To address the balance there are a few people prepared to address the inaccuracies, point out the need for substance, rather than style and generally describe junk as junk. My metaphorical hat is doffed to the people undertaking this sisyphean task.

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.

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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.

Happenstance is an R&D project that will fund residencies for designers, developers and digital producers at one of three arts organisations: Site Gallery, Lighthouse and Spike Island.

SYNC is the biggest of the three. A two-year programme for the cultural sector in Scotland with three main elements:

• Culture Hack Scotland
• A geeks in residence programme
• An online magazine called SYNC Tank

Incidentally, NESTA have just launched a Scottish version of their Digital R&D Fund, along with AHRC and Creative Scotland.

And…

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).

Come to think of it (and veering from the point only slightly), a more culturally-relevant version of LinkedGov’s doc on ‘The economic impact of open data’ would be good too.

My point is, I think all this activity is good and welcome and useful. It’d just be interesting to know how useful.

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I’m collecting links to good crowdfunding case studies over on Delicious. Here are some of the better ones.

Some examples

Craig Mod’s article about funding Art Space Tokyo is a must-read with some solid tips and some strong analysis around pledge tiers and some insight into their approach to marketing.

Suw Charman-Anderson has blogged about the things she wishes she’d known at the start of the process. Don’t underestimate the amount of time required to promote the crowdfunding and get as much as possible lined up beforehand.

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

On T-Shirts and Suits, David Parrish makes the point that:

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

Which reminded me of this post about using Google Ads to test prospective book titles. Slightly off topic, but worth mentioning.

The Kickstarter and Patronage panel from GenCon 2011 is worth a listen.

The crowdfunding sites themselves are generally pretty good at putting out tips and stats, for obvious reasons. For instance, on their second birthday Kickstarter shared data representing activity on the site between April 2009 and April 2011. It’s really good.  On top of that, Cindy Au is an employee there and Fred Kicks has some good notes from her stat-packed talk at the Metatopia Game Design Festival.

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
• The barrier to entry for those people was very low – just $1 (although many paid more)
• 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.

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• Individual stores such as Shopify, Goodsie, Big Cartel and Storebeez
• Market places like Etsy, Folksy and eBay
• Bespoke websites

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:

(Photo by Anthony Citrano, zigzaglens.com)

Whereas retailers understand that by clumping together with others in one place they’re more likely to attract passing trade.

(Photo by Daniel Morris)

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:

1. Give me a front page
2. Let me customise my shopping centre a little (header, colours, fonts, links back to my site)
3. Allow me to select the shops that would populate that shopping centre
4. Give me a way of attaching it to my site
5. 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?

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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:

• Stereogum Best of 2011 (Spotify)
• Fluxblog 2011 Survey (Spotify)
• Quietus Albums of the Year 2011 (Spotify)
• Guardian Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Piccadilly Records Albums of the Year 2011 (Spotify)
• Rough Trade Top 100 Albums of the Year (Spotify)
• NME’s 50 Best Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• The Fly Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• The Wire Top 50 Releases of the Year (Spotify)
• Uncut Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Rolling Stone’s Best 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Drowned in Sound Top 50 of 2011 (Spotify - sampler)
• Clash Top 40 Albums of 2011
• Filter Top 10 of 2011
• Hype Machine Zeitgeist 2011 (Spotify)

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%.

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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.

Here’s a spreadsheet of what’s on mailing lists:

I’m pretty certain there are more than this, so…

Help me add to the list

If you know of any other what’s on mailing lists then fill out this very quick form.

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.

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When Should I Visit? was made at Culture Hack London in January 2011 by Dan Williams. It uses check-in data from Foursquare to find the least busy time to visit the museums, galleries and theatres of London.

There have been other interesting things made at Culture Hacks over the year but this one stuck in the mind.

In April, Jim Richardson tweeted about having a spreadsheet of 1500+ museums on Twitter. This sparked a collaborative project with lots of others chipping in to extend and improve his data. The spreadsheet doesn’t seem to be accessible at the moment but no matter, it got a good amount of attention while it was around.

Sean Redmond, a web developer at the Guggenheim, took that spreadsheet and created Museums in Social Media. He added Facebook data and presented the information in a nice table.  He’s also blogged about the process.

Skip on a few months to August when the Let’s Get Real report was published. I’ve mentioned that one on this blog plenty enough by now so won’t go on about it here. I should give Museum Stats a mention at this point. It was referenced in that report but, what with it being in closed Alpha at the moment and me not being a museum, I have no idea what’s going on there.

Which brings us to Museum Analytics, recently unveiled by INTK in the Netherlands. It’s:

an online platform for sharing and discussing information about museums and their audiences. For each museum there is a daily updated report with information about online and offline audiences.

I’m not quite sure how they’re getting all the information (although there is an about page which explains a little) but it’s nicely put together and they’re talking about it extending it further. You can look at stats for each venue, country and online platform. You can even order a regular report to be emailed to you.

The pattern for these things goes:

• Someone makes data available (Foursquare, Jim Richardson & co, Let’s Get Real partners, etc)
• Someone does something with that data (Dan Williams, Culture 24, Sean Redmond, INTK)

The variety of things that can be built will only increase as the raw materials (lots of good sources of data) become more widely available. Whether the things that are made are insightful, arty, actionable, profitable, funny or otherwise will depend on the person building it and what their motivations are. The more the merrier, I say.

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As more established arts institutions come to understand the need to establish community relevance as part of their long-term prosperity (or survival) the more necessary it will be to develop models of work with communities that produce impressive results

You can get the full context of that quote via the link. I’m posting it here because I’d like to co-opt the sentiment, or perhaps extend it a little.

I think it’s relevant to how artists and organisations view themselves online in relation to their artform, location, other organisations, individuals and others. Or rather how they should view themselves. It’s probably worth a separate blog post or a rant over a pint sometime.

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This is a place where professionals from all departments in arts and heritage organisations – including audience development, communications, education, fundraising, finance, logistics, management and policy – can come to share advice and inspiration. We will combine the best comment from around the web with fresh content commissioned in-house to cater to your needs and interests.

As far as ‘combining the best comment from around the web’ is concerned, I was chuffed to hear that they’d picked up on the article about online collaboration that I wrote for the Arts Marketing Association’s blog. Not only have they’ve reposted it but they’ve also made it one of the editors’ picks.

On top of that, I’ve also been asked to chip in to the first of their live chats, which will be a discussion of creative collaboration in a time of cuts. That’ll be at midday on Friday 11 November.

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As well as posting stuff on my own website a little more frequently, I’ve been interested in contributing occasional guest posts to other blogs. To that end, I’ve written something for the Arts Marketing Association. Its title is All Together Now and it’s a brief run through some of the ways in which:

the Internet and a raft of online tools are making collaboration and resource-sharing quicker, easier and cheaper

It touches on collaborative approaches to online presences, resource sharing and the possibilities of opening up and making better use of data. It’s also stuffed with links to examples of initiatives that I think are pushing in the right direction.

Please go and read it and if you could leave a useful comment – perhaps with some good examples of your own – that’d be ace.

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