Links for 1 January 2012

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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Crowdfunding case studies

I’ve been interested in crowdfunding for a little while but recently had the opportunity to look at the area a lot more closely, being involved in some work related to the current project to raise funds for the new John Peel Centre.

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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Links for 26 August 2009

• journalisted.com – “Journalisted is an independent, non-profit site run by the Media Standards Trust to help the public navigate the news”. So if you want to see all the articles printed by any particular journalist then you can
• Elatable : Bradley Horowitz: Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers – Content production pyramid – a breakdown of 1%, 10% and 100% across levels of interaction, taken from looking at data on Yahoo Groups
• Crowdfunding for creative endeavours – Springwise – Kickstarter – “a new site where artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, explorers and others can raise the funds for their next big idea”

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