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”.
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”
Here’s how the project worked: researchers worked with small focus groups to understand their associations with arts and culture organizations and developed several framing arguments for public support of the arts. Then, they interviewed 400 people by phone and online, presenting them with a short framing argument (80-120 words), followed by a series of open-ended questions intended to determine how memorable the argument was, how it influenced their perception of the public value of the arts, and how likely it was to inspire action
The Doofer Call: On [that] day, 4th October 2011… pt 1 - “All in all we launched a new brand, the beta of the all-new IWM website, a re-skinned image licensing site, overhauled e-shop, redesigned print sales website, and phase 1 of a new system for delivering collections information to our public digital interfaces”.
I like the kind of post where someone creates something unexpectedly popular and then blogs about why they think it was good. In this case, simple rules for designing slides
I read an awful lot online and have a few places where I stash notable things – Instapaper, Delicious, Google Reader starred items, YouTube favourites and a particularly link-heavy Twitter account (not my personal one). Once a month I’m going to pull out some of those items and link to them from here. So here we go…
I’ll start with Ben Hammersley’s speech to the IAAC, in which he set out a few facts (Moore’s law, the Internet as the dominant platform for C21 life and technology changing our expectations of each other), explaining why older members of the establishment might be “so deeply confused by the present”.
You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve
‘Spreadable media’ is a topic we may be hearing more about over the next little while. It’s a theory that describes the potential for media to move around a networked society. It’s:
an emerging hybrid model, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways
Devon Smith wrote up some notes from a session that brought Gary Vaynerchuck and representatives of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare to address arts organisations. From Gary Vee:
Social media isn’t a concept, it’s the deciding factor between whether you’re still going to be in business or not five years from now
Devon’s post on arts incubator schemes is worth a read too. As is John Coburn’s contribution to the MuseumNext blog, Understanding Compelling Collections, in which he talks about whihc museum collections are best suited to online sharing and conversation.
Kasabi (an information marketplace from Talis) organised a culture hack day and Unthinkable Consulting have blogged lots of good links from a session called ‘Delivering Great Digital Experiences’ that they ran for the BBC.
Three posts about the Internet’s effect on traditional business models:
The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist - A standard-ish ‘state of the book market’ affair, but I hadn’t considered this (and wonder how much of a problem it really is): “Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying”
Frieze Magazine – Down the Line - “A second reason for the slow response is that, unlike other industries, such as music and publishing, the art world wasn’t forced to react to cultural shifts wrought by the Internet because its economic model wasn’t devastated by them. […] The principles that keep the visual arts economy running – scarcity, objecthood and value conferred by authority figures such as curators and critics – make it less vulnerable to piracy and democratized media
A Story of GameLayers, Inc. – “Between 2007 and 2009 GameLayers made a multiplayer game across all the content of the internet. I was the CEO of GameLayers and one of the co-founders. Here I’ll share stories and data from this online social game startup. This story covers prototyping, fund raising, company building, strategic shifting, winding down and moving on”.
Pinboard feature requests – Google Doc - There’s so much to love about this. Essentially, Delicious was well-loved by the fanfic community. They weren’t impressed by the recent changes made to the service so they walked to Pinboard, whose founder said he’d implement any changes they needed. This is the Google Doc they worked up in the space of a few hours.
The Poster Cause Project – “Each month we will release a very limited print by a different artist with 50% of profits going to a specific charity or organization chosen by us or the artist.”
YouTube – TAT augmented ID – With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you
Podcast | dConstruct 2009 – “All the sessions at dConstruct 2009 have been recorded and are being delivered via the magic of podcasting”
Mockingbird – “an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application”
Frankenlab – “This is the home of Dr. Victor Emelius Frankenstory, eponymous inventor of the world famous writing game, and a place where he will be regularly displaying and dissecting his favourite stories”
CultureLabel: an aggregator for the arts – “Essentially, CultureLabel enables the online purchase of products that were previously only available from each institution’s in-gallery store on the way out”
The App Garden on Flickr – “Here you’ll find home grown applications created by Flickr members (like you!) using the Flickr API. The garden continues to flourish so go forth and frolic amongst the apps!”
