There’s been quite a lot of good stuff to read and think about over the past little while. One of my favourite articles was called What sells CEOs on social networking (don’t let the title put you off) which didn’t necessarily tell me anything new but reframed things very nicely:
There is a huge amount of work in sociology, really beautiful work, that shows, especially if you want innovation and novelty, or introductions to other social networks, that your weak ties are a better place to go than your strong ties. Your weak-tie network is an extremely valuable thing for you. The problem is that before the 2.0 era, we had terrible tools for building and maintaining and exploiting a network of weak ties.
Weak ties are good for innovation, novelty and new networks. Strong ties are good for taking action. The question is, how do you turn a weak tie into a strong tie and is that always necessary or desirable?
There’s a line to be drawn from that way of thinking to this from Paul Adams, a member of Facebook’s product team:
To be a successful advertiser on the web in the future, you will need to build content based on many, lightweight interactions over time.
Arts/digital links
Chad Bauman’s post on his lessons learned during 4 1/2 years as Director of Comms at Arena Stage was very good. In other blogging-from-experience news, here’s a post about what worked and what didn’t when Woolly Mammoth invited people to tweet from rehearsals.
- TrendsWatch 2012 from the Center for the Future of Museums highlights seven trends that CFM’s staff and advisors believe are highly significant to museums and their communities
- A collection of digital marketing case studies for major venues and festivals in Australia, US, UK and Canada. Short descriptions of each (although the ‘strategy’ bits are misnamed)
- There’s a mobile app for delivering real-time captions for live theatre via smartphones and tablets, which is funny because recently I was idly wondering how Soundcloud-style comments might work for live performances.
- Behind Ballet is the blog of The Australian Ballet. Looking at dance through the prism of fashion, music, art and literature.
And I’ll end this section with a quote from Sadler’s Well’s Kinglsey Jayakasera looking back on the Transmission Vamp conference:
Certainly if I am ever going to create a 12 part history of European contemporary dance I should start by planning to produce it for online rather than hope for a commission from BBC4
Other links
The minor kerfuffle over The Curator’s Code, a proposed “standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment” was interesting but short-lived. For me, Matt Langer and Marco Arment provided the best arguments, summed up by the latter here:
regardless of how much time it takes to find interesting links every day, I don’t think most intermediaries deserve credit for simply sharing a link to someone else’s work. Reliably linking to great work is a good way to build an audience for your site. That’s your compensation
Five emerging revenue strategies for digital content producers brings together an odd but interesting mix of case studies (although the title’s a bit misleading). Blogs and forums turned into PDF digests, specialised ad networks, diversifying into TV and tiered-access/price subscriptions
The latest SSX game uses uses NASA topography data for its snowboarding courses. Awesome. If more people talked about these kinds of uses for open data I suspect more people would care about it. On the topic of data, I thought App Store Optimization was interesting for the way they use search data from related third party sources, rather than the app store itself.
Some other bits and pieces:
- I started reading Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas while wearing my sceptical face but it wasn’t necessary.
- Teletext was a fascinating thing and quite often gets skipped over in the narrative of the shift to digital. For that reason alone The promise of Teletext is worth a read.
- UnCollege has a round-up of open textbooks, learning communities, study groups, lectures and courses.
- 9 examples of great blogger relations.
- I have no idea what threaded is but it should probably come with a health warning.
- Each month, the Awesome Foundation chooses an applicant who has proposed an awesome project and funds them. There are chapters opening up in cities all over the place.
Apps/services/etc
- Web – PeopleBrowsr, ValoBox, EdgeRank Checker, CiviCRM, ReTargeter, Vanilla Forums, NationBuilder, freeDive, Timeline, Ketchup, minutes.io, Percolate, Geofeedr, Fluent, The Slide, Checkthis, Social Metrics, InboundWriter, Call Recorder for Skype, hackpad, QuirkTools
- iPhone – Fish
- WordPress – Social Network User Detection, Like Gate, Editorial Calendar
Finally
Like A Kid In A Sweet Shop is a behind the scenes look at the new ‘reservation experience’ at Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant, The Fat Duck. I know a lot of arts organisations are thinking about how the experience of a performance can be seen as starting with the first point of contact and ending only when the memory fades. Here’s someone (apparently with a nice budget) exploring that idea: