fotoLibrarian

From an article by Victor Keegan in today's Guardian:

The emergence of truly huge banks of photographs has spawned a new industry. Companies such as istockphoto.com in the US and the much smaller fotolibra.com in the UK (not to mention Flickr) are undermining the business models of companies such as Getty Images and Corbis by offering high-quality images on practically any subject at a tiny fraction of the price charged by the big boys.

This may help to explain why Getty Images recently bought istockphoto. Video uploading sites such as YouTube grab most of the headlines, but in many ways they are less sophisticated and much less successful than their stills rivals in generating real communities. Photo sites are also largely free of pirated material. They are the web's true monument to user-generated content.

The full article can be seen online here.

Keegan has put his finger right on the button when he writes that sites such as fotoLibra are generating real communities. The amount of positive feedback we get is mildly embarrassing, and there is a strong sense of being part of that hateful buzzword usually used to describe any disparate bunch of potential voters united by a common grievance, a community. We're breaking down the barriers in the picture buying market in much the same way that Abebooks.com opened up secondhand bookselling to the world. Before Abebooks, secondhand booksellers were either your Sotherans or your Quaritches, or the local mid-terrace shop with a two mile reach. What Abebooks did was herd customers to those local shops. That was disruption.

In August I moaned on this blog that fotoLibra was being being labelled disruptive, but now I recall (it's the first thing to go) that ten years ago I publicised a book by Jean-Marie Dru titled 'Disruption: overturning conventions and shaking up the marketplace'. This is the first significant work on disruption, a topic usually credited to Clayton M. Christensen. But Christensen published in 1997, a year after Dru.

See? I was in at the start of it all. And in the excitement of fotoLibra I'd forgotten about it.