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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To address the balance there are a few people prepared to address the inaccuracies, point out the need for substance, rather than style and generally describe junk as junk. My metaphorical hat is doffed to the people undertaking this sisyphean task.

Notwithstanding all of that, I wanted to draw a line between the ongoing infographic boom and a Smashing Magazine post from a few years back discussing a micro-trend for bespoke designs for individual blog posts. Warning: that post contains the word ‘blogazine’.

It was a designer’s reaction to seeing millions of people using the same old blog layouts to express themselves. However, interesting as it was, one look at the advantages and disadvantages at the end of the article would tell you it was never going to take off in a meaningful way. In fact, the trend has swung towards ever more flexible content types to cope with things like responsive design and dynamically-generated pages.

Still, despite everything, the idea had its merits and I see some of those in the way that infographics have been taken up – particularly by many websites and marketers/campaigners*. The key thing is that they solve problems for many of the people involved in their propagation:

• readers like them because (at their best, at least) they make large amounts of information/data more easily digestible and are more interesting to look at than standard blog posts
• websites like embedding them because they’re a quick and easy form of content and a shortcut to something like having a single blog post with its own bespoke design. Also, readers like them
• marketers/campaigners like making them because websites will embed them (without editing them) and readers will share them around. They can also be good for communicating a message effectively

A final thought on this – it might help to have the vocabulary to differentiate between types of visually-presented content. Overuse of the info- prefix means that the format is less likely to be used for opinion, questions, mindless invective, whimsy or any number of other uses. Or maybe we just call those ‘graphics’.

*I think journalists tend to take a slightly different approach to this, although don’t ask me to back that up or explain/justify differentiating between journalists and website owners.

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Hack days (events where organisations provide data for developers to play with) have become more and more popular over the past couple of years with culture, more culture, history, music and Black Country Museums all tackled.  About a year ago, the first fully-capitalised Culture Hack Day took place in London, with follow-ups in Edinburgh, Cambridge, Leeds and Atlanta. There are probably more examples of this kind of thing.

More

Three more projects that aim to bring together developers and cultural organisations have been announced recently. Working from the littlest to the biggest…

The CultureCode Initiative is a series of free events in the North East taking place over Feb and March 2012. The idea is to match up cultural organisations/practitioners with software developers and creative technologists. They’ll do this via an introductory workshop and a meet and greet. Things will culminate with everyone working together at a hack day.

Happenstance is an R&D project that will fund residencies for designers, developers and digital producers at one of three arts organisations: Site Gallery, Lighthouse and Spike Island.

SYNC is the biggest of the three. A two-year programme for the cultural sector in Scotland with three main elements:

• Culture Hack Scotland
• A geeks in residence programme
• An online magazine called SYNC Tank

Incidentally, NESTA have just launched a Scottish version of their Digital R&D Fund, along with AHRC and Creative Scotland.

And…

I think more digitally-savvy cultural organisations are a good idea, for lots of reasons. If you’ve read this far then I’ll assume you don’t need me to list them for you.

At some point, what I’d like to see emerging from all this activity is:

• Some way of tying together all these geographically-disparate projects, even if just very loosely, so these projects can feed off each other more than they currently do. Funding respects borders, there’s no reason why online activity needs to.
• Some indication of what sort of value these workshops, networking events, R&D programmes and hack days provide to what sort of participant.
• Related to the above, an idea of the merits/drawbacks of these initiatives as compared to other  ways of bringing digital capabilities into an organisation (such as hiring staff, paying an agency or consultant, asking your little cousin to lend a hand or taking a course/subscribing to a bunch of useful RSS feeds and learning everything yourself).

Come to think of it (and veering from the point only slightly), a more culturally-relevant version of LinkedGov’s doc on ‘The economic impact of open data’ would be good too.

My point is, I think all this activity is good and welcome and useful. It’d just be interesting to know how useful.

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NESTA and Arts Council England recently commissioned a bunch of projects via the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, aiming to connect arts and cultural organisations with technology companies in a way that can benefit the wider sector. Hoorah to that.

They had £500k to dish out to a handful of organisations. A grand total of 459 artists and organisations applied, prompting some (including myself) to suggest that a lot of people may have wasted their time and energy. Incidentally, most of the eight commissioned organisations are blogging intermittently at digitalrndfund.wordpress.com.

NESTA, much to their credit, have published ‘An analysis of applications for the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture‘. Amongst other things, it breaks down:

• The types of arts and cultural organisations that applied – mainly performing and visual arts plus commercial arts organisations and creative businesses
• Geographic spread – overwhelmingly London, with an interesting band around Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield
• Requested budget allocations
• The applications’ digital themes – a fairly even distribution with a slight lean towards UGC/social media and mobile/location/games

It’s all quantitative stuff, which is pretty interesting as far as it goes. What’s absent and would be much more useful, given the comments on this post, is some sort of qualitative feedback on the applications. Making that feedback available publicly would be even more useful. It’s very likely unfeasible to do that 451 unsuccessful applications, but I’d love to see some sort of simple grading on a scale along the lines of this:

• commissioned
• we’d have commissioned it if we had a bigger budget – worth pursuing through other routes
• great idea but wouldn’t trust the organisation to deliver it
• missed the point entirely
• batshit insane

I can’t see it happening, unfortunately.

Something else of note is that Birmingham apparently had one of the higher levels of application submissions and not a single one was successful. A very poor return from a city that hosted one of the Digital R&D Fund roadshows, the Hello Culture conference (programmed along the themes of this fund) and recently benefitted from the not-entirely-dissimilar DCD programme and 4iP.

Still, the report ends on an interesting note, with the conclusion stating that:

As a pilot, the high levels of demand suggest that the funding partners are right to consider how the fund could be scaled-up in future to meet the digital R&D needs of a larger set of arts and cultural organisations.

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Louis CK self-released his show ‘Live at the Beacon Theater‘ and became the new Radiohead. Rather than getting a company to record and distribute one of his standup shows, he did it all himself, selling DRM-free downloads of the show for a quarter of the usual price.

It was a bit of a risk but it’s paid off and the profits generated have been pretty extraordinary. Louis’s put out a couple of updates on how things have gone, with this paragraph standing out (my emphasis added):

If the trend continues with sales on this video, my goal is that i can reach the point where when I sell anything, be it videos, CDs or tickets to my tours, I’ll do it here and I’ll continue to follow the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not overmarketing to you, keeping as few people between you and me as possible in the transaction.

This provoked all sorts of excited chatter including this: Why 2012 will be year of the artist-entrepreneur. The thing that gets me is that Louis CK didn’t use any particularly new tools to do what he did. This has been possible for years now – In Rainbows came out in 2007.

Will 2012 really be the year of the artist-entrepreneur? It’d be about time. As time goes by there are bound to be more people looking to do this kind of thing and I’ll bet individual artists are more likely to move quicker than larger organisations (and it won’t suit everyone). I’d be interested to see what lessons people take from alternative ways of selling online – the way Qwertee shifts T-shirts and Kopi sells coffee, for instance. It’s still early days for crowdfunding too.

Meanwhile, other much-discussed topics included the acquisition of Gowalla by Facebook and the consequent bleating from people irked that their data and the time/effort they invested in the platform had gone to waste. That provoked a post from the guy behind Pinboard called Don’t Be A Free User who advised people to “avoid mom-and-pop projects that don’t take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement”.

There was also a minor incident involving some shoddy customer service which escalated impressively. Daniel Nye Griffiths provided ongoing updates for Forbes but the work by the guy drafted in to clear up the mess, especially this IAmA on Reddit, is worth a look for fans of online crisis control.

Arts/Digital links

Hannah Rudman’s round-up of 2011’s digital developments in the arts and cultural sector is recommended, as is Clairey Ross’s selection of must-read museum/digital/humanities blogs.

Jasper Vissen’s 30 do’s for designing successful participatory and crowdsourcing projects is a good list and has been followed up by Nina Simon with her Fifteen Random Things I’ve Learned about Design for Participation This Year.

The Want to Steal Banksy? campaign by the Art Series Hotels in Australia was pretty funny and Singing Tweets from the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra was a simple and nicely executed  little thing.

