Or maybe not lessons but inspiration. Or something. I’m not sure yet.
I stumbled across Club Mumble (NB: link disabled cos Google’s reporting malware) 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.