May 6, 2012

Links for 6 May 2012

Everyone working in the arts should gather round and watch Ze Frank. The man’s a genius, has a million and one things to teach about all sorts of things (but if we’re being prosaic, we could start with UGC-based online projects) and has been doing it long enough that people should really have caught on by now.

Here’s the Kickstarter video for his latest run of shows by way of introduction.

Arts/digital links

I’m really not sure what to make of The Space yet. I think it’s somewhere between a spectacularly ill-conceived distraction and a rather good thing. Probably it’s both but it’s too early to tell for sure. Either way, here’s an interesting piece about how it was built.

I came across a few arts data-related projects this month, including Cultural Data Project, Space, TRG Arts’ Community Programs and Open Cultuur Data. There are plenty of these things around – arts sectors internationally aren’t short of information, the trick is in making sure useful information is available to the right people at the right time.

This is an interestingly introspective post about the Map the Museum project, posing the question “should you release 5000 records with well produced photographs, and meticulously edited text? Or should you simply dump 50,000 online, warts and all?”

Some other things:

Other links

Custom Report Sharing for Google Analytics and The Best Google Analytics Add-Ons. Can you tell what I’ve been working on a lot recently? On a completely different data/stats kick, Dan Hon’s post about data and diabetes was fascinating.

A couple of interesting collaborations from the world of journalism:

And while we’re on the subject, Writing in Newspapers and Magazines is worth reading for the George Clooney quote alone.

Apps/services/etc

Finally…

I’ll leave you with the first video in a series by Rui Guerra who interviewed John Stack, Head of Tate Online about Tate’s online strategy and new website. Lots of interesting stuff in there.

See also Rui’s other videos with Rob Stein from the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

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April 9, 2012

Links for 9 April 2012

There’s been quite a lot of good stuff to read and think about over the past little while. One of my favourite articles was called What sells CEOs on social networking (don’t let the title put you off) which didn’t necessarily tell me anything new but reframed things very nicely:

There is a huge amount of work in sociology, really beautiful work, that shows, especially if you want innovation and novelty, or introductions to other social networks, that your weak ties are a better place to go than your strong ties. Your weak-tie network is an extremely valuable thing for you. The problem is that before the 2.0 era, we had terrible tools for building and maintaining and exploiting a network of weak ties.

Weak ties are good for innovation, novelty and new networks. Strong ties are good for taking action. The question is, how do you turn a weak tie into a strong tie and is that always necessary or desirable?

There’s a line to be drawn from that way of thinking to this from Paul Adams, a member of Facebook’s product team:

To be a successful advertiser on the web in the future, you will need to build content based on many, lightweight interactions over time.

Arts/digital links

Chad Bauman’s post on his lessons learned during 4 1/2 years as Director of Comms at Arena Stage was very good. In other blogging-from-experience news, here’s a post about what worked and what didn’t when Woolly Mammoth invited people to tweet from rehearsals.

And I’ll end this section with a quote from Sadler’s Well’s Kinglsey Jayakasera looking back on the Transmission Vamp conference:

Certainly if I am ever going to create a 12 part history of European contemporary dance I should start by planning to produce it for online rather than hope for a commission from BBC4

Other links

The minor kerfuffle over The Curator’s Code, a proposed ”standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment” was interesting but short-lived. For me, Matt Langer and Marco Arment provided the best arguments, summed up by the latter here:

regardless of how much time it takes to find interesting links every day, I don’t think most intermediaries deserve credit for simply sharing a link to someone else’s work. Reliably linking to great work is a good way to build an audience for your site. That’s your compensation

Five emerging revenue strategies for digital content producers brings together an odd but interesting mix of case studies (although the title’s a bit misleading). Blogs and forums turned into PDF digests, specialised ad networks, diversifying into TV and tiered-access/price subscriptions

The latest SSX game uses uses NASA topography data for its snowboarding courses. Awesome. If more people talked about these kinds of uses for open data I suspect more people would care about it. On the topic of data, I thought App Store Optimization was interesting for the way they use search data from related third party sources, rather than the app store itself.