Girl Walk // All Day is “a feature-length dance music video and tale of urban exploration that follows three dancers across New York City. They turn the city’s sidewalks, parks and architecture into an evolving stage as they spread their joy of movement”. As much as anything, I thought it was notable that this was presented by Gothamist.

The Guggenheim released its first ebooks. They’re not only releasing new titles such as the catalogue for their current exhibition but also going through the archives, making available out-of-print titles for online browsing and publishing digital versions of reprinted titles.

In other ebook news, Vook looks like being an interesting publishing platform for creating, distributing and tracking sales of digital books. This seems like a good point to repost this on why some ebooks cost more than the hardcover.

If you’ve not come across the kind of new information that emerges when data-mining is applied to literature then The Data-Mining’s The Thing: Shakespeare Takes Center Stage In The Digital Age is a good starting point. I liked the analogy that it’s like “taking 36 decks of cards filled with random content… and then asking why there were no sevens in the decks that contained red cards.”

Other bits and bobs:

• ArtsProfessional’s 2011 Ticketing & Technology supplement
• The new NCA Arts Index 2011, with data sources including DCMS, UK National Statistics, ACE, Arts & Business, Higher Education Statistics Authority and SoLT
• @homeofpolar: Twitter is like a mirror for your voice
• InstantEncore is a thing for keeping track of the classical music & artists you love
• Dan Harmon (a writer on Community) discussing an algorithmic approach to writing stories.

Other links

I’ve been using Christmas TV viewing to try out some of the social TV platforms. GetGlue (so called for the stickets they’ll send you, apparently) and Miso are alright but Zeebox looks to be the most interesting at this stage. I can’t say any of them actually improved my viewing experience at all, but it’s early days.

I was fascinated by this interview with The Economist’s Andrew Rashbass and especially this quote:

A survey among its US subscribers asked those aged over 40 how they read the Economist – more than 95% said they read it in print. But when asked how they expect to read it in two years’ time, the number expecting to do so in print fell to 35%. “I’ve never seen a statistic like it,” says Rashbass.

I liked this bit from Tom Ewing’s Take Me to the River:

In a way, it’s sad that the word “surfing” caught on so early as the description of what people do online. Using the web back then was more like diving– plunging into an endless otherworld looking for treasure. Social media is a truer match for the surfing metaphor– content comes at you and you ride it as best you can.

Something I’d not come across before is the idea of seat licences at (mainly sporting) venues in the US. These give the owner the right to buy season tickets for that seat and they’re proving to be valuable so far, apparently. STR Marketplace seem to be the main players in providing the sales platform for this.

• I’m not particularly interested in the tech blogging scene but I liked Jeremiah Owyang’s Taxonomy of Tech Bloggers.
• I haven’t read Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2011 report yet, but it’s on the list.
• The Federated Media network shows monthly views, demographics and advertising costs for a wide range of well-known blogs
• A round-up of The Year of 2011 in 3D Printing
• How open data will affect philanthropy
• You Have Downloaded checks your IP address against a database of torrent downloads
• Cowbird ”explains humanity’s sagas through heartfelt stories”. Notable because Jonathan Harris is behind it
• Blogging: The fine art of the confessional - “Too often, today, we meet people online who are frantically promoting themselves and their businesses – all the time pretending that what they are doing is not advertising or marketing but rather ‘being sociable’.”

Discovery’s still a big thing and probably always will be:

• Byliner - Byliner helps you discover & discuss great stories and great writers. We’ll find you something good to read
• Discover – Last.fm - Find your next favourite band. Over 2 million tracks from emerging artists

Some apps and services

• Web – ArtSpotter, ArtStack, Clicky, Asana, Tout, Groupon Scheduler, WorkFlowy, Farfromhomepage, Schemer
• Mac – Mendeley (prompted by coming across the newer ReadCube), Moom, Selenium, Piezo
• WordPress plugins - Sharebar, Twitter @Anywhere Plus and a good list of standards at Plugins – GitHub
• Ruby resources - The Bastards Book of Ruby and Kidsruby.com
• iPhone – Flipboard, Waze, Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms, BBC iPlayer, Tweetlogix, Dickens: Dark London
• Games - iPhoneTiny.com is good for recommendations of free games (I grabbed Mr Ninja and Muffin Knight). Dizzy – Prince of the Yolk Folk was disappointing. There, I said it.

