Your site obviously has commercial background and not obtained permission to participate at Skywatch Friday. Your link has been removed.
In addition – since you decided to set up a counterfeit Skywatch on your own – you are not welcome to participate at the original.
Please remove all references to the original Skywatch Friday from your site.
The Skywatch Friday Team
I was deeply hurt by that simple comment. I don’t know why it hurt so much, one of those, “all over the body, flooding of endorphins” kind of pain. Instead of a thank you or nice note, I felt like it was pretty harsh. Erase it? Won’t do any good. Leave it up? I think so.
(The image is the front of the Museo Alameda, quite a piece of art, in and of itself. Part of the problem, that picture is worth a couple of hundred words.)
Commercial background? To be sure. Well, this site is clearly commercial. This portion of it? The weblog, not so much. I recall discussing that early this week or last week or sometime recently. Don’t care.
But BexarCountyLine.com has a commercial background? Ask any artist about getting paid even one quarter of his or her worth. There is advertising. When I set it up a few years ago, it was a photo-weblog, digital images from within Bexar County Line, and that was it. An advertiser I use offered a new product that was an advertising layer over the image. I figured, at the inception, that could pay for hosting.
It didn’t. Figure hosting, name and everything runs about $100 a year. That advertising has paid, maybe, $20 thus far. The advertiser keeps sending me note, “Increase you revenue by increasing your page views, &c.”
However, it does carry some advertising. In that sense, it is commercial, but even a tag for Sky Friday is advertising. Part of the “link back” plan. Cool way to get more traffic.
I did, early on, scale back some of the more aggressive pop-up an other invasive ads. Not like a few cents here or there was going to matter.
BexarCountyLine.com was, and still is, just an experiment, The rules are simple. Digital images, no fancy photo-shopping. Taken within the confines of Bexar County. Picture a day. More or less. As a writer, it’s harder for me, just a picture, no background, no words, no prose artful tacked together to help the image make sense. Besides the Sky Watch Friday group, there was a series of other carnivals I participated in.
What was amusing, as I was wrestling with my own moral compass and how to answer this, the comments started to stack up in the kramerwetzel.com posting to the same portal.
Buried in my horoscopes, there are links to various photo weblogs, I’ve fished out of the original portal.
I started the Sky Friday as it as what I was first looking for, when I stumbled across the other guys. When I posted a banner, my banner always ran beneath theirs. Symbol of gratitude. Rip-off? Okay, call it what you want. Kind of harsh. I don’t have time to click through 300 links. I was looking for portal with less than a hundred.
Still stings a little, I approached this endeavor, hardly an enterprise, as a way to explore digital art, and I got labelled.
That pisses me right off, getting labelled – especially when it misses the mark.
I don’t feel like flipping through the most recent three hundred or so posts that the portal has, but almost every time I checked, there was a sidebar with advertising. Not exactly playing fair.
Too bad, that was a recent photo that I really liked. Hurts that much more.
Bastards