We talk a lot about spam around here – about inappropriate keywords that have nothing to do with a file, but are included anyway to get into more search results. We hate spam.

We hate isolated televisions keyworded 'nightlife' and 'quality control'. We hate jigsaw puzzles that have nothing to do with 'community', 'cooperation', or 'inspiration' but have all those keywords anyway. Christmas? Don't even get us started.

Bad keywording is a constant stumbling block in front of good search results, and even though we have articles, Wikis, an army of summer staff, and enough forum text to wrap the planet, it continues to be a problem. We've created a whole team of people to fix spam after the fact. What we haven't had is consequences. Now we do. We are pushing back, hard.

We know that people make mistakes. That language can be tricky, and that keywording can be genuinely difficult. If you have a hard time keywording, we want to educate you, not punish you. The resources for proper keywords are available at everyone's fingertips. Here's something to get you started:

But beyond that, there are contributors here who include bad, inappropriate keywords on every single image they upload. Even worse, sometimes the spam is added after a file inspected. There are piles of bad keywords in huge portfolios. We've asked everyone to stop, to change, to improve. Lots of people listened. Some didn't. That's who we're going to have an issue with.

In 7 days, we will begin contacting contributors and giving them advanced warning. We will be deactivating the portfolios of contributors in clear violation of our keyword policies. Please have a look through your portfolio to make sure that none of your isolated bell peppers are keyworded as 'Christmas' or 'business'. A few errors on a few files are totally understandable and we'll help you fix those eventually. What we're pursuing here is the serial spammer. You probably know who you are. If you don't, I guess you soon will. We're happy to answer any questions you might have in the mean time.

If anyone has any questions, please post them here or email artists@istockphoto.com or submit a ticket

On July 26th we started our 3rd annual Steel Cage tournament. We saw 117 entries. Now, 76 days later (somewhere along the way we made some time), after 6 rounds, hundreds of entries, and countless hours of staring at a screen in the middle of the night tweaking adjustment layers, we have one contender left. Congratulations Nbodine, you are the 2008 Battle Royale Champion, and win the $5000 prize.

If you've met our fast-talking, friendly COO, Kelly Thompson (kkthompson) then you'll recognize this star-struck twinkle in his eye. Kelly was recently in Australia and made an appearance on Australia's national Sky Business News on Sept. 24. Although soft-spoken, it's like he was born to spread the good news of iStock across the continents.
Kelly offered crisp answers and intriguing facts like Australia is our 4th largest market and 55% of all the stock sold in North America is sold by iStock.
So, sit back and watch Kelly do what he does best.

We're launching our first non-English forum next week in German to coincide with the opening of our Berlin office today.

Maybe you recall a big long forum thread from a few months back about a proposed restructuring of the forums (reduce and simplify)? Well the first part of that is going to take place next week!

We're also adding a category and moving and reorganizing some of the threads. This is only the first phase in a series of changes designed to reduce and simplify our forums.

As of today we've got a new operating entity called iStockphoto LP.

What will change for you? Nothing changes in our day-to-day operations for customers and contributors. But you will notice all agreements will now be with iStockphoto LP instead of iStock International Inc. or iStockphoto Inc. You will also notice the change on receipts, cheques, invoices etc. Please take this message as notice that effective today, October 1st, any contract(s) you have with iStockphoto will be assigned to iStockphoto LP.

If you are a customer who pays by cheque, don't worry. We will still accept any cheques you already sent in the mail addressed to iStock International Inc. But for future payments, please address cheques to our new company name: iStockphoto LP.

Thanks for your patience and dedication to help make iStock the world's leading royalty-free stock destination!

I am excited to announce that today iStockphoto Berlin officially opened its doors for business under the steady hand of our new director of European operations, Dittmar Frohmann.

There is a great opportunity to further develop business in key European markets and Berlin is an excellent place to centralize our European efforts. Our new team will help iStockphoto by speaking directly to our customers in key regions we're looking to expand in.

Catherine Gluckstein has been named vice president of international operations at iStockphoto and will plan our global expansion.

Thank you to everyone involved in making this happen, and if you are ever in Berlin – feel free to stop in!

Up until very recently, we had plans to begin selling the iStockaudio collection this fall, but due to site maintenance taking longer than expected, we’re delaying launch until 2009. We’ve been making tweaks to the audio landing page and functionality since ingestion began, but we want to make sure all our plans take off without a hitch.

Large increases in membership and traffic have necessitated the addition of another high-capacity data center. We’re also migrating the site to the more advanced PHP 5, improving the scalability of the site, and streamlining the user interface in many areas (more to come, so stay tuned). As you can imagine, making these changes to a site as large, complex and busy as iStock is a little like changing a spark plug in your car while doing 60 on the freeway: it’s doable, but you better be damn careful while you’re at it. Things have gone very well so far and you shouldn’t have noticed anything, but it means that a few features had to be pushed out.

More customers downloading more files is something we're happy to contend with, and the site maintenance and improvements we're making this season will help streamline and pave the way for a smooth rockin' iStockaudio launch next year.

iStockaudio is an incredibly important piece of the world's leading stock destination that is iStockphoto. Customers are increasingly preparing multimedia projects requiring images, videos and audio. With more than 260,000 seconds of audio, more than 7,000 tracks added by 528 contributors, iStockaudio is well on its way as a strong collection but there are a few things we could use. We've got lots of musical compositions and we welcome more, but we could really use more sound effects. You know, the brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrings, waaaaaaa-waaaaaaas, aaaawww-awwwww, badda-bing-cling-bammms and na-na-na-na-boo-boos and general ambient, isolated sounds.

Thanks to all the diligent audio contributors and to our customers patiently waiting to blend iStockaudio with their creations. Until the new year!