There are some very good infographics out there but most are rubbish. No surprises there – that’s Sturgeon’s Law for you. They’re also very popular at the moment, with otherwise respectable people spewing the good and (more often) the bad into my RSS reader and Twitter stream. Although I think this one by lunchbreath has a lot to say:
Notwithstanding all of that, I wanted to draw a line between the ongoing infographic boom and a Smashing Magazine post from a few years back discussing a micro-trend for bespoke designs for individual blog posts. Warning: that post contains the word ‘blogazine’.
It was a designer’s reaction to seeing millions of people using the same old blog layouts to express themselves. However, interesting as it was, one look at the advantages and disadvantages at the end of the article would tell you it was never going to take off in a meaningful way. In fact, the trend has swung towards ever more flexible content types to cope with things like responsive design and dynamically-generated pages.
Still, despite everything, the idea had its merits and I see some of those in the way that infographics have been taken up – particularly by many websites and marketers/campaigners*. The key thing is that they solve problems for many of the people involved in their propagation:
readers like them because (at their best, at least) they make large amounts of information/data more easily digestible and are more interesting to look at than standard blog posts
websites like embedding them because they’re a quick and easy form of content and a shortcut to something like having a single blog post with its own bespoke design. Also, readers like them
marketers/campaigners like making them because websites will embed them (without editing them) and readers will share them around. They can also be good for communicating a message effectively
A final thought on this – it might help to have the vocabulary to differentiate between types of visually-presented content. Overuse of the info- prefix means that the format is less likely to be used for opinion, questions, mindless invective, whimsy or any number of other uses. Or maybe we just call those ‘graphics’.
*I think journalists tend to take a slightly different approach to this, although don’t ask me to back that up or explain/justify differentiating between journalists and website owners.
Over the past few years there have been more and more funded projects that have tried to team up developers and cultural organisations. Australia Council for the Arts have run two versions of their Geek in Residence scheme since 2009. Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab recruited their own geek in residence in mid-2010.
Hack days (events where organisations provide data for developers to play with) have become more and more popular over the past couple of years with culture, more culture, history, music and Black Country Museums all tackled. About a year ago, the first fully-capitalised Culture Hack Day took place in London, with follow-ups in Edinburgh, Cambridge, Leeds and Atlanta. There are probably more examples of this kind of thing.
More
Three more projects that aim to bring together developers and cultural organisations have been announced recently. Working from the littlest to the biggest…
The CultureCode Initiative is a series of free events in the North East taking place over Feb and March 2012. The idea is to match up cultural organisations/practitioners with software developers and creative technologists. They’ll do this via an introductory workshop and a meet and greet. Things will culminate with everyone working together at a hack day.
I think more digitally-savvy cultural organisations are a good idea, for lots of reasons. If you’ve read this far then I’ll assume you don’t need me to list them for you.
At some point, what I’d like to see emerging from all this activity is:
Some way of tying together all these geographically-disparate projects, even if just very loosely, so these projects can feed off each other more than they currently do. Funding respects borders, there’s no reason why online activity needs to.
Some indication of what sort of value these workshops, networking events, R&D programmes and hack days provide to what sort of participant.
Related to the above, an idea of the merits/drawbacks of these initiatives as compared to other ways of bringing digital capabilities into an organisation (such as hiring staff, paying an agency or consultant, asking your little cousin to lend a hand or taking a course/subscribing to a bunch of useful RSS feeds and learning everything yourself).
NESTA and Arts Council England recently commissioned a bunch of projects via the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, aiming to connect arts and cultural organisations with technology companies in a way that can benefit the wider sector. Hoorah to that.
They had £500k to dish out to a handful of organisations. A grand total of 459 artists and organisations applied, prompting some (including myself) to suggest that a lot of people may have wasted their time and energy. Incidentally, most of the eight commissioned organisations are blogging intermittently at digitalrndfund.wordpress.com.
The types of arts and cultural organisations that applied – mainly performing and visual arts plus commercial arts organisations and creative businesses
Geographic spread – overwhelmingly London, with an interesting band around Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield
Requested budget allocations
The applications’ digital themes – a fairly even distribution with a slight lean towards UGC/social media and mobile/location/games
It’s all quantitative stuff, which is pretty interesting as far as it goes. What’s absent and would be much more useful, given the comments on this post, is some sort of qualitative feedback on the applications. Making that feedback available publicly would be even more useful. It’s very likely unfeasible to do that 451 unsuccessful applications, but I’d love to see some sort of simple grading on a scale along the lines of this:
commissioned
we’d have commissioned it if we had a bigger budget – worth pursuing through other routes
great idea but wouldn’t trust the organisation to deliver it
missed the point entirely
batshit insane
I can’t see it happening, unfortunately.
