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:

• JISC’s Two Years of Economic Uncertainty is a final report on their Case Studies in Sustainability, revealing how different business models fared during the economic downturn.
• Key data from the Arts Council’s 829 RFOs with chapters on data overviews, staff and diversity, financial statements, arts activities and audiences, analysis of income per attendance, and touring data.
• The NCA’s Arts Index is now available to download for free.

A few documentaries:

• PressPausePlay is about the digital revolution’s effect on creativity and features interviews with lots of interesting people.
• Side by Side is a Keanu-produced documentary about the transition from analogue to digital filmmaking.
• Indie Game: The Movie features the people behind the likes of Super Meat Boy and Braid.

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:

• The National Trust have put a load of information about their collection online
• An article about the National Theatre of Wales Community
• Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television is a three-year research project based in the Arts, Media and Design department at the University of Westminster.
• Fragmentary: writing in a digital age has all sorts of interesting references in it.
• The projects from Art Hack Day.
• Cultural PR Conference UK - Notes and presentations from the 2011 Cultural PR Conference. The 2012 event took place a few weeks ago and I’ve been hard-pressed to find anything about it online.
• The Digital & Emerging Media department at Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City has a new blog.

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:

• MailChimp‘s email marketing benchmarks per industry
• The Syllabi is my latest source of articles with which to feed Instapaper
• Tips for Finding Great Free-to-Use Images Online - Lots of sites, no mention of compfight though
• Hype Machine’s Zeitgeist 2011: The best music on the web all year
• Differing European attitudes on digital privacy
• SEO Ryan Gosling might help some people learn the basics
• The Game Bakers have info about iOS and indie games market with loads of data, links to post-mortems and a few myths are dispelled
• Waterstones Oxford Street (one of the better corporate Twitter accounts out there) did a Twitter/photo competition with Misery Bear
• The @Betfairpoker Twitter story – part 2 provides a bit of background to one of the quirkier big brand Twitter accounts and where they’re planning to take things next

Some apps and services

• Web: UserVoice, Story Wheel, Tiki-Toki, Bronto, Pure360, Parse.ly, Trello, Shelby.tv
• iPhone: Race Against Time from the Tate. The list of apps I’ve deleted recently is a lot longer
• Email: Boomerang for Gmail, OtherInbox. Not using either of these yet but that might change
• WordPress: Edit Flow ticks so many boxes

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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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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