Some other bits and pieces:

  • I started reading Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas while wearing my sceptical face but it wasn’t necessary.
  • Teletext was a fascinating thing and quite often gets skipped over in the narrative of the shift to digital. For that reason alone The promise of Teletext is worth a read.
  • UnCollege has a round-up of open textbooks, learning communities, study groups, lectures and courses.
  • 9 examples of great blogger relations.
  • I have no idea what threaded is but it should probably come with a health warning.
  • Each month, the Awesome Foundation chooses an applicant who has proposed an awesome project and funds them. There are chapters opening up in cities all over the place.

Apps/services/etc

Finally

Like A Kid In A Sweet Shop is a behind the scenes look at the new ‘reservation experience’ at Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant, The Fat Duck. I know a lot of arts organisations are thinking about how the experience of a performance can be seen as starting with the first point of contact and ending only when the memory fades. Here’s someone (apparently with a nice budget) exploring that idea:

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March 10, 2012

Links for 10 March 2012

If you skip everything else, at least watch this video of Ira Glass talking about getting good at something. I definitely identified with that.

A little while back, John Coburn (who I was pleased to meet at Bits to Blogs a few weeks back) wrote a very interesting post called Understanding Compelling Collections. It was a write-up of a series of small-scale experiments looking to answer two questions:

Which of our collections best lends themselves to impulse sharing online?
Which of our collections are people most willing to talk about online?

I was reminded of this when Mia Ridge picked up on it recently. Like I say, it’s a good post. It also gives me the opportunity to quote another good post by Schmutzie:

What we do and create most often ends up being about meeting the perceived needs related to what we think people want and not what their needs actually are or what our own needs might be within that experience, so we are often left creating toothless pap that can be easily digested by the broadest community we can imagine and no one in particular. We try to appeal to the things a community of hundreds or thousands might all agree on like we’re all Martha Stewarts selling boring sheet sets.

There are distinctions to be drawn between the two viewpoints (not least between the institutional and the personal) but the question remains – should an instituion be concerned more with reach or effect (or both, or neither, or that magical sweet spot between the two)?

Ed Vaizey’s was up on his technological soapbox again during his keynote speech at the State of the Arts Conference:

I’m also, as many of you will know, excited about what technology can do for the arts. I think it provides an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to new audiences. I don’t regard technology in binary terms – that the future will be totally different, or that technology will fundamentally change the way we live. We will all still want to go to see live theatre, music, dance, or visit galleries and museums. But I passionately believe that technology can enhance that experience, by deepening and enriching what you experience, or by simply letting you know that something is happening nearby.

As much as I wonder about some of the digital stuff the arts funders are pushing, as very-top-level views go, this seems pretty sensible.

Arts/Digital links

The Young Vic have an alternative Twitter account. I really hope someone’s doing the smart thing and comparing/contrasting the effect of this and their main account.

The Arts Council announced the successful applicants for The Space. John Wyver at Illuminations has blogged about their unsuccessful application and said that he’d like to use the Illuminations blog to continue discussions about The Space.

Bruce Sterling looks at four possible futures where combinations of high/low tech and high/low art are played out. I don’t know why the audience look so bemused, I thought this was good.

A few other bits and pieces:

Other links

Pete Ashton wrote Flaneurism shouldn’t be easy and included this line:

Meanwhile the tech bloggers, who were supposed to be the scribes of this cultural revolution, are held rapt by the warring of their corporate gods, cheering like children as one multinational throws a patent lawsuit thunderbolt at another – like Homer, only without the poetry.

I liked that. I also bought a copy of Pete’s This Much I Knew (which I hesitate to call a book). It’s effectively the collected works (2008-2009) of someone who, for me, represents the gold standard in using a blog as a tool for thinking out loud. In a similar-ish vein Lean back media: the shock of the old is a very good (and good looking) presentation from The Economist, who are doing a decent job of presenting their thinking and progress around the shift to digital.

What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen? is a nice illustration of what people will do to get around the limitations of software that’s not up to scratch.

I remember watching Lynda La Plante’s Killer Net back in 1998 but had completely forgotten what it was called until recently. If anyone knows where I might get hold of a copy, that’d be great. Here’s the synopsis:

Students get involved in a violent Internet-based game, around the same time as a series of murders – is there a connection?

Awesome. Here’s some other stuff:

My favourite bit of the BBC English Regions Social Media Strategy (PDF) was the instruction for “All defunct/dormant accounts to be closed elegantly”. More elegance, please.

