SypherVOX

TenHunt.com is an interesting little online scavenger hunt site that gives away prizes to people who answer questions about ten Web sites.  Its a sneaky way to get us, the simple-minded consumers, to go to some new sites and read about what they have to offer. 

This somehow turns capitalism and advertising into a fun and addictive little game!  I've been playing for a few weeks now.  Each time a new hunt starts up, my wife and I grab our notebook computers and race to the finish.  Tonight, however, the hunt didn't go very smoothly.

The first thing that looked odd was Question #1 of the hunt.  Actually, the oddity was tha lack of a Question #1.  The clock was ticking away up top, letting me know that the game was running, but somehow I needed to know the answer before I knew the question.  I tried "42" over and over to no avail.  Finally, I gave up and tried to use another Web browser.  To my surprise, the countdown in the new browser window showed that the hunt was delayed another 15 minutes!

That was a big relief to me.  I didn't mind that the site was having problems... just as long as it wasn't just me. :-)  So I waited a few minutes, then went back to my first browser to re-log in.  Voila!  Another 15 minutes were added to the first 15 minute wait!  Wha?  I checked the chat room and found around seventy people cursing and complaining and anxious to win the iPod and Zune combo prize.

So I went back to waiting for the start.  5... 4... 3... 2... 1... It started this time!  Well, sort of.  It started for some people, but not for me.  I noticed the leaderboard on the side of the page began to show that people had answered Question #1 and Question #2, but Question #1 hadn't shown up for me yet.  I refreshed a few times and finally got it to show.  I was six questions behind but I still felt like I had a chance... until I got to Question #4.  It was a question about LastMinute-Auctions.com.  Well, apparently, LastMinute-Auctions wasn't ready for 200 simultaneous visitors, 'cause it froze up like a tongue on a February flagpole.

Twenty minutes later, I was finally able to get to LastMinute-Auctions.com to continue the hunt.  By that time, however, a handful of people had already finished the hunt, so there was no rush any longer.  I continued on and finished in 127th place.

Long story short: this is a fun idea when it works, but it looks like the site is going through a few growing pains.  I hope they can get this ironed out by next week. ;-)

If you would like to play, follow one of the links in this post to TenHunt and sign up!  I'll get credit for the referral, and if you win, I'll win too!  The way I've been playing, that may be my best chance at actually winning. :-)

A couple of my Flickr photos of the Bellagio fountain in Las Vegas were chosen by LightWorld to be included in their most recent issue (#2, August-September 2006).  I am very excited about this, as it's the first time I've had any of my photographs published in a magazine.  Sure, most of the magazine is in Turkish, so it really isn't something I can read and understand, but the photos and layout were very cool.

This is the first time I've heard of any printed magazine using photos found on a public shared photo site like Flickr.  I hope that this is a new trend and that other magazines start picking up on this.  It seems to be something that would benefit both the magazines and any up-and-coming amateur photographers that they select.  The magazine gets to use some nice photographs for free, and the photographers get some publicity and bragging rights.  The only people that may lose out on this would be the average professional photographers who normally got paid for their photographs.


If any other amateur photographers out there are looking to get their photos published in magazines like LightWorld, here are my suggestions:

1. Put your photos up on Flickr, Yahoo Photos, or one of the other BIG photo sharing sites out there.  I personally love Flickr, but the Yahoo site is currently more feature-rich.  Flickr is owned by Yahoo now, though, so I would guess that many of the features will be shared across both sites soon.  I used to be a big supported of publishing photos on my own Web site, even using my own hand-rolled photo gallery.  While that worked great for sharing my photos with friends and family, there was almost no chance of someone from a magazine stumbling upon my site.  Sure, a Google image search might have worked, but it would have also returned a bunch of useless images and stock photography.  Searches done on the big photo sharing sites should return a much more refined and useful result set.
   
2. Add tags to all of your good photos.  They can't find what you don't tag.  In my case, both of these photos were tagged with Las Vegas, Bellagio, and fountain, so they were very easy for LightWorld to find.
3. Don't worry as much about the title or description of the photos.  The tags are the most important part.  The title and description can always be added later.  In my case, I have over 3000 photos on Flickr.  I'd be surprised if more than 100 of them have a descriptive title or description.  All of the good ones have tags, though. ;-)
   

That's it.  While there are a ton of other options to add your photos to other categories or shared photo groups, I don't think magazine editors are going to use those tools to find photos.  So, stick to my three simple steps and you should have as good of a chance as I did in being published.

If you do happen to have a photo published, let me know, will ya? ;-)