Links for 10 March 2012

If you skip everything else, at least watch this video of Ira Glass talking about getting good at something. I definitely identified with that.

A little while back, John Coburn (who I was pleased to meet at Bits to Blogs a few weeks back) wrote a very interesting post called Understanding Compelling Collections. It was a write-up of a series of small-scale experiments looking to answer two questions:

Which of our collections best lends themselves to impulse sharing online?
Which of our collections are people most willing to talk about online?

I was reminded of this when Mia Ridge picked up on it recently. Like I say, it’s a good post. It also gives me the opportunity to quote another good post by Schmutzie:

What we do and create most often ends up being about meeting the perceived needs related to what we think people want and not what their needs actually are or what our own needs might be within that experience, so we are often left creating toothless pap that can be easily digested by the broadest community we can imagine and no one in particular. We try to appeal to the things a community of hundreds or thousands might all agree on like we’re all Martha Stewarts selling boring sheet sets.

There are distinctions to be drawn between the two viewpoints (not least between the institutional and the personal) but the question remains – should an instituion be concerned more with reach or effect (or both, or neither, or that magical sweet spot between the two)?

Ed Vaizey’s was up on his technological soapbox again during his keynote speech at the State of the Arts Conference:

I’m also, as many of you will know, excited about what technology can do for the arts. I think it provides an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to new audiences. I don’t regard technology in binary terms – that the future will be totally different, or that technology will fundamentally change the way we live. We will all still want to go to see live theatre, music, dance, or visit galleries and museums. But I passionately believe that technology can enhance that experience, by deepening and enriching what you experience, or by simply letting you know that something is happening nearby.

As much as I wonder about some of the digital stuff the arts funders are pushing, as very-top-level views go, this seems pretty sensible.

Arts/Digital links

The Young Vic have an alternative Twitter account. I really hope someone’s doing the smart thing and comparing/contrasting the effect of this and their main account.

The Arts Council announced the successful applicants for The Space. John Wyver at Illuminations has blogged about their unsuccessful application and said that he’d like to use the Illuminations blog to continue discussions about The Space.

Bruce Sterling looks at four possible futures where combinations of high/low tech and high/low art are played out. I don’t know why the audience look so bemused, I thought this was good.

A few other bits and pieces:

Other links

Pete Ashton wrote Flaneurism shouldn’t be easy and included this line:

Meanwhile the tech bloggers, who were supposed to be the scribes of this cultural revolution, are held rapt by the warring of their corporate gods, cheering like children as one multinational throws a patent lawsuit thunderbolt at another – like Homer, only without the poetry.

I liked that. I also bought a copy of Pete’s This Much I Knew (which I hesitate to call a book). It’s effectively the collected works (2008-2009) of someone who, for me, represents the gold standard in using a blog as a tool for thinking out loud. In a similar-ish vein Lean back media: the shock of the old is a very good (and good looking) presentation from The Economist, who are doing a decent job of presenting their thinking and progress around the shift to digital.

What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen? is a nice illustration of what people will do to get around the limitations of software that’s not up to scratch.

I remember watching Lynda La Plante’s Killer Net back in 1998 but had completely forgotten what it was called until recently. If anyone knows where I might get hold of a copy, that’d be great. Here’s the synopsis:

Students get involved in a violent Internet-based game, around the same time as a series of murders – is there a connection?

Awesome. Here’s some other stuff:

My favourite bit of the BBC English Regions Social Media Strategy (PDF) was the instruction for “All defunct/dormant accounts to be closed elegantly”. More elegance, please.

Also, I really like the simplicity of The Two Things, which I found via Oliver Burkeman who neatly summarised every self-help book that crossed his desk:

first, if you can tolerate a little discomfort, you can achieve almost any goal; and second, it’s amazing the lengths we’ll go to to avoid discomfort.

Some apps and services

Finally

I like the first line of this:

We’re in a very exciting place where absolutely anyone can be a publisher. But I think a more interesting question is how to be a successful publisher

From a video of Faber & Faber, Random House, ustwo & Hachette discussing the future of digital publishing.

Bits to Blogs: Putting Digital First

A couple of weeks ago I was in Newcastle to give a talk at an event called Bits to Blogs at the Great North Museum:

Bits 2 Blogs is the regional e-learning event for museum, library and archive professionals in the North East. It provides a varied day of presentations and workshops that:

  • Showcase the ways in which digital technologies and social media are being used to support and enhance educational programmes in the cultural heritage sector
  • Demonstrate how social media can be used to build engaging relationships with our audiences
  • Provide practical demonstrations of technologies that are relevant and affordable to the sector
  • Demand no prior experience. Bits 2 Blogs is specifically designed to inspire and appeal to all!

The slides from my talk are at the bottom of this post. As is often the way with these things, they don’t make quite so much sense without me talking over them (and you’re missing out on some fancy transitions) so I’ll start with some explanation and links. Feel free to skip on to the pretty pictures if you must.

I’d quite like to give this talk again at some point (*hint*).

Putting Digital First

The first part of my talk was called ‘Putting Digital First’ and it was about how arts and heritage organisations could and should approach digital projects.

More to the point, it was about how, in some cases, arts and heritage organisations are being beaten at their own game (or at least challenged) by people armed with little more than a laptop and an internet connection. I wanted to talk about why that might be the case and what could be done about it.

There are many examples of people punching well above their supposed weight online. I pointed to Bo Burnham, Digital Photography School, Swiss Miss and Boiler Room but the list could go on. I also talked about how a few notable artists, organisations and brands have been transferring their efforts across to digital – Radiohead, Louis CK, The Atlantic and Transformers: Autocracy being ones that seem to be succeeding and/or trying new things. Again, the list could’ve gone on.

