Um.... Host on google blogger?

Further to my last comment, you can keep your domain name:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=55373

Bandwidth charges are for suckers.

What about joining an advertising uhh collective. I'm thinking about The Deck that takes ads and posts them automagically on like-minded sites. I'm not sure if the sites like Design Observer and Coudal and Kottke are like-minded with ewe, but if so, I think you bring the brand (Future Perfect) and they bring in da funk and da ching.

I promise never to write like this on your blog again.

You know, you could host your images on Flickr and videos on YouTube. That would cut down *significantly* on any bandwidth - and would probably be the least radical change you could do.

But no, I don't think corporate money would destroy your integrity. After all, it's already paying for most of the content of the site.

:)

What about licensing some/all of your photos to a stock photo agency or licensing them back to your company for promotional purposes with royalties being used to fund the blog.

I hope you will continue, i love reading your posts and exploring all these new ideas.

Seconding Janne here: there are other places for images and media to go. Amazon's S3 service excels at this, I've been throwing mountains of stuff at it for the past year (images, video, music) and it continues to cost me just a few bucks per month. It's so good I'm considering getting an iPod's worth of music up there too, and listening to my collection over the web instead of from my laptop. S3 would hold all your bandwidth-guzzling media and downloads, while your current host would hold the rest.

I think figuring out your own cheaper hosting would be a better situation than getting your employer to pay your costs. Nothing about the site would necessarily change, but you might find yourself in a different emotional relationship to the comped service. I might find myself thinking differently about a sponsored blog.

There are easy ways to do moves like this in such a way that your old URLs don't stop working and you get to keep pointing at something that says "janchipchase.com" at the end of it.

hi Jan,
advertising is an option, you could easily get +500US$ a Week for a banner here. (because the audience is pretty targeted)

but as far as I know, high traffic site (3TB) wouldn't cost you more than 60U$D/month to host...
This is less than what many people spend in drinks each week!

I think you just have to accept hosting as another live-expenses, or go for advertising.
but, never never never let somebody directly pay for it, or this won't be you playground anymore and it will become your duty.. :(

good work, and nice turd-post :D

Good luck!

easy: move all the images to flickr, the bandwidth is unlimited for $25/year

How about donations? I enjoy your writing and imagery on an almost daily basis, so I'd happily slip you a fiver now and then. I bet you could easily pay for a year's hosting with a little help from your readers.

Or is that a naughty suggestion, what with the blogosphere being free and all that?

I was always under the impression that FP was a sanctioned product of the research you're doing.

It reads wonderfully as a travelogue of course, but the product placement is integral. I don't know if it's possible to write about being the ultimate road warrior without mentioning the tools you're using. Lenovo, Nokia, Nikon etc must love this of course.

I even bagged a 6300 on the basis of seeing some guy in a yurt scanning yours for cool photos - I don't fly much so this is the closest I've got to 'living the life'.

Shipping out to Flickr would be a useful exercise, like moving house. Independence means being platform agnostic these days.

Stay free. With advertising, flickr, whatever suits you.
We enjoy your blog, it is a rare and stimulating one; so keep it a place for your thoughts.

Ta for suggestions...

> photo licensing

that's a very difficult and competitive marketplace to be in. + the little matter of commercial usage rights for a lot of these photos.

> flickr

Whilst an excellent service (or hei, Ovi Share, heh), i can't help feeling it would suck the life out of writing and posting - far easier to have it in one place. Yes how very web one dot oh. (we're old skool here)

> sponsorship

pretty much every way i look at it, its too obtrusive and dilutes the pure snow white innocence of the site.

> product placement

what product placement?

surely you don't mean this:
http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2008/01/when_pointers_f_2.html

that says more about you then it does me.

given that the occasional stray body park makes it into shot... there's always the opportunity for footwear and hand-cream sponsorship...

> blinkr

nice subliminal advertising. sneaky :)

> collectives

Collectives are for people who like to collect, together with a common purpose. Strikes me as a bit unadventurous.

> sanctioned

Staying under the radar more like, certainly in the early days.

So far I go with Michals suggestion of a decent heavy duty hosting service and suck up the costs for the pure unadulterated love. But keep the ideas flowing...

