Updated (10-4-07): Tristan Kime, the manager of program management - community at Sprint, read my article and addressed my concerns. He e-mailed me that the "Written by Tristan" was indeed a coding issue and it has been fixed. He agrees that the formatting needs to be fixed, but it's a matter of having the time to do so.
In addition, there is a limitation on categories in BuzzAboutWireless compared with Photobility's. Also, the Photobility articles on BuzzAboutWireless end in mid-April, rather than through June, because Sprint's lawyers haven't approved them....yet (?).
Sprint's lawyers had to read and approve every article I wrote for Sprint's camera phone weblog. None of my articles were ever rejected for editorial content, but it took time -- sometimes a very, very long time.
So, thank you Tristan for the update.
I was looking at Sprint's BuzzAboutWireless "community" site and see that a few weeks ago that "Photobility," consumer-oriented camera phone weblog I helped write for Sprint has been incorporated into BuzzAboutWireless (see below).
Unfortunately, the integration of "Photobility" with BuzzAboutWireless is less than ideal.
Firstly, I wrote about 49 percent of the articles and Tony Henning, a photography consultant at Future Image, wrote another 49 percent, with Sprint employees writing the remaining two percent. However, if you click on any of the Photobility articles in BuzzAboutWireless, you'll see that below the headline is the byline "Written by Tristan."
No, Tristan didn't write anything. Tony and I mostly did. I assume this was originally the fault of whoever imported the Photobility articles, rather than deliberate plagiarism. However, it has been almost a month since that has occurred and the byline hasn't been changed to reflect the real writers.
Where's the rest?
Secondly, I wrote Photobility articles through June 2007. The articles in BuzzAboutWireless end in mid-April. There are more than 20 articles I wrote through June, plus whatever Tony wrote. Where are those articles?
Thirdly, all the articles in Photobility had spaces between the paragraphs and also between the subheads in order to make the articles easier to read. When the articles were imported into BuzzAboutWireless, the paragraph spacing wasn't "imported" so that everything is just a big block of text.
Fourthly, all the Photobility articles were tagged with at least one "category" to make them easier to find. I was adamant about incorporating that feature. The imported articles, however, do not include any categories.
Check out the real deal
If you want to get an idea of what Photobility used to look like when it was live, check out archive.org and click on the most recent link for what used to be photobility.sprint.com. Perhaps I'm being a little bit picky, but I'm very careful about journalistic integrity as well as ensuring a good reader experience.
I think Photobility was an excellent weblog (my participation notwithstanding) that provided valuable information about camera phones for consumers, and I was sorry to see it end.
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