[A quick side note – if I’d had longer I might’ve talked about some attempts that haven’t worked so well].

I also quoted Nick Poole’s talk at Bits to Blogs 2011, the conclusion of Bill Thompson’s talk at OpenCulture, Steve Yelvington’s post on getting ‘digital first’ right in the ‘newsroom’ and this from an article about how The Atlantic made the move to digital first:

We decided to prioritize digital over everything else. We were no longer going to be ‘The Atlantic, which happens to do digital.’ We were going to be a digital media company that also published The Atlantic magazine.

I’m planning to expand on this topic at some point and I might also talk about how some of this thinking applies to my recent work with the Royal Court theatre on their Young Writer’s Festival website.

You’ll know you ‘get it’ when…

I really dislike the way people talk about those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t, but that’s a rant for another time. The second part of my talk was really a list of ten traits of good digital projects. It’s not comprehensive and not intended to be prescriptive – I’m quite happy to accept exceptions and I’d be even happier to hear your suggestions.

Here’s my 10:

  1. Project names are search engine-friendly (also, NameChk is your friend)
  2. You work with people with large online networks
  3. There are bloggers on your VIP lists
  4. Each project builds an audience/contacts for the next
  5. People do your marketing for you
  6. You can tell (and/or have a framework for testing) whether new platforms are for you
  7. Test your assumptions online first
  8. You think and act like one of many
  9. Your income comes online
  10. Your audience is online

In this part of the talk I referred to Breathe The Beat, my own YouTube antics for Birmingham Hippodrome, John Willshire’s fireworks and bonfires analogy, Mike Skinner’s thoughts on social media from this interview, The Next Web‘s use of Spread.us, the idea of the lean startup and this post about how to test a project idea from the founder of Buffer.

Thanks again to Rob and John for having me speak at their event and thanks also to everyone who asked good questions in the Q&A section and said kind things afterwords.

Bits to Blogs: Putting Digital First

Trust/funding

Matter is a new journalism project that’s currently raising funds via Kickstarter. Within hours of launching it drew a particularly unpleasant response from Stephen Robert Morse, a Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellow at the City University of New York. At this point I’ll mention I haven’t backed the project – it’s just not really my thing.

The point Stephen made (when he wasn’t going out of his way to insult or defame people) was that people should save their time, money and effort for projects with solid business models. Of course, that’s a perfectly valid opinion and I’d agree that it’s a worthwhile thing to pursue, although not to the exclusion of other experiments. It’s also his area of study, so you can see why it would be his major preoccupation.

However, he attacks two things that I think are very interesting, both of which are encapsulated in this little quote:

While the trailer has an obscenely high production value and the project may have some biggish-in-this-insular-world names on screen, they never make a point to say where the money that unsuspecting victims donate is actually going

Personally, I think those are the best things about this project.

Storytelling

As Stephen points out, they’ve worked the Kickstarter format well – the video has high production values and they’ve got some influential people to lend their support. Presumably those people have helped/will help to spread the word too. Basically, they haven’t just told people that they’re experienced communicators with good connections, they’ve demonstrated it in their pitch.

Whereas Stephen sees that as conning ‘unsuspecting victims’ (patronising sod), I interpret that as an encouraging sign that the people behind Matter:

  • have the contacts to reach (and question) the right people for their stories; and
  • will be able to connect with an audience once they’re up and running.

I already believed that though, which is why this point is minor compared to the next one.

Trust

Stephen complains that:

it is a scam in that the costs of completing an operation like this have not been articulated to the people who may be making donations to the project

‘Scam’? Steady. Bit much. Actually, you’d think that such vagueness would hamper a fundraising project like this. What’s interesting is that Jim and Bobbie didn’t need to explain themselves (although they have now, a bit).

They’re trading off the reputations they’ve built up over the years, with plenty of people trusting them enough to risk a few dollars on them. Bearing in mind the public’s current opinion of journalists, that’s no mean feat.

Stephen doesn’t have that level of trust in them. Fair enough, I expect many wouldn’t, but going so far as to call Jim and Bobbie ‘Snake Oil Salesmen’ their project ‘a scam’, their backers ‘unsuspecting victims’, their benefits ‘junk’ and insinuating that they’ll just take the money and run… well, it makes you wonder all sorts of uncharitable things.

How this relates to art

There’s an article doing the rounds at the moment in which one of the co-founders of Kickstarter is quoted as saying:

It is probable Kickstarter will distribute more money this year than the NEA

For non-US readers, the NEA is the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s essentially the US equivalent of Arts Council England. UPDATE: actually, see Helga’s comment about this below – the NEA isn’t all that big.

Now, I know that some have concerns around the whole idea of crowdfunding, with people questioning the range of artistic endeavours that would benefit from it. They say that only safe, populist work would be funded, that rich people would fund art for themselves and that some things – participatory work with certain communities, for instance – wouldn’t stand a chance. I think they have a point and (as the article says) there will always be a role for state funding.

However, I like the idea that organisations might be able to secure funding for unspecified projects, purely off the back of the reputations they’ve built up.

The thing that I especially like about this idea is that artists and arts organisations could take the effort they currently put into impressing/building relationships with funders and instead lavish that attention on their audiences and communities. What would they do if they didn’t have to spend time on funding applications, evaluations, meetings and other assorted hoop-jumping activities?

I wonder if an organisation’s ability to raise funds in this way might be a measure of the kind of relationship they have with their audiences. For instance, if every theatre company in the country were to say “We’re going to crowdfund our next production. We don’t know what it’ll be, but we’ll need at least £50,000. Trust us”, I wonder how many would hit the target.