Something else of note is that Birmingham apparently had one of the higher levels of application submissions and not a single one was successful. A very poor return from a city that hosted one of the Digital R&D Fund roadshows, the Hello Culture conference (programmed along the themes of this fund) and recently benefitted from the not-entirely-dissimilar DCD programme and 4iP.
Still, the report ends on an interesting note, with the conclusion stating that:
As a pilot, the high levels of demand suggest that the funding partners are right to consider how the fund could be scaled-up in future to meet the digital R&D needs of a larger set of arts and cultural organisations.
It was a bit of a risk but it’s paid off and the profits generated have been pretty extraordinary. Louis’s put out a couple of updates on how things have gone, with this paragraph standing out (my emphasis added):
If the trend continues with sales on this video, my goal is that i can reach the point where when I sell anything, be it videos, CDs or tickets to my tours, I’ll do it here and I’ll continue to follow the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not overmarketing to you, keeping as few people between you and me as possible in the transaction.
This provoked all sorts of excited chatter including this: Why 2012 will be year of the artist-entrepreneur. The thing that gets me is that Louis CK didn’t use any particularly new tools to do what he did. This has been possible for years now – In Rainbows came out in 2007.
Will 2012 really be the year of the artist-entrepreneur? It’d be about time. As time goes by there are bound to be more people looking to do this kind of thing and I’ll bet individual artists are more likely to move quicker than larger organisations (and it won’t suit everyone). I’d be interested to see what lessons people take from alternative ways of selling online – the way Qwertee shifts T-shirts and Kopi sells coffee, for instance. It’s still early days for crowdfunding too.
Meanwhile, other much-discussed topics included the acquisition of Gowalla by Facebook and the consequent bleating from people irked that their data and the time/effort they invested in the platform had gone to waste. That provoked a post from the guy behind Pinboard called Don’t Be A Free User who advised people to “avoid mom-and-pop projects that don’t take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement”.
There was also a minor incident involving some shoddy customer service which escalated impressively. Daniel Nye Griffiths provided ongoing updates for Forbes but the work by the guy drafted in to clear up the mess, especially this IAmA on Reddit, is worth a look for fans of online crisis control.
Girl Walk // All Day is “a feature-length dance music video and tale of urban exploration that follows three dancers across New York City. They turn the city’s sidewalks, parks and architecture into an evolving stage as they spread their joy of movement”. As much as anything, I thought it was notable that this was presented by Gothamist.
The Guggenheim released its first ebooks. They’re not only releasing new titles such as the catalogue for their current exhibition but also going through the archives, making available out-of-print titles for online browsing and publishing digital versions of reprinted titles.
In other ebook news, Vook looks like being an interesting publishing platform for creating, distributing and tracking sales of digital books. This seems like a good point to repost this on why some ebooks cost more than the hardcover.
If you’ve not come across the kind of new information that emerges when data-mining is applied to literature then The Data-Mining’s The Thing: Shakespeare Takes Center Stage In The Digital Age is a good starting point. I liked the analogy that it’s like “taking 36 decks of cards filled with random content… and then asking why there were no sevens in the decks that contained red cards.”
The new NCA Arts Index 2011, with data sources including DCMS, UK National Statistics, ACE, Arts & Business, Higher Education Statistics Authority and SoLT
I’ve been using Christmas TV viewing to try out some of the social TV platforms. GetGlue (so called for the stickets they’ll send you, apparently) and Miso are alright but Zeebox looks to be the most interesting at this stage. I can’t say any of them actually improved my viewing experience at all, but it’s early days.
A survey among its US subscribers asked those aged over 40 how they read the Economist – more than 95% said they read it in print. But when asked how they expect to read it in two years’ time, the number expecting to do so in print fell to 35%. “I’ve never seen a statistic like it,” says Rashbass.
In a way, it’s sad that the word “surfing” caught on so early as the description of what people do online. Using the web back then was more like diving– plunging into an endless otherworld looking for treasure. Social media is a truer match for the surfing metaphor– content comes at you and you ride it as best you can.
