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:

• ArtsProfessional’s 2011 Ticketing & Technology supplement
• The new NCA Arts Index 2011, with data sources including DCMS, UK National Statistics, ACE, Arts & Business, Higher Education Statistics Authority and SoLT
• @homeofpolar: Twitter is like a mirror for your voice
• InstantEncore is a thing for keeping track of the classical music & artists you love
• Dan Harmon (a writer on Community) discussing an algorithmic approach to writing stories.

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.

• I’m not particularly interested in the tech blogging scene but I liked Jeremiah Owyang’s Taxonomy of Tech Bloggers.
• I haven’t read Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2011 report yet, but it’s on the list.
• The Federated Media network shows monthly views, demographics and advertising costs for a wide range of well-known blogs
• A round-up of The Year of 2011 in 3D Printing
• How open data will affect philanthropy
• 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

Some apps and services

• Web – ArtSpotter, ArtStack, Clicky, Asana, Tout, Groupon Scheduler, WorkFlowy, Farfromhomepage, Schemer
• Mac – Mendeley (prompted by coming across the newer ReadCube), Moom, Selenium, Piezo
• WordPress plugins - Sharebar, Twitter @Anywhere Plus and a good list of standards at Plugins – GitHub
• Ruby resources - The Bastards Book of Ruby and Kidsruby.com
• iPhone – Flipboard, Waze, Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms, BBC iPlayer, Tweetlogix, Dickens: Dark London
• Games - iPhoneTiny.com is good for recommendations of free games (I grabbed Mr Ninja and Muffin Knight). Dizzy – Prince of the Yolk Folk was disappointing. There, I said it.

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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…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

• A list of augmented reality case studies with plenty I’d never heard of,
• Hand waving and the “real work” of design - Why is handwaving not “real work?” And what is “real work,” in interaction design, anyway?
• Design Fiction: Profitable, Desirable, Buildable Products - a nice Venn diagram
• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part One) - The first in a series of five guest posts
• 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”
• Digital verbosity: What’s in a tweet - a map of a tweet including all its metadata
• the pen is mightier than the spork: Free writing seminar blog post in a box - Lots of links to good pieces on writing. Ian Ravenscroft recommended the bits about pitching, and who am I to argue?

Some apps and services

• Facebook – Odeon event organiser
• Products - Little Printer
• Web – Map Tales, Nestio, Gimme Bar, Small Demons, TaskRabbit, GetLostBot, Wunderlist, Sycorax and I like the social streams Flavors have rolled out but suspect I won’t use them
• iPhone - Stamped, The Show Must Go On, Treasures of the Bodleian

Finally

A barnstorming Gary Vaynerchuk keynote at Inc5000.

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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

• 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”.
• Lots of resources on free and open source art, compiled by Furtherfield for the Arts Council
• Createquity does good link round-ups and the blogroll is worth raiding too
• A sketched concept for a collaboration matchmaking service bringing artists and geeks together with other sectors.
• Digitalization in the arts: Is there a do-over if we get it wrong? | Jumper - “I’ve recently come across four articles/papers that have me grappling with the promise and the potential threats of digitalization in the arts and culture sector.”
• New Models for Arts Journalism Receive Funding – Knight Foundation - “five projects that offer innovative models for local arts journalism will receive funding to help make their projects a reality”. With a further six honourable mentions
• Vision scientist helps to rescue John Martin’s vision of destruction - Psychologist Tim Smith describes how a painting was saved by a combination of eye-tracking technology, Photoshop and conservation expertise. User-testing art the way we might user-test a website

Other links

• An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, mashups and tools being influenced by Google Maps.
• Mary Meekers’s presentation from the Web 2.0 Summit has lots of stats but it was slide 15 (about iPad shipments) that surprised me
• Avinash Kaushik’s taken a look at social media measurement
• 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
• Loads of online giving/crowdfunding platforms
• Matthew Somerville’s knocked together a page of Birmingham to London train times. Timely, what with all the back and forth I do

Some apps and services

• Web - Speaker Deck, SearchHash, Chartbeat, Repudo, PunchTab, ArtSpotter
• iPhone – the ESPN Goals app proves 101 Great Goals point. Codify looks interesting

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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:

• 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”.
• Some interesting rephrasing by Mark Sorrell in ‘TV is the Second Screen’.
• BBC News – Fashion week: The ordinary people who stole the show - The use of ‘ordinary’ is irritating, but still.
• Girl Geeks: 30 women under 30 in digital – The Drum - Interesting that 9 of the 30 specifically have the word ‘social’ in their job title.
• Wired have graphed the UK’s tech and startup meetups. It’s pretty good and features the Birmingham Social Media Cafe (which I ran until recently).
• 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.
• 7-point Checklist For Bloggers Who Want to Create a Profitable Blog - Not a bad checklist for getting a blog on to a firmer footing (and not just for those looking for profit)

Some apps and services

• Web - WillCall and Culture Craver look particularly interesting. Also, Rewinder and EDITD piqued my interest too.
• Mac – I’m now regularly using Notational Velocity and Pukka.
• Facebook - SurveyMonkey will be useful.
• iPhone – I’ve recently downloaded Story Cubes, Vibe, AskLocal, 4oD Catch Up and Meetup. So far I’ve only used the latter.

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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