I’ve been a fan of Kickstarter since it launched back in 2009. I love its very 21st-century take on patronage. It’s also my favourite example of a particular kind of startup idea. Back in 2009, I wrote “it’s a terrific example of spotting something that people are doing in an ad hoc basis, and creating a site to formally organize and enable that behaviour.”
I’ve been delighted to watch it grow, and work its way into the mainstream. There are plenty of indicators of its success, but one is all of theKickstarterimitators that have emerged.
Kickstarter now processes some serious coin. They’ve recently had severalprojectsraise more than a million dollars, and in 2011 their projects collectively generated just under US $100 million That’s up from $27 million in 2010.
With all that money floating around, there must be an emergent demand for a professional marketer or fundraiser who can help Kickstarter projects achieve their goals. After all, Kickstarter (and its ilk) are simply a particular kind of fundraising, which is itself a popular profession.
Accidental consultants
I did some searches for ‘Kickstarter consultant’ and the like, but Google’s cupboards were surprisingly bare. I found this guy and this guy, both of whom more or less admit to accidentally becoming crowdfunding consultants. Interestingly, they’re both filmmakers who had their own successful Kickstarter projects. I’m always been a little leery of the “I did this, so you can too” approach, but I have no reason to doubt their capabilities. I was surprised not to find any professional marketers or fundraisers positioning themselves for this kind of work. Even searches for the more general ‘crowdfunding consultant’ (and some variations) didn’t produce as many convincing results as I would have expected.
The average Kickstarter project in 2011 only asked for about $8400. If you’re earning a few percentage points, there’s not a lot of money there. But many of the projects are worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most projects seem to be founded by artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers. These are, in my experience, people who, on average, aren’t great at marketing themselves and their projects. Most of the artists I know would prefer to make art.
On the other hand, it’s still early days for Kickstarter. So perhaps it’s a prerequisite for a successful project that the people behind it be savvy marketers? In essence, Kickstater filters out the creative people who are bad at crowdfunding?
Obviously, crowdfunding is becoming big business. And it’s about to become a lot bigger, thanks to a new bill that President Obama is soon expected to sign into law. I expect to meet more and more crowdfunding experts at conferences in the coming months.
Can I look under the hood of your Kickstarter project?
On a personal note, I’ve always wanted to start my own Kickstarter project, but I’ve been reluctant. I wouldn’t be developing a game or making a movie, so I wouldn’t be asking for a substantive amount of money. It seems a little ingenuine, as a successful business grown-up, to crowdfund a creative project that I could manage to fund myself, doesn’t it?
Until I resolve that particular existential crisis, I’d be curious to chat with people who are launching Kickstarter projects. No promises, but if you’ve got a project that interests me, and I’ve got some time, I’d enjoy contributing to making it a success. The one I can probably help the most is through advice and, occasionally, a connection. I’m just curious about watching the Kickstarter crowdfunding process close up.
I’ve been thinking about antecedents, copying and credit because we recently launched Drawn to the Wild over at The Big Wild. It invites Canadians to re-imagine a frame from a Sarah Harmer video, and to contribute to wilderness protection while they do so. Some web users will recognize that this campaign is highly derivative of the great, moody The Johnny Cash Project.
On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with borrowing ideas. After all, while talent imitates, genius steals. We all stand on the shoulders of preceding giants.
However, when you create a derivative project, it’s important to acknowledge its source. The idea of attribution is baked into the culture of the web, in back links, in Creative Commons and in retweets. It’s also consistently abused and ignored on the web, where authorship is difficult to trace and creators and copiers have few incentives to give credit where its due.
There are lots of ways that Budweiser could have acknowledged Improv Everywhere. They could do so in the YouTube video description, in earned media or on a blog post on their own site. A cynic might suggest that Budweiser’s ad agency wanted to claim complete and original authorship of the idea, as it increases their value in the eyes of their client.