Something I’d not come across before is the idea of seat licences at (mainly sporting) venues in the US. These give the owner the right to buy season tickets for that seat and they’re proving to be valuable so far, apparently. STR Marketplace seem to be the main players in providing the sales platform for this.
You Have Downloaded checks your IP address against a database of torrent downloads
Cowbird ”explains humanity’s sagas through heartfelt stories”. Notable because Jonathan Harris is behind it
Blogging: The fine art of the confessional - “Too often, today, we meet people online who are frantically promoting themselves and their businesses – all the time pretending that what they are doing is not advertising or marketing but rather ‘being sociable’.”
Discovery’s still a big thing and probably always will be:
Byliner - Byliner helps you discover & discuss great stories and great writers. We’ll find you something good to read
Discover – Last.fm - Find your next favourite band. Over 2 million tracks from emerging artists
Actually, seeing as how it’s the first day of 2012, here’s another video. I’ve been catching up on TED talks over Christmas and my favourite by far was Luis von Ahn’s talk on massive-scale online collaboration. He’s one of the people behind reCaptcha and is now working on Duolingo which will help you learn a language for free and simultaneously translate the Web. Impressive.
See also what Trendwatching have dubbed ‘Idle Sourcing’‘: ”products and services that make it downright simple (if not effortless) to contribute to anything”.
I’ve been interested in crowdfunding for a little while but recently had the opportunity to look at the area a lot more closely, being involved in some work related to the current project to raise funds for the new John Peel Centre.
Leonard Richardson recently backed 52 Kickstarter projects in one month and has analysed the results, drawing out some good lessons for wannabe fundraisers. Part one of his report makes some general points about what makes for a good fundraising project (hustle, don’t ask for too much and don’t make your rewards too niche).
The second part looks at a single project and pulls out some good stats, making the point that most projects aren’t going to get all that many backers, therefore:
you need to make each backer count. That means raising the mean contribution or lowering the goal
He ends by suggesting people gauge their own projects with reference to similar ones run by others:
Look at the tiers they set up, see how many people pledged at each level, see how much money they actually raised and where it came from. A cool video can get people wanting to back your project, but the reward tiers and the goal you set will determine how much money you see
You can use crowd-funding platforms to test the market for a new product, service or project, in parallel with raising finance to fund new creative initiatives
WeDidThis have picked out some information about the kind of people who donate via their site.
Studio Neat
I very strongly recommend you read this post about Studio Neat‘s first Kickstarter project - Idea to Market in 5 Months: Making The Glif. There are relatively few lessons to take away on the fundraising side of things, what with how things panned out, but I think it’s amazing to see just how much two people are able to achieve using a crowdfunding service and a handful of online services.
Studio Neat went back to Kickstarter for their second project – an iPad stylus called the Cosmonaut. This time they tried something different – they set a target of $50,000 but allowed donors to pledge as little or as much as they liked, at the same time limiting the number of backers to 3,000. The Kickstarter blog broke down the figures:
If everyone pledges $1, nobody gets the Cosmonaut. If everyone were to pledge the same amount, they’d each be pledging about $16.66. And if some people are feeling generous and pledge $25 or $30, suddenly there’s room for a few people to pledge $1 or $5 or $10
All 3,000 slots were taken in less than 48 hours with backers pledging just short of the $50,000 required. Rather than upsell some of those backers, two fixed-price tiers (pricing the Cosmonaut at $25 – higher than the average required by the 3000 initial backers) allowed more people to pre-pay for their items. By the end, a total of $134,236 had been raised.
The pay-what-you-want thing struck me as very clever indeed:
It created a sense of urgency – people needed to get on board quickly for the chance to snag a potential bargain
Once those people are invested, you can get them to advocate for you or upsell them in order to reach the target
It makes for a good story in itself. With more and more crowdfunding projects people are going to need to find ways to stand out from the crowd
It’s still early days with this crowdfunding so it’s good to see people pushing the format to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s great to see so many people documenting their experiences too.
Panlogic recently released a report called Digital Philanthropy for the Arts. It’s good – thorough and well-explained and worth recommending to clients as reading material.
The key findings are as follows (and taken directly from the executive summary):
Emotion is the key reason why people give. Arts organisations need to optimise the giving process to give donors reasons to feel good and to look good in front of their peers
Technology has changed who gives and how. As a result, Arts organisations need to overcome their demographic prejudices, that too often still focus on monthly direct debits from baby boomers. The Arts world is moving from a model of fewer, high level donations to many, smaller donations.