Another blog I read started using ads because of increased hosting costs. His ads are less obnoxious than most, and he blogged about choosing advertising. It might be helpful:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000893.html
How To Advertise on Your Blog Without (Completely) Selling Out

Jan,

I feel your pain, as this can happen to any of us that have the good fortune to pass from obscurity to wider readership (and the suffering for success).

I am for the 'no ads' as that 100% changes the face of the site, with only a chance of helping the bill.

Yeah, Migurski and Janne are right (who am I to disagree with those two geniuses?). In the past few years, it has become easier to host media off-server on many free services.

On our work site, we've offloaded all the media to other sites, not only to put the media where the people are, but to save us the storage costs. All we pay for is serving text pages (and maybe a pro account here or there), the other services do the rest. That's why we don't have a storage space of our own to host your stuff.

One other thing: try to come up with a solution that keeps you physically separate from the mother ship. You won't be here for ever (though it might feel that way). If you store stuff on the mother ship, you lose it when you go.

Migurski and Janne can help you vault our of 1.0 and into distributed media. And, whatever you end up doing, please write up a follow-on.

Tchau,

Charlie

Subscribed Micropayments or a Tip Jar.

I was going to recommend Flickr as well (or a free CDN such as http://www.archive.org/web/freecache.php or http://www.coralcdn.org/) but particularly if you're going to be exploring a quasi-academic approach you might want to look at the Internet Archive (archive.org). I think they'd be happy to add your social commentary to their collection.

I don't visit ad-supported sites, for whatever that's worth, and specifically not Deck or Federated Media sites - please don't go that way. xo ag.

Personally, I don't notice ads anymore on the websites I love, especially if they're Google's text-based ones. I can understand you wanting to avoid ads altogether, though.

Staying independent from Nokia is crucial, in my opinion.

I agree with the idea of hosting your photos on Flickr. Would there be a problem with setting up a server in your LA apartment, using Dynamic DNS, and paying for a DSL or cable connection? If you host your videos off-site, it won't be painfully slow. The IP addresses don't change very often, and with everybody torrenting, the ISP likely won't notice. I do near terabyte traffic on top of massive amounts of torrenting, and have never had a problem. Though I've only hosted a fairly well-traversed website on my desktop at university.

Barrett
New Haven and NYC

I think the MOST transparent thing to do would be to have your employer host the site. Currently, unless people click on the 'About' link there's not a clear way of knowing your source of funding. Making it loud and clear that your research and this blog (which seems to be largely about your research) are funded by Nokia disclaims any real or perceived conflict of interest. Plus, you can then be upfront to your readers about what level of editorial control (if any) Nokia exercises over your posts. Corporate funding gets a black eye, but with editorial independence I don't see what the problem is.

I don't know if Flickr's so tough to handle. I mean if you upload pics manually using the platform it's a pain but if you use uploader such as Picture Sync, it's OKAY as you make a selection of pics, upload them, get well-formated urls and use them in your post.

In addition, I don't know what blogging tool you use but some also have integration with picture uploading features (for instance ecto+iphoto on Mac)

As for the ads... I don't think it's pertinent.

Jan,

FWIW, I bounced your post off of a friend over at echoditto...

Couple of different suggestions:

Find a way to get someone to pay for a project that comes out of his blog -- for example, get him a publishing deal, to write an old-fashioned book, and then use the advance fee ($10k? More?) to cover a lot of the hosting costs.

Another example would be a University partnership, where he gets a job teaching a class or who knows what else, but instead of getting paid a lot, they agree to cover the cost of his blog. Its still "sponsorship' in one sense of the word, but... (I know you travel constantly but if scheduled in advance and you just swing through...)

Sell something else. Can he create a product, or a series of small products, that people would buy a lot of, that he could automate the distribution of, and then have the proceeds go to pay for the blog?

Cheers,
JoRoan

You might want to consider changing your blogging software to put less articles per page, or at least on just the front page. I stopped counting at 50 images with plenty of scrollbar left...

I would suggest talking to an ad network like Indieclick. They are really good about placing very good, relevant, non-intrusive ads on their partner site.

http://www.indieclick.com/

Jan,

Have others host your stuff.