Finally

It was nearly Rich Fulcher and Samsung’s Old Masters but instead it’s going to be Ice Cube’s take on the Eames.

Actually, seeing as how it’s the first day of 2012, here’s another video. I’ve been catching up on TED talks over Christmas and my favourite by far was Luis von Ahn’s talk on massive-scale online collaboration. He’s one of the people behind reCaptcha and is now working on Duolingo which will help you learn a language for free and simultaneously translate the Web. Impressive.

See also what Trendwatching have dubbed ‘Idle Sourcing’‘: ”products and services that make it downright simple (if not effortless) to contribute to anything”.

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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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Panlogic recently released a report called Digital Philanthropy for the Arts. It’s good – thorough and well-explained and worth recommending to clients as reading material.

The key findings are as follows (and taken directly from the executive summary):

• Emotion is the key reason why people give. Arts organisations need to optimise the giving process to give donors reasons to feel good and to look good in front of their peers
• Technology has changed who gives and how. As a result, Arts organisations need to overcome their demographic prejudices, that too often still focus on monthly direct debits from baby boomers. The Arts world is moving from a model of fewer, high level donations to many, smaller donations.
• Mobile giving is the way forwards. We believe that a national mobile-giving platform (allowing donors to text the amount they wish to donate to an organisation-specific number) would help drive significant impulse donations. Vodafone are leading on this with their JustTextGiving service.
• Arts organisations need to ensure that all the ‘hygiene’ factors within the giving journey are ticked. They must be visibly unflashy and efficient. Their appeals must be explicit and proactive, ideally leveraging their creative talent
• The main reasons for not giving fall within the Arts organisation’s to resolve – so ‘don’t put barriers up’

Elsewhere, I’d recommend the list of barriers to entry cited by organisations (p8) and things that might go wrong (p32). I’d also suggest you read the reasons why people do (pp9-12) and don’t (pp14-16) give and the best practices with regard to donors, digital (generally) and social media (p20 onwards).

The breakdown of the Southbank Centre’s email supporting their Pull Out All The Stops was interesting (and not unfair at all, criticism doesn’t come much more constructive).

In conclusion then, good stuff.

On a related note, JustGiving has revealed average donation values of social media shares. Apparently Facebook drives the most donations and Twitter drives the highest average donations.

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• Individual stores such as Shopify, Goodsie, Big Cartel and Storebeez
• Market places like Etsy, Folksy and eBay
• Bespoke websites

Putting aside the market place sites, the problem with individual stores and bespoke sites is that people end up trying to drive traffic to their individual, isolated shops. They’re tacked on to their portfolio websites but rarely linked to from anywhere else. They might look very nice, but there are no shoppers browsing by. They look a bit like this:

(Photo by Anthony Citrano, zigzaglens.com)

Whereas retailers understand that by clumping together with others in one place they’re more likely to attract passing trade.

(Photo by Daniel Morris)

To be fair, this is what the market place solutions are going for. Storebeez allows you to search across stores, as does Big Cartel (although this feature’s a bit hidden). Even so, I have a suggestion for improving things.

How to improve things

I run a decent-sized, geographically specific arts and culture blog. I’d like to have a shop of some sort on there but I don’t want to deal with the admin of actually running it. However, I could provide some of that much needed footfall.

What I’d like to be able to do is set up a virtual shopping centre, bringing together individual stores that I think are relevant to my audience:

1. Give me a front page
2. Let me customise my shopping centre a little (header, colours, fonts, links back to my site)
3. Allow me to select the shops that would populate that shopping centre
4. Give me a way of attaching it to my site
5. Let me earn affiliate payments for any sales made and/or new stores set up

That would do as a starting point. Later on, give me the option to group or highlight sub-lists of products (a round-up of Christmas gifts, for example), give me more granular control by letting me exclude certain products from sellers’ inventory, give me some analytics and so on. If it’s a successful mall maybe people could pay me to be listed in it, or to have their products listed as ‘featured’ (a bit like Badoo‘s premium Rise Up and Spotlight features).