Mobile giving is the way forwards. We believe that a national mobile-giving platform (allowing donors to text the amount they wish to donate to an organisation-specific number) would help drive significant impulse donations. Vodafone are leading on this with their JustTextGiving service.
Arts organisations need to ensure that all the ‘hygiene’ factors within the giving journey are ticked. They must be visibly unflashy and efficient. Their appeals must be explicit and proactive, ideally leveraging their creative talent
The main reasons for not giving fall within the Arts organisation’s to resolve – so ‘don’t put barriers up’
Elsewhere, I’d recommend the list of barriers to entry cited by organisations (p8) and things that might go wrong (p32). I’d also suggest you read the reasons why people do (pp9-12) and don’t (pp14-16) give and the best practices with regard to donors, digital (generally) and social media (p20 onwards).
The breakdown of the Southbank Centre’s email supporting their Pull Out All The Stops was interesting (and not unfair at all, criticism doesn’t come much more constructive).
There are all sorts of ways for artists and makers to sell their wares online. Decent storefront options abound and generally come in one of three flavours:
Putting aside the market place sites, the problem with individual stores and bespoke sites is that people end up trying to drive traffic to their individual, isolated shops. They’re tacked on to their portfolio websites but rarely linked to from anywhere else. They might look very nice, but there are no shoppers browsing by. They look a bit like this:
To be fair, this is what the market place solutions are going for. Storebeez allows you to search across stores, as does Big Cartel (although this feature’s a bit hidden). Even so, I have a suggestion for improving things.
How to improve things
I run a decent-sized, geographically specific arts and culture blog. I’d like to have a shop of some sort on there but I don’t want to deal with the admin of actually running it. However, I could provide some of that much needed footfall.
What I’d like to be able to do is set up a virtual shopping centre, bringing together individual stores that I think are relevant to my audience:
Give me a front page
Let me customise my shopping centre a little (header, colours, fonts, links back to my site)
Allow me to select the shops that would populate that shopping centre
Give me a way of attaching it to my site
Let me earn affiliate payments for any sales made and/or new stores set up
That would do as a starting point. Later on, give me the option to group or highlight sub-lists of products (a round-up of Christmas gifts, for example), give me more granular control by letting me exclude certain products from sellers’ inventory, give me some analytics and so on. If it’s a successful mall maybe people could pay me to be listed in it, or to have their products listed as ‘featured’ (a bit like Badoo‘s premium Rise Up and Spotlight features).
I wouldn’t be interested in having any direct influence over individual store owners – inventory, pricing, order fulfilment, customer service and so on wouldn’t be of any interest to me. I’d just send traffic their way and let them deal with the rest. It wouldn’t even be an exclusive deal – they could potentially appear in hundreds of these virtual shopping centres.
The benefits
Everyone wins:
Sellers get more traffic to their stores without having to lift a finger. In fact, more people are being incentivised to sell their work for them
Buyers don’t have to search around for shops – sellers and their products are more easily discoverable
The store provider gets more sellers using their platform and more customers buying products through it
Website owners get a useful, low maintenance feature for their websites that comes with the prospect of earning them (and some independent artists and makers) a little money
The size of the opportunity
I’m sure many other websites and blogs would relish the opportunity to do the same – for instance, there are plenty of big design-focussed sites that could make use of something like this. I can see lots of possible configurations too:
Created in Birmingham’s mall would aggregate shops that belong to artists of all sorts from around Birmingham
Someone who blogs about knitting might aggregate shops set up by knitters from around the world
A collective of artists might promote a single mall that brings together all of their individual stores
A big design blog might feature products they’ve covered
In summary
If anyone from Shopify, Goodsie, Storebeez or Big Cartel happens to be reading this then please build this feature. I’ll then tell everyone to get stores with you (and I’m sure others will do likewise).
Or maybe someone’s already doing this and I’ve not spotted it – anyone? For all I know, it might be possible to do something with Shopify’s API. Alternatively, there might be a good reason why nobody’s doing this yet – would it be too much hassle?
At this time of year I tend to search out some of the best albums lists churned out by websites, magazines, record shops and so on to see what I might’ve missed over the past year (those things do serve some purpose). A good starting place is Metacritic, which rounds up a load of top 10′s from various sources.