For Drawn to the Wild, we prominently cite The Johnny Cash Project as inspiration on the project’s About page, as well as in our email communications with the media and our communities. When pitching the idea, were totally upfront with stakeholders about its origins. The Johnny Cash Project actually acts as a kind of proof of concept. If somebody else has been successful with something similar, then it increases our odds.
A website for the origin stories of ideas
There are lots of ways online for the creator of a derivative work to acknowledge their inspiration. However, there are no systematic ways for anybody else to highlight possible connections. Maybe the original creator has a bone to pick, or other web users want to understand and contribute to the “origin story” of an idea.
I’m imagining a website where users can post links, and drawn connections between them. This wouldn’t just be for web projects, but any sort of creative work.They might post a link to the Wikipedia article or IMDB page for Star Wars, and connect it to pages about The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Hidden Fortress. Or they’d drawn the connection between the Bud ad and its Improv Everywhere antecedent. People could vote up the connections they agreed with, and vote down the ones they didn’t (“Two and a Half Men owes nothing to Aeschylus!”).
My friend suggested a great name for the project: This Came From That.
Do other sites already do this? Wikipedia does, in a way, though one has to establish notability and then find corroborating evidence from mainstream sources before getting such a connection included in an article. Google sort of does this, too, in that you can search for “Star Wars influences” and find some useful information, but neither site is focused on solving this particular problem.
What do you think? Should we care about tracing the origins of ideas?
I likeonline satire. The technology world takes itself pretty seriously, and deserves its fair share of skewering. When it’s done correctly, satire doesn’t have to be mean-spirited. It’s cutting, and pokes gentle fun at the ideas and projects we may be taking too seriously.
Pinterest.com has exploded onto the start-up scene. In the current parlance, it’s a “push-button curation” site. A cousin to Tumblr, you use Pinterest to collect images from the web and ‘pin’ them to ‘boards’. To me, it’s mostly Delicious for pictures or collages of “stuff I want to buy”.
It represents the convergence of a few trends. First, and most importantly, there’s the crunchy, Etsy, DIY movement that’s popularized knitting and other crafty practices, and is reflected in the hipster ethos. Add to that mix the maturation of online shopping, where a lot of people spend a lot of their time (particularly on tablets like the iPad) browsing online stores. Then bake in the mainstream understanding of social sharing, thanks mostly to sites like Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve barely used the site–I haven’t thought of a personal or professional use for it yet. I was wondering about it on Twitter and somebody (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten who) suggested that it wasn’t for me, but rather for “co-eds to make visioning boards for The Secret“. Ouch.
Is anybody Pinterested?
Pinterest is ripe for satire. And I wish I had a good idea about how to satirize it. But life is a bit hectic at the moment, and, as I said, I’m a Pinterest noob.
I suggested on Twitter that the satirical site ought to be at Disinterest.com, but that’s already taken by a mortgage company. Then Paula suggested Dishinterest.com, which sounds excellent to me. So I registered it.
Now what should go there? What are the characteristics of Pinterest that most deserve a critique? In my limited time on the site, I see a lot of these quotations-in-image-form that are popular on Tumblr (ironically, it’s become immediately popular to use this collage site to collect blocks of text). This isn’t a great idea, but maybe the site is just a board full of the most banal objects one can find: a pencil, a clump of dirt and so forth?
What do you think? Any good ideas for Pinterest-related satire?
I have been thinking about piracy lately, though, because I’m considering alternatives to cable television. In truth, hockey is the only thing that binds me to Shaw Cable. I’ve been poking around for alternatives to watching or recording Canucks games on our PVR.
The only legal option is NHL GameCenter LIVE (caution, autoplaying video ahead). Back in October, I could pay $169 to watch nearly any game I want on my computer, iPad or iPhone. They reduce the price throughout the year–it’s currently $119. On the face of it, this seems like a satisfactory offer. I’d rather they amortize the pricing based on the exact day I sign up, but it could be worse.
However, the fine print is pretty hostile to the average customer:
If you want to cancel your subscription after you sign up, you have five days to do so. After that, you forfeit the entire payment.
