Tony Karrer's eLearning Blog on e-Learning Trends eLearning 2.0 Personal Learning Informal Learning eLearning Design Authoring Tools Rapid e-Learning Tools Blended e-Learning e-Learning Tools Learning Management Systems (LMS) e-Learning ROI and Metrics

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

PBWiki Image Overlay - Yuck

This issue has been resolved. See No More Little Sandwiches. And I'm still a fan of PBWiki.

I just took a look at my blog and wow, all of my images that I've been keeping on PBWiki for use on my personal Wiki and for use on my blog have randomly started having an image overlayed on top of my images with their logo. You can see two examples below that I've saved from PBWiki and then uploaded to blogger.





I don't think I received any kind of warning about this. That's pretty bad. So, I go from being a raving fan telling people about them during presentations (literally yesterday was one example) to a person who now can't recommend them because who knows what they will do in the future.

Now I have to go out and figure out who I'll use instead.

12 comments:

Mark said...

did you ask them?

Karl Kapp said...

oh, I just thought you were thinking about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Tony Karrer said...

Mark - I'm reaching out to them, but I wish they would have reached out to me first.

Collin Kromke said...

That sucks. Are you using the free version of PBWiki? If so, I'm really not surprised. Many of the free Web 2.0 sites are starting to figure out that they need to generate revenue somehow, even if it means putting ads on photos that are hosted on their site in an effort to get more traffic.

Damon Regan said...

Disappointing to see. I love pbwiki and agree it would have been nice for them to provide a warning.

Anonymous said...

I do agree that having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich floating above your head tends to diminish the professional polish a bit. Sorry, Tony, I did have to laugh... :)

Donald Clark said...

PBWiki? I thought everyone used Flickr to share photos :-)

Anonymous said...

Tony -
For bub.blicio.us, I store all my images in a free, separate Flickr account (I have a personal one I pay for). The free Flickr account is full of screenshots, logos, etc that I use in blogging and it works great.
If you want to stick with a a wiki, I'm a big fan of wikispaces.com. Collin is right though. A lot of the free sites are now trying to generate more revenue, and that means more advertisting, etc, to get you to pay.

Anonymous said...

Although I use a lot of CC-licensed images from Flickr, and they could decide to do the same thing, I also keep my own images (those I've taken) on my own site.

It's a bit retro of me, but I figure free sites are a bit like standard network TV: sooner or later, they're going to want to make some money, just like the rest of us.

Instead of commercials, that means annoying ads you didn't choose (e.g., on Ning), annoying ads you signed up for (e.g., AdSense on blogs), subscription fees, or donations (which I suspect are about as reliable as tip jars at Starbuck's).

If enough people notice, maybe PBwiki will rethink the idea.

Anonymous said...

Yes, per Michelle's suggestion, WikiSpaces is a great option. As an option, you might want to look at WetPaint as well.

Anonymous said...

No way - that's totally crazy, I hadn't noticed that before ???!!! I wonder who thought doing that would be a good business idea :-)

I guess there must be a way of getting rid of it, apologies I don't know, but I also completely agree that they should have let you know first. I had a quick scan of their getsatisfaction site but couldn't see anything on first 3 pages.

Maybe Wiki matrix might offer some alternatives if you want something different.

George Ritacco said...

What a horror show. Sometimes people just don't have any common sense. It's probably relegated to the free version or if not - you can "buy out" of the sandwich image.