Digital Theatre – ‘working in partnership with Britain’s leading theatre companies… to capture live performance authentically onscreen’. Interesting this. Presumably there’s much more to come – it’s launched with just one production available (despite apparenty having several partners) and the website itself is currently missing a whole host of tricks
Michael Bierut: 5 Secrets from 86 Notebooks – “Digging into the 86 notebooks he’s kept over the course of his career, Bierut walks us through 5 projects – from original conception to final execution – extracting a handful of simple lessons (e.g. the problem contains the solution; don’t avoid the obvious) at the foundation of brilliant design solutions”. I haven’t watched this yet, but I fully intend to
Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – “You can write iPhone apps quickly and efficiently using your existing skills with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This book shows you how with lots of detailed examples, step-by-step instructions, and hands-on exercises”
Society6 – Society6 is a platform for the world’s artists and creatives to promote their work and connect with unique opportunities
IKEA Heights – “Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing”. That’s… incredible
aM laboratory – “Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer”. I love this
4iP Birmingham Nick Booth Presentation – Nick Booth talking about Big City Talk, Social Media Surgeries and Help Me Investigate at the Recasting Power event. This made me proud to be working in Birmingham
Designing Social Interfaces – The patterns in this collection are social design patterns (a.k.a. social user experience design patterns). They are interaction pattern for people designing social interfaces
Intelligent Naivety – First Art Game For the iPhone – “The soft watches have disappeared from the painting and are hidden in other Dalí works. Players need to find them by exploring enlarged pictures of those other art pieces”
What’s the best art you’ve ever experienced? | Hello Art – The first stage of the Arts Council’s public engagement project running 2010-12 is a simple question and answer thing. Am wondering if this is as much an email capture system as anything
Universe Creation 101 » Techniques for Segmenting Content Across Media – “While the notion of episodics is fairly understood, what isn’t is the variety of episodic techniques available and how these can be utilized in a cross-platform project. So, in this post I’ll outline ways a production can be designed for multi-platform segmentation”
When The Audience Takes Control – “Lance Weiler breaks down the new models independent filmmakers are using to create a fan base”
ARG Stats – “information about the uptake, impact and awards garnered from ‘alternate reality games’ (ARGs)”
Derek Powazek – How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half – “But, really, I can’t believe how easy it was. Making print media used to be so difficult. I remember cutting and gluing long columns of text together, shooting flats, and generally sweating for days to create my college newspaper. Now the the most time-consuming part is simply asking for permission from the content creators”
Welcome | MagCloud – “Welcome to MagCloud, where you can publish your own printed magazine”
Trust Art – Home – “Trust Art is a social platform that is commissioning ten public artworks over the next year. People are invited to become shareholders with $1, share with interested friends, and renew culture”
24hrBook Project : CompletelyNovel – “a groundbreaking project to challenge a group of writers to write a new story about London in just 24 hours. The book will be written by a group of experienced writers working together using all kinds of online collaborative tools around the clock”
HBO Imagine – “This isn’t sitting back to watch a show… we’ve created this entirely new way of experiencing a story. Each piece of content provides unique information, and offers a unique perspective on the characters, plots and motives at play, allowing viewers to discover for themselves what is really going on”
November In Manchester – November in Manchester is a social media tale of fiction. Taking place over the month of November, this project will share the story of two very different characters – via the medium of social media – as their lives intertwine and eventually collide
Shop Culture from Leading Global Museums – CultureLabel – “CultureLabel.com is the first online platform to curate and showcase the best artist-designed and limited-edition products from over 60 leading galleries, museums, artists and culture institutions”
Babelgum – “Babelgum is global web video curated by our team of publishers. Individually they are experts, together they are Babelgum”
What is NaNoWriMo? | National Novel Writing Month – 50,000 words, 1-30 November. “Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down”
Most Common Passwords – The lists are interesting/useful enough, but it’s the explanations afterwards that are eye-opening
Social by Social – “A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact”. Buy the book for a tenner and/or download the PDF for free
BBC – The Knowledge Exchange Blog: ugc@thebbc – “a year-long project which produced a huge amount of data, and proved to be the first significant study of UGC at a broadcast organisation”
2009 MTV VMA Tweet Tracker | MTV.com – VMA Tweet Tracker [mtv.com] is a real-time graph of Twitter activity that highlights the social news surrounding the Video Music awards by aggregating the most popular terms being tweeted around this event. Developed by Stamen Design and social media monitoring company Radian6,
