Here's the The Lowdown
from DN Journal,
updated daily
to
fill you in on the latest buzz going around the domain name industry.
The Lowdown is
compiled by DN Journal Editor & Publisher Ron
Jackson.
Who
Are They? Now We Know! Readers Help Us Match Names With
Industry Faces
In
my last Lowdown postI asked readers to help us identify
some people in our massive industry photo
archives that I did not have names for. As I
expected, our readers came through like champs! To
start the first of what I expect will be many
identification quests, I posted the shot of the
two lovely ladies in the photo below that was
taken at the 2008 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York conference
and asked anyone who knew them to send me their
names. The story quickly
took
a spooky twist that makes me believe ESP is
real.
A
couple of hours after posting the photo a random
thought went through my mind - "If there is
anyone I don't know Laura Schmidtwill
know them." Now Laura, who produces the
Domain
Roundtable conference, certainly
knows a lot of people, but the same can
be said for others who have been in the business
for awhile. So I wondered why Laura's name specifically
popped into my head. A short time later I was
back at my computer and there was a note waiting
from, you guessed it - Laura! As I told her -
cue the Twilight Zone music! And
sure enough she had the answer too - identifying
Paolo Antik and Debbie Santoyo.
Paolo
Antik (left) and Debbie Santoyo
In
addition to names, Laura had the back story for
me. Paola had worked for Yahoo and then TrafficZ
but has since left the industry (don't worry she
will be back - no one can get this business out
of their blood for long!). Debbie is also a Yahooite
and the two of them had gone to T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
New York to represent the company. First case
closed!
While
identifying two people might seem like a
small thing to you, it is a huge help
to me. When industry people pop up in
the news I was having a hard time
finding the best photograph (or finding
one at all) among the tens of thousands
of photos on my hard drive. Someone told
me
Picasa
Logo
about Google's
Picasa
program and it his been a Godsend (it is
also free - amazing considering
what a time and work saver it is).
If I have a
photo of someone and know their name, I
can enter the name under the face in one
photo and Picasa, using facial
recognition, will then scour my hard
drive and pull up every picture I
have with that person in it and copy
thumbnails into an album for that
individual! Suddenly I could look up any
name and see, in some cases, hundreds of
shots of that person along with the
exact location of the original photos on
my hard drive. It made it a snap to find
the best possible available shot of
anyone in our database. That's why I
want to identify the people in our files
whose names I do not have.
Publishing
some of those photos I need IDs for also gives
me a chance to introduce you to some industry
people you may not have known before either and
it puts some fresh faces in DN Journal alongside
the old standbys we have all come to know so
well.
By the way,
I found that I need to give someone else
credit besides Laura. Barbara Neu,
who is the wife of T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
co-founder Howard
Neu, is a terrific
photographer, so at the end of most
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences, she and I
trade copies of each other's camera
cards. When I got the names I needed
from Laura and pulled up the original
photo again in Picasa I noticed it was
in one of my folders of photos taken by
Barbara - so she gets credit for that
great shot of Paolo and Debbie. I might
have known - Barbara always takes the
best pictures!
Since my
first call for help yielded positive
results I'll post another photo next
week and we'll see who can be come up
with an ID first next time.
Barbara
& Howard Neu
at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Las Vegas 2010
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