I live for my photo comments. :-) It's true I'm an artist, and I have the inherent desire to create things, but if no one ever noticed or liked my stuff, I'm afraid it'd take all the joy out of it for me. Today I logged on tribe to see I had a photo comment! I went to read it - it was a comment from someone asking that I not post any more thinny (sic) veiled spam.

Just for kicks I got a definition for spam online. It isn't an acronym, but apparently a slang term for the real acronym UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email. Given that definition, I should just be able to go to bed and rest easy in the fact that my picture posts don't fit that definition, but sadly for me it doesn't work like that.

Every once in a while something like this happens to me. A while back I actually had the time to be on tribe more regularly. I hung out on DIY a lot. I could actually answer a lot of the questions on there, and I felt like I was a useful part of that community. I decided to clean out my closet and get rid of a bunch of my unfinished belly dance costumes. I thought, maybe some of the girls on DIY might like them - I was just going to sell for cost of materials to avoid a total loss - I thought that that way they might at least not go to waste! So with nothing more than a desire to give something to that community, I posted some pics on my website and posted a topic with a link to the pics. My post got deleted and a "no spam" post got bumped to the top. I thought - oops - and wasn't mad or vindictive, but totally lost my desire to answer any questions on that tribe.

I realize that we live in an ad-heavy culture. We are continually bombarded with advertising in the form of billboards, commercials, pop up ads, those annoying banner ads that make noise until you find the stop button. But to me there's a big difference between a large company doing mass emails to anyone advertising ringtones, or free ipod offers, or male enhancement supplements, and a real human being who creates pretty things and posts them to a select group of people who she (or he) thinks will like them!

I also think that most people can't see things from the point of view of a home business crafter. Big companies have advertising budgets and pay people in third world countries to create cheap merchandise. When you buy something from me you are paying materials, shop expenses, and my labor (which costs a lot more than labor overseas but remember I do have to eat) and you are getting something top quality, made by someone who cares about what they do. In order to sell my products on the internet, I need to get the word out about them on the internet. For handcrafted items, words just don't work. People need a picture. I could pay for banner ads on different belly dance themed sites. In order to afford it, considering I'd have to post enough ads to replace my exposure thru tribe, I'd have to increase my prices by about 25%. I choose to keep my prices down so more people can afford my pretties and deal with the occasional complaint about the pictures.

I also try to be as considerate as possible while posting pics - I delete all my old pictures and only post to tribes that are specifically related to tribal or belly dance costuming, and never in the "topics" section.

Internet sites like tribe.net have made it possible for single people to start selling their creations. Ebay is great too, but if you create something unusual enough it is unlikely that anyone will be searching for it. Eliminating the pics from small crafters means eliminating many of the small crafters. I don't know about everyone else, but I love being able to buy costume items that are handcrafted and produced in very limited quantities. Therefore I vote to keep the pictures! - though my vote probably shouldn't count since I'm a picture poster... :-P

What is everyone else's opinion on the subject?