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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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:

• 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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Links for 6 October 2009

• Derek Powazek – How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half – “But, really, I can’t believe how easy it was. Making print media used to be so difficult. I remember cutting and gluing long columns of text together, shooting flats, and generally sweating for days to create my college newspaper. Now the the most time-consuming part is simply asking for permission from the content creators”
• Welcome | MagCloud – “Welcome to MagCloud, where you can publish your own printed magazine”
• Trust Art – Home – “Trust Art is a social platform that is commissioning ten public artworks over the next year. People are invited to become shareholders with $1, share with interested friends, and renew culture”
• 24hrBook Project : CompletelyNovel – “a groundbreaking project to challenge a group of writers to write a new story about London in just 24 hours. The book will be written by a group of experienced writers working together using all kinds of online collaborative tools around the clock”
• HBO Imagine – “This isn’t sitting back to watch a show… we’ve created this entirely new way of experiencing a story. Each piece of content provides unique information, and offers a unique perspective on the characters, plots and motives at play, allowing viewers to discover for themselves what is really going on”
• November In Manchester – November in Manchester is a social media tale of fiction. Taking place over the month of November, this project will share the story of two very different characters – via the medium of social media – as their lives intertwine and eventually collide
• Flink Labs | Data Visualisation Beyond the Bar Chart | Concept Lens – Concept Lens is an innovative application that enables you to visually track the conversations occurring on Twitter and photos being posted on Flickr, for an event or topic of interest

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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”

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Links for 12 July 2009

• Social Media Releases for the music industry – MonkeyWatcher – Advice for bands – “send a quick press release by email, and provide a link to a social media release (SMR), or, in other words, a page aggregating the various items you want to share (music, pictures, videos, blog posts, tour dates, etc.)” I get a lot of adjective stuffed press releases from bands’ PR companies too – the essentials with links to further stuff would be so much more useful
• Putt’s Law – “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand”
• Population : One – One Person is One Pixel – “Every pixel in the illustration represents one person alive on Earth. The first one is you. The rest are everyone else”. Reminiscent of Stans Cafe’s ‘Of All The People…’. It never hurts to get a sense of perspective once in a while
• Birmingham schools named in gang report – Google Maps – Someone’s plotted all the schools named in a report as being “at risk of becoming ‘feeder schools’ for city gangs into a Google Map. No idea which report and the colour-coding is a mystery. Still. As a side note, if anyone knows how to search Google Maps for user-generated maps then please let me know
• kala phool – Mother India – 21st Century Remix – The edit and live soundtracking of Mother India which Kala Phool produced last year was one of the best things I’ve seen in the past 12 months. I’ve just heard they’re taking the show on a UK tour between August and October. No dates yet but you heard it here first
• nycgo / this is new york city – New York’s official website for visitors was relaunched in Jan 09, partnering with Google, Travelocity, Time Out New York and others
• Spotted by Locals – Experience cities like a local – A collection of city blogs, all under the ‘Spotted by Locals’ roof. An interesting idea, not quite realised but still pretty good

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