Links for 11 September 2009

• Blogging for Artists – An informal talk given to Shropshire Arts Network on September 8th 2009 by Pete Ashton
• Culture Wars | About Culture Wars – Culture Wars is the online review of the Institute of Ideas in London. We cover books, films, theatre, art and talk events, with a view to understanding how political and other ideas filter through the culture, and how the arts in turn influence politics and society more generally
• Welcome to verifiable.com – “Our goal is to develop a tool to help you communicate data more clearly, efficiently, and honestly. We want to make it easy and fun to produce gorgeous, verifiable visualizations and allow viewers to dig into your data and even build on your work to bring out richer, clearer, or just plain different conclusions”
• Monopoly City Streets – Live worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence” Launching 9 Sept
• RSS in the Clouds « Blog « WordPress.com – “Today we turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud, which is basically a way for people to get push notification that your feed has updated”. Oh, now that is interesting
• Embeddable Google Document Viewer – A little known Google Docs feature will let you embed a PDF or .ppt on a website. One day we won’t have to faff around with arcane things like this
• Ning Apps – “Today you can choose from more than 90 Ning Apps, and that’s just the beginning. This number will continue to grow as developers here at Ning and around the world build additional Ning Apps tailored around your interests and passions”

Lessons from Club Mumble

Or maybe not lessons but inspiration. Or something. I’m not sure yet.

I stumbled across Club Mumble yesterday. I’m not quite sure how/why but I’ve been looking at doing a new project and have been finding all sorts of interestingness. Mumble’s fantastic – a rambling great big group blog with contributors chipping in posts around the themes of contemporary art, skateboarding and street culture. Apparently it wasn’t always thus.

I was looking for an ‘About’ page, probably to see how the site self-identified or some such. The closest match was the Masthead/Mission link so I followed that.

I’ll liberally quote what Bob Kronbauer, the founder of the site, has written there because I find it just so fascinating:

Originally dedicated to bringing what I perceived to be “real” content back to the internet following “the stranglehold that blogs [had] taken on it”, I produced two actual features every week for a year and a half on my own, and over this year and a half I slowly came to the realization that those blogs that have taken a stranglehold… well… they’ve done so with good reason. They’ve taken over because blogs are awesome, and it’s the community and the sharing of ideas and information that makes them so awesome. The idea of a lone dude sitting in front of his computer filtering all of the information that he receives and then feeding you his singular opinion on what’s cool and why it’s cool got tired after a minute, and the idea of “real” content changed in my mind from magazine-quality articles into just real stories about real things by real people. So I switched it up, re-launching Mumble as a contradiction of itself, bringing along 99 people who “really” inspire not only myself but our culture as a whole.

There’s more so go have a read if you found that interesting. The emphasis is Bob’s btw.

Links for 22 September 2008

Local Blogger of the Week: Chris Unitt of Created in Birmingham – Localmouth is a site that rounds up ‘placeblogs’. They were kind enough to ask me to do a short interview on what running CiB is like so I tried to cram as many links and refs to other people as possible.