You only get to watch the first two rounds of the playoffs. It’s not immediately apparent, despite some diligent searching, as to how one watches the subsequent rounds.
Because of league agreements with broadcasters, many games are blacked out. The rules around this policy are pretty inscrutable, though I did read that no games are broadcast through GameCenter in the playoffs in Canada, because they’re televised nationally. There are endless complaints from GameCenter customers on social media and online discussion forums about this practice.
The reviews of the NHL GameCenter mobile app are not flattering. A typical review in the iTunes store reads “Huge downgrade from the 2010 version. It crashes constantly and it’s way harder to navigate than last years version.”
The NHL seems to be about 60% of the way there to a really great service that enables you to watch all games, live or recorded, over the web.
By the way, there are no current NHL (nor NBA, NFL or MLB) games available through the iTunes store. This seems like an enormous missed opportunity.
Clearly, the NHL has not found its iTunes-esque sweet spot. How do I know this? Because there are a ton of illegal ways to watch NHL games online.
There are streaming sites, usually with multiple options for streams of both the home and away broadcasts for any game, and bittorrent sites. But my favourite example is this grey-market site based in Rotterdam, Netherlands that is a generic clone of NHL GameCenter. They essentially offer the same thing as GameCenter, except with more convenience and at a moderately-lower (a year costs US $99) price point. There are no blackouts, no playoff restrictions and the site seems to be more reliable better than the GameCenter app. In short, this shady Dutch operation out-performs the NHL’s own service.
As is so often the case, when the legal options aren’t satisfactory, illegal alternatives abound. There’s clearly a huge appetite for this kind of on-demand sports content. On my site alone, more than 17,000 people have visited this site alone looking for some variation of “how to watch NHL hockey online”. Not everybody wants the all-you-can-eat package for $169, mind you, but that’s the only legal game in town.
We’ve solved online music. We’re making good progress on television and movies. It looks to me like sports leagues, or at least the NHL, still have a very 20th century attitude towards the web. What’s holding them back?
UPDATE: Coincidentally, I was poking around on my iPad tonight, looking for hockey highlights. None of the CBC, TSN or Sportsnet apps offer video highlights, and the associated sites only offer video highlights in Flash. When I visit NHL.com looking for highlights, I get forwarded to their GameCenter offering. In short, the NHL expects me to have to pay to watch video highlights on my iPad.
Of course, somebody has routed around the bogosity, and hosts a simple site for NHL highlights that runs very smoothly on my iPad.
While eating lunch on Tuesday, James Erwin noticed a question in the AskReddit section of Reddit.com, the popular social news site, that struck his fancy. Another user asked: “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion?”
Drawing on a degree in History–he recently finished an encyclopedia of US military actions–he began writing this piece of fiction under his Reddit user name, Prufrock451:
The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes.
The section of Bagram where the 35th was gathered suddenly reappears in a field outside Rome, on the west bank of the Tiber River. Without substantially prepared ground under it, the concrete begins sinking into the marshy ground and cracking. Colonel Miles Nelson orders his men to regroup near the vehicle depot – nearly all of the MEU’s vehicles are still stripped for air transport. He orders all helicopters airborne, believing the MEU is trapped in an earthquake.
Erwin wrote 3000 words over the next two hours. They read like the first chapter of a novel, a kind of Romans vs. Marines companion piece to World War Z.
Reddit goes nuts. Reflecting the opinions of many, one Reddit user asked Erwin, “Do you have a job? Because this should be your job.”
Within hours of his first post, Erwin was the star of a ‘sub-Reddit’–a categorized section of Reddit.com–and now has nearly 7000 readers clamouring for the next installment of his work.
Erwin, a technical writer from Des Moines, Iowa, tells me that he’s overwhelmed by the response. “I’m astounded that something I churned out over my lunch hour turned into this,” he writes in an email interview. “I’m excited and very grateful and a little terrified.”