Also, I really like the simplicity of The Two Things, which I found via Oliver Burkeman who neatly summarised every self-help book that crossed his desk:

first, if you can tolerate a little discomfort, you can achieve almost any goal; and second, it’s amazing the lengths we’ll go to to avoid discomfort.

Some apps and services

Finally

I like the first line of this:

We’re in a very exciting place where absolutely anyone can be a publisher. But I think a more interesting question is how to be a successful publisher

From a video of Faber & Faber, Random House, ustwo & Hachette discussing the future of digital publishing.

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February 6, 2012

Links for 6 February 2012

The discussion around Jeremiah Owyang’s taxonomy of tech bloggers (included in my last link round-up) led me to have another look at The Verge and The Kernel. Their attempts to distance themselves from run-of-the-mill tech-churn tie in with Ben Kunz’s Douglas Warshaw-referencing post where he says ”a rise in the supply of any production technology typically creates an inverted, U-shaped bell curve of quality output”:

Knowledge is flowing this way with new communication networks enabling rapid scientific advance on one end and endless bloggers regurgitating “how to get social media ROI” on the other. Everyone in the middle gets killed when barriers to production or access fall. You have to either focus on more utility with low quality at mass scale (YouTube, IZEA advertising) or quality with artificial scarcity (“Titanic” now in 3-D, million-dollar spots on the Super Bowl).

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings is good on this subject. In a post that married her thoughts on SOPA with a rediscovered 1923 essay titled “Our Changing Journalism”, she said:

today’s “circulation managers” still dictate the editorial direction and vision for most of the information we consume. Until we, as an information culture in general and as media producers in particular, figure out a way to reinstate the editor as the visionary and the reader as the stakeholder, the Internet will remain a dismal landscape for intelligent, compelling media

At the other end of the spectrum is this highly self-aware post from Hipster Runoff, with Carles painting himself as a content farmer/indentured servant to the search engines.

Just to round off this thread, I was interested in this article on Forbes’ approach to social media - using their brand to attract a decent range of online contributors. From the increasing number of Forbes articles I’m seeing in my Twitter stream these days, I’d say the approach is working. I also think the group blog model used by The Pastry Box Project and 24 Ways has a lot to recommend it. Anything’s preferable to the HuffPo method.

Arts/Digital links

A few reports:

The latter was originally restricted to paid NCA members, which surprised me a little. I know these things cost money to pull together, but I thought the idea would be to get the information into as many hands as possible beyond the usual circles. Either way, I suspect Mark Robinson has revealed the answer as to why they gave in and released it for free.

A few documentaries:

The latter was funded by Kickstarter, as were 16 more of the films on show at Sundance this year. Kickstarter have also released stats and more in their 2011 Year in Review.

Ebook innovation keeps on happening. Leanpub lets you self-publish a book while you’re writing it. You can charge people for it (or not) and, when it’s done you can shift it over to another ebook seller. On a similar note, with Volpen you write the beginning of your book and let the Volpen community complete it. You get paid royalties according to how much you contributed to the book.

Here are a few other things:

Other links

At the beginning of the month I spent a little time sorting out my many RSS feeds and found this guide quite helpful. For instance, I didn’t know you could weed out inactive and obscure feeds. That was handy.

An Observer feature on celebrity financial correspondents fed my interest in what slebs think of this social media lark:

“Three years ago, I would have the news wires up on my computer screen for breaking stories. Increasingly, people have their Twitter feeds up. The news about Standard and Poor’s downgrading the EU bailout fund popped up on my Twitter feed before it was on the wires and before it came into my email inbox because people who are players in stories are on Twitter too. It’s not just the chatterati”. Flanders finds that her blog is “a good place to flesh out arguments or put out stories and ideas that aren’t ever going to make it on to the main news. For Robert Peston and me, I guess the blogs also help to show that we know our stuff, even if we can’t always get all of it onto the bulletins or the Today programme.”

This article on ‘A Business Model Perspective on Open Metadata‘ is worth a read if you’re into that sort of thing. Otherwise, here’s the conclusion:

The conclusion of the workshop participants was that the benefits of open sharing and open distribution would outweigh the risks. In most cases the advantages of increased visibility and relevance will be reaped in the short term. In other cases, for example where there is a risk of loss of income, the advantages will come in the longer run and short-term fixes will have to be found. All of this requires a collective change of mindset, courage to take some necessary risks and a strong commitment to the mandate of the cultural heritage sector, which is to enable society to realise the full value of the cultural legacy that is held in the public realm.

