Stolen Content’, because media groups rarely pay for Citizen Journalism images and more often than not, either claim the copyright or an all-encompassing license from contributors, when they send their pictures in. That’s a copyright grab in all but name.”

The article runs to three pages and make many other salient points, but this one stuck out too:

“The perception is “if it’s on the web, it’s either free, or I’m gonna nick it anyway because, hey, ‘they’ can afford it”. The reality is that there are now more copyright-free or near-free images on the web than copyright images. Most of them will be on Flickr (owned by Yahoo!), MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) or the major corporate image portals. Neither Flickr nor MySpace exist to commercially leverage images, but clients now go there trawling for free content, so they don’t have to pay a photographer for it. It has caused a crash in the unit cost of any images which aren’t given away and which are licensed for profit.”

As a victim of copyright theft in the past, I can entirely sympathise with his point of view. In my case, I was minding my own business reading one of the broadsheets’ weekend colour suppliments a few years ago, when I stumbled across a picture which I knew incontrovertibly to have been stolen from one of my websites and used without my permission. After writing an incensed letter to the paper’s picture editor, they freely admitted that it was their fault (blaming a lazy researcher for not checking the copyright status of the image!) and agreed to pay me their standard repro fee.

It took another 4 letters and six months for them to finally honour their promise. And that was for a picture which wasn’t particularly important or valuable, and would not have earned me anything anywhere else – it was just for the principle of it that I pursued them. What would have happened if I hadn’t spotted it? I wonder how many more times newspapers get away with this sort of thing – not to mention the millions of folks online who can trawl the web for all of your pictures and do with them what they will.

And I’m afraid that’s why you’ll find I put a copyright watermark in all my images which I put online – they’re usually only 600×400 resolution too. And my Flickr images aren’t tagged with a Creative Commons licence. Once bitten, twice shy.

On a related note, recently a client gave me a brief, and I worked up a proposed site layout. But despite me following the brief, the client was not happy and has basically admitted they want me to rip off the design of another site! I flatly refuse to do so. Asking me to do this would basically be asking me to throw away my professional integrity and risk being sued for breach of copyright.

Fortunately, there was PR agency inbetween me and the client in question, who managed to mediate the situation. They were pretty much in agreement with me that it wasn’t not a healthly thing to be suggesting. And from a prospective customer’s point of view, I wouldn’t be too impressed if I found a site which had obviously pinched a design from a competitor – that wouldn’t say much for the company’s buisness ethics!

Otherwise known as the dConstruct Party…

But first, I’d like to say what a great time I had at the conference. Some really informed and informative speakers; nice venue (apart from the pokey seats) and plenty of subjects to get the braincells working. And of courese, plently of opportunity to meet like-minded geeks for beer, chat and crazy golf!

Here’s some of my pictures taken around the after-party.

[Sunset over the wreckage of the West Pier]

[Bright On Neon. OK, bad pun]

[Ross and his Paps on the crazy golf circuit]

[Who ate all the pies? A conference-goer wishes to remain anonymous]

You can see all my d.Construct/Brighton images at Flickr.

I met some great people, amongst whom were:

• Ian Forrester
• Jeffrey Veen
• Jeremy Keith
• Olly Hodgson
• Robert Lee-Cann
• Ross Bruniges
• Sheila Farrell

The other great thing about the conference was the excellent backnetwork site – no problems if you forgot to get someone’s card; just look them up later, or read their aggregated blog posts and view their Flickr pictures, all in one place. Every con’ should have one!

Lastly, here’s a cheeky little desktop which I spotted during the first session of the day – great to stop the Over The Shoulder Snoopers?

[Stop Looking At My Screen!]