This year I’m looking for Spotify playlists of those top albums so I can skip through them and transfer anything that sounds decent to my ‘New stuff to listen to’ playlist. Those playlists aren’t too easy to find though – I’d have thought people would have started putting them together as a matter of course, but apparently not (although that’s probably fair enough in the case of the record shops).
Anyway, here’s a starter list. I’ll add to it as and when I find more:
Most of these are full albums. If there’s just one track from each then I’ve labelled that ‘sampler’.
A single, aggregated playlist might be good. Maybe next year there’ll be something like a Metacritic Spotify app for this. Oh, and I should point out that not every album is on Spotify, so not all of these playlists are 100%.
Mailing lists are great. Sign up to one and, on a regular basis, suggestions for interesting things to do will drop into your inbox. What’s not to love about that? They’re especially good for getting to grips with a new city.
The problem is that they’re sometimes not all that easy to discover. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a handy mailing list repository that anyone can search. So I thought I’d kick something off.
If there’s anything wrong on the spreadsheet (for example, dodgy URLs or long-dead lists) or if you can think of any ways to improve this then please leave a comment below.
NB: Ideally, I’m looking for what’s on mailing lists that cover events in a particular geographic areas (regions, cities, etc). I’m not looking for the mailing list for your individual venue/theatre company/band/whatever.
I’ll check for submissions and update the spreadsheet above on a semi-regular basis. I’d open it up more, but I’ve seen this sort of thing get abused by spammers before so am going to take on a bit of admin to prevent that.
A couple of thanks
With thanks to Jake Orr (@jakeyoh) for kinda prompting me to do this and Alex Jones (@jones_alex) for kicking off this list a little while back.
Let’s start with something that made me nod my head quite a bit. It’s a post titled Digitally-literate staff are key to charity digital success and it’s a slightly better written version of a rant that I sometimes go off on. The whole thing’s worth but these bits will give you a flavour:
…the things that stand in the way of digital success. Internal politics, lack of money, lack of evidence, legacy technologies and lack of experience…
It’s one thing to deliver a fabulously interactive website, but if you don’t have the resources behind it to keep it running, it’ll be just window-dressing
No longer can those skills be the preserve of the harried and over-stretched digital teams. We have passed the tipping point where digital is something new, it just is
Moving on, I’m really not sure what to make of The Space. It’s “an experimental digital arts media service and commissioning programme” which doesn’t explain a great deal but there’s money and the BBC’s name attached, so people have jumped on it regardless.
The last arts funding cow to be fed to the raptors was the ACE/NESTA R&D Fund, with details of the commissioned projects now starting to emerge. For instance, over the next year the IWM Social Interpretation team will be regularly posting about their in trying to integrate social media models into museums’ outputs. It’s good to see these processes being documented in this way.
The abridged version of Mia Ridge’s notes for her talk, Open for engagement: GLAM audiences and digital participation have some good tips for designing participatory projects. In other talk-related blog posts, Hugh Wallace spoke about Beautiful small things at the National Gallery of Ireland’s 2011 Symposium, presenting five projects that he believes exemplify good practice in digital media with an emphasis on the audience.
Arts/digital links
Arte TV livestreamed La Boheme from a council block in Berne, with online viewers able hop between different camera angles. I’m really disappointed to have missed this.
Silk was created by Yuri Vishnevsky as an experiment in generative art. It’s lovely.
Mobile Museum is a series of semi-structured written interviews with people who have developed, authored or managed mobile projects.
StageScan aims to give personalised theatre recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past, letting you follow individual creatives and/or critics. It’s kinda like the missing link between Theatricalia and Journalisted.
Far too many infographics are rubbish but this one showing how much artists earn online (including last.fm, spotify, retail albums and mp3 downloads) is very good.
PressBooks lets you author and output books in multiple formats, including epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML and inDesign-ready XML. Could be handy.
I liked how LEGO® CUUSOO has been put together. The ‘outstanding products’, highlighting anything that’s new or has a good level of comments or supporters, is good.
Beware of the Sorrell: Advertising’s Social Contract Is Fucked - “If you want to sell me something, then you, personally, should sell me something, Not your company, not your brand, you. That’s the power of social media. It’s a bunch of people, talking to each other. It lets us rediscover how things used to be, lets us remember how millions of years of evolution have shaped us to be, lets us remember that we’re just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to buy some crab paste”
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design - “this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible”