I’m lagging slightly behind on Codecademy but have been enjoying the experience. They’re not the only player in the online code-learning market, in fact it’s looking very competitive at the moment.

Some other bits and bobs:

Some apps and services

Finally…

NFB Interactive showcases some really interesting approaches to documentary storytelling, with all sorts of ideas flying around – some good, some bad and most worth exploring. For instance, with CodeBarre.tv/BarCode.tv you enter the name of an object or scan its barcode, and the app will show you a relevant 60-second film.

The thing that really caught my eye was this trailer for Bear 71:

Bear 71 from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

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January 1, 2012

Links for 1 January 2012

Louis CK

Louis CK self-released his show ‘Live at the Beacon Theater‘ and became the new Radiohead. Rather than getting a company to record and distribute one of his standup shows, he did it all himself, selling DRM-free downloads of the show for a quarter of the usual price.

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.

Arts/Digital links

Hannah Rudman’s round-up of 2011’s digital developments in the arts and cultural sector is recommended, as is Clairey Ross’s selection of must-read museum/digital/humanities blogs.

Jasper Vissen’s 30 do’s for designing successful participatory and crowdsourcing projects is a good list and has been followed up by Nina Simon with her Fifteen Random Things I’ve Learned about Design for Participation This Year.

The Want to Steal Banksy? campaign by the Art Series Hotels in Australia was pretty funny and Singing Tweets from the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra was a simple and nicely executed  little thing.

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.”

Other bits and bobs:

Other links

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.

I was fascinated by this interview with The Economist’s Andrew Rashbass and especially this quote:

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.

I liked this bit from Tom Ewing’s Take Me to the River:

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.

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

Some apps and services

Finally

It was nearly Rich Fulcher and Samsung’s Old Masters but instead it’s going to be Ice Cube’s take on the Eames.

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”.

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December 7, 2011

Links for 7 December 2011

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.
  • Details and links to all of the hacks produced during Culture Hack North.
  • 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.
  • The results are in on the steve.museum’s research project: Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums. They found that museum professionals and the general public speak different languages and that a high percentage of user-submitted tags were useful.
  • On that theme, Brooklyn Museum’s Gallery Tag! is a pretty simple mobile tagging game, specifically designed for use in the gallery.

Other links

Some apps and services

Finally

A barnstorming Gary Vaynerchuk keynote at Inc5000.

Continue Reading

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November 2, 2011

Links for 2 November 2011

To kick things off, there are two reports that I’ve flicked through and decided need some proper attention. First up is Getting In On the Act: How Arts Groups are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation (PDF) from The James Irvine Foundation. Frankly, they had me at this diagram:

Audience Involvement Spectrum

I was also fascinated by The Arts Ripple Report that Nina Simon blogged about:

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

Leaning back towards the tech side of things, Wieden + Kennedy’s post on Why We’re Not Hiring Creative Technologists started a fair few conversations. As did Steve Yegge’s unintentional thinking/ranting out loud. I’m still not quite sure to make of the Photos of Sarah article in The Awl and the post that I’ve brought up in conversation with others more than any other has been Bobbie Johnson’s one about failure.

Arts/digital links

Other links

Some apps and services

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October 3, 2011

Links for 3 October 2011

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”.

Then there was Adrian Short’s post, ‘It’s the end of the web as we know it‘:

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

Backing up the theory, see Paulo Coelho in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Arts/digital links

We found out which projects have been awarded funding from the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture. Some look interesting, some not so much, although we don’t know too much about the projects yet. Congrats to all who were successful.

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
  • Are digital movies pushing smaller theaters and drive-ins to the brink? - Good piece on how smaller cinemas are being affected by massive savings in digital distribution

Other links:

Some apps and services

Finally

Hennessy Youngman gave a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and was interesting, thoughtful and entertaining. Museum conference organisers take note.

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December 28, 2009

Links for 28 December 2009

  • Welcome to MotherApp – Create mobile apps on all major mobile platforms
  • 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.”
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November 17, 2009

Links for 17 November 2009

  • 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”
  • Story – the conference – This sounds like a good idea
  • 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
  • Inside the App Economy – BusinessWeek
  • FIFA Earth – I am impressed by this
  • 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”
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