What’s most striking about Erwin’s story is the speed with which he accidentally assembled a readership that any writer would envy. However, as my publishing-savvy friend Monique Trottier points out, the trick is capitalizing on this burst of interest. “Really good publishers are looking for this exact sort of untapped talent–particular someone who is able to build an audience.”
Traditionally, publishers would rush to have the author write and produce the hardcopy book, a process that can take six months to a year. Instead, Trottier recommends that Erwin self-publish an ebook. “The period of time when you can make money off a book is shrinking. Ebooks obviously offer a much faster production cycle, and they work particularly well in the fantasy and science-fiction genres”.
Erwin plans on turning his instant fame into some kind of published work. “When people are literally demanding to give you money, that’s a no-brainer. But I’m carefully weighing my options on when and how. In the meantime, I appear to have a winning formula, so I’ll try to push it forward a bit and provide some meagre reward to my readers.”
Image by Reddit user JamieTeamCool. Used with his permission.
When blogs emerged out of the basement to become a cultural force, they brought an accompanying technology along with them. RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask) held the promise that every citizen could, for free, build their own customized newspaper comprised only of the sources and topics that interested them.
Do you love whippets, the Whitecaps and Whitney Houston? No problem. You can subscribe to newspaper and magazines sites, blogs and search alerts for those topics and never miss a story.
My friends at Common Craft made a video back in 2007 advocating for a customized news future:
RSS was a big deal for a while. Back in 2005, it was a key part of Microsoft’s browser strategy. There were several prominent start-ups who produced RSS readers, only to be eclipsed by Google’s offerings. Lots of technology pundits were convinced that it would usher in a new phase of customized news. Others worried that it would create a million echo chambers, where people would only read news about topics they cared about.
Though it’s an important part of Internet plumbing, RSS never really caught on among Normal Humans.
We prefer to be spoon-fed
I was discussing this today, and more than one person suggested that RSS got broadsided by social sharing. That is, that link and news sharing by peers on Facebook and Twitter replaced RSS. There’s some merit to this theory. My own Google Reader usage has declined a bit thanks to time spent on social media tools.
Another possibility? Site publishers, whether newspaper magnates or niche bloggers, want people to visit their sites. They want more page views to increase their advertising revenue, and ads in RSS never really took off. As such, the very people who should have been RSS’s evangelists felt pretty chilly toward the technology.
Ultimately, though, I think RSS was just too much work. I don’t mean to sound misanthropic, but the average person prefers to be spoon-fed.
The irony is that when I’m giving talks and workshops, people often ask me some variation of “how do I keep up with all these blogs and news sites and keyword searches I’m supposed to be monitoring?” The answer, which is usually followed by a demo of Google Reader, is RSS.
I don’t have much to say about them yet, but I’m interested to see whether algorithmic, curatorial tools like Summify or Percolate will replace news readers for those of us who use them. I’ve got an account on both, but haven’t had time to seriously kick the tires yet. Do you use either tool, or one like it?
Canada has a federal election next week. Please vote.
If you live in Eastern Canada, your vote may be counted before our polls out west close. The local media in Fredericton and Lavalle and Ottawa will report on the early returns.
Section 329 of Canada’s election laws will, in theory, prevent those results from drifting westward before 8:00 pm PST. Here it is:
No person shall transmit the result or purported result of the vote in an electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the close of all of the polling stations in that other electoral district.
The law is designed to prevent eastern results from influencing western voters. It made sense in an era of few communications channels, before the 24-hours news cycle, before TV and when there were only dozens of radio stations across the country. In 2011, in the age of the Internet, Canada has millions of broadcast channels. More than half the country has a Facebook account, and there are millions of Canadians on Twitter.
Section 329 has clearly become obsolete, unfeasible and unenforceable. We can’t ask 10 million easterners on social networks to keep secrets from five million westerners. It’s just not going to happen.
Tweeting the results
Alexandra Samuel and I were talking about this last week, and how Section 329 is a twentieth century law for a twenty-first century issue. We put our heads together, and came up with Tweet the Results (Alex did most of the work–she writes about it here).
It’s a small act of civil disobedience, demonstrating