Amazon S3 or
Flickr or
Google Blogs

How much are your bandwidth charges anyway?

We use Westhost. Prices for big bandwidth and our own server aren't bad.

Don't forget to tell us what you decide!

Hi, Jan!

Great blog! I just stumbled onto you from google image search a few days ago.

With regard to bandwidth, first, there should be less on your top page. Suppose someone reads your blog daily -- then they just need to see today's posts. Or it could be a week's. Or the last 10 posts. That alone could cut your bandwidth 50-90%, good for a few years -- or until someone writes another news article about you.

Second, p/hosting your photos on one of the 40 or so free photo hosting services would probably cut 99% of your bandwidth, or whatever the proportion of photo data vis-a-vis text is. Also gives you experience in comparing their services (at the cost of some loss of continuity). Photo software like iPhoto lets you throw your photos onto two or more sites with uploader plugins.

Third, I think it would be worthwhile to try out some of the blogging services, too. Some blogging software lets you post on multiple services, such as a Wordpress blog AND Blogger. Again, you'd get some experience comparing them, kind of research in its own right, but even there. the bandwidth problem might necessitate considering ads again(?).

You could just swallow the costs, as was also suggested. But… I have one other idea. Since you are all about cellphones, how about making a site formatted to the cellphone internet standard? That would be unusual, bleeding-edge, and appropriate (and would also reduce the bandwidth). People like me could read your blog even in the train. Pictures would be thumbnailed down to a size that fits on docomo, softbank, au, nokia, etc screens. Full-sized pics would be a click away. Limit the top page to the past 2-3 days' posts or something like that. You could provide a button to load a PC-formatted browser page as an option, but the default would be keitai-sized. Maybe a considerable proportion of visitors would just read the default small-formatted page.

What do you think?
-B

I couldn't care less as long as you keep writing.

Ian, ads suck big time - and it may not be a very profitable option...

You can move to a blogging host like typepad or blogger - and use flickr ( can you also use share at ovi for photo hosting? )

About taking the money - dont think about it as selling out - think of it as legit, hard earned money by helping your mothership in internet brand building :D

Like Ben, I couldnt care less as long as you keep writing....

using flickr has nothing to do with sucking anything
it's just a disk drive for your photos and an infinite photo bandwidth provider that is all!

...Roland "I have no stock in Yahoo" just 35000 photos on flickr Tanglao

Jan,

Do whatever it takes!

My friends and I (all students) love your blog and insights. Whatever format you decide to put them in, we'll keep reading!

This is an interesting conversation with parallels and implications for anyone playing in new media, whether it's writing or music or photography, etc. Not only is there a covering costs issue, but why not earning a living? This may not be what your interested in, Jan, but why shouldn't you earn money from this?

Aesthetics aside, and I understand that's not trivial, is there a real difference between collecting money from ads or collecting money from Nokia? Ultimately, someone would be paying and isn't there really only an issue if at some point you feel your comprising your integrity?

As it stands now, Nokia is already paying for this via your employment through them. Your income from them is presumably how you're paying your bills now. They're just not paying you enough!

Funding is funding and doesn't inherently corrupt. While perception does matter (i.e. how people think of you taking sponsorship if you went that route), you're the only one who can answer for your integrity. Your ability to maintain that will come through one way or another.

get the funding from Nokia, disclose that they're paying the bill, but state that your thoughts are your own and other than being the "sugar daddy" they have no control or say about the words you write.

if not ... then ask for donations on the side. ping someone at NRC and ask for hosting, they should have plenty of bandwidth for you.

Jan,
You might look at some of the ideas Kevin Kelly (of Wired and the Cool Tools site fame). His article on "Better Than Free" has a few high-level ideas on how to make money off of something that is provided for free.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html

Good luck! Really enjoy the articles!

As I see it you are a researcher working for Nokia who is kind enough to share some really interesting work with the rest of the world. I assume that your trips and research are already being paid by Nokia, so it seems reasonable that they pay the hosting costs. I cannot see the importance of the distinction that you want to make between paying for your salary and all your research costs and, in addition, paying for making your experience of the research process public.

A small disclaimer saying that you work for them but that this blog is not sanctioned by them should suffice. It would also save you the trouble of moving hosts, pictures, etc.