I wouldn’t be interested in having any direct influence over individual store owners – inventory, pricing, order fulfilment, customer service and so on wouldn’t be of any interest to me. I’d just send traffic their way and let them deal with the rest. It wouldn’t even be an exclusive deal – they could potentially appear in hundreds of these virtual shopping centres.

The benefits

Everyone wins:

• Sellers get more traffic to their stores without having to lift a finger. In fact, more people are being incentivised to sell their work for them
• Buyers don’t have to search around for shops – sellers and their products are more easily discoverable
• The store provider gets more sellers using their platform and more customers buying products through it
• Website owners get a useful, low maintenance feature for their websites that comes with the prospect of earning them (and some independent artists and makers) a little money

The size of the opportunity

I’m sure many other websites and blogs would relish the opportunity to do the same – for instance, there are plenty of big design-focussed sites that could make use of something like this. I can see lots of possible configurations too:

• Created in Birmingham’s mall would aggregate shops that belong to artists of all sorts from around Birmingham
• Someone who blogs about knitting might aggregate shops set up by knitters from around the world
• A collective of artists might promote a single mall that brings together all of their individual stores
• A big design blog might feature products they’ve covered

In summary

If anyone from Shopify, Goodsie, Storebeez or Big Cartel happens to be reading this then please build this feature. I’ll then tell everyone to get stores with you (and I’m sure others will do likewise).

Or maybe someone’s already doing this and I’ve not spotted it – anyone? For all I know, it might be possible to do something with Shopify’s API. Alternatively, there might be a good reason why nobody’s doing this yet – would it be too much hassle?

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This year I’m looking for Spotify playlists of those top albums so I can skip through them and transfer anything that sounds decent to my ‘New stuff to listen to’ playlist. Those playlists aren’t too easy to find though – I’d have thought people would have started putting them together as a matter of course, but apparently not (although that’s probably fair enough in the case of the record shops).

Anyway, here’s a starter list. I’ll add to it as and when I find more:

• Stereogum Best of 2011 (Spotify)
• Fluxblog 2011 Survey (Spotify)
• Quietus Albums of the Year 2011 (Spotify)
• Guardian Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Piccadilly Records Albums of the Year 2011 (Spotify)
• Rough Trade Top 100 Albums of the Year (Spotify)
• NME’s 50 Best Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• The Fly Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• The Wire Top 50 Releases of the Year (Spotify)
• Uncut Top 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Rolling Stone’s Best 50 Albums of 2011 (Spotify)
• Drowned in Sound Top 50 of 2011 (Spotify - sampler)
• Clash Top 40 Albums of 2011
• Filter Top 10 of 2011
• Hype Machine Zeitgeist 2011 (Spotify)

Most of these are full albums. If there’s just one track from each then I’ve labelled that ‘sampler’.

A single, aggregated playlist might be good. Maybe next year there’ll be something like a Metacritic Spotify app for this. Oh, and I should point out that not every album is on Spotify, so not all of these playlists are 100%.

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The problem is that they’re sometimes not all that easy to discover. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a handy mailing list repository that anyone can search. So I thought I’d kick something off.

Here’s a spreadsheet of what’s on mailing lists:

I’m pretty certain there are more than this, so…

Help me add to the list

If you know of any other what’s on mailing lists then fill out this very quick form.

If there’s anything wrong on the spreadsheet (for example, dodgy URLs or long-dead lists) or if you can think of any ways to improve this then please leave a comment below.

NB: Ideally, I’m looking for what’s on mailing lists that cover events in a particular geographic areas (regions, cities, etc). I’m not looking for the mailing list for your individual venue/theatre company/band/whatever.

I’ll check for submissions and update the spreadsheet above on a semi-regular basis. I’d open it up more, but I’ve seen this sort of thing get abused by spammers before so am going to take on a bit of admin to prevent that.

A couple of thanks

With thanks to Jake Orr (@jakeyoh) for kinda prompting me to do this and Alex Jones (@jones_alex) for kicking off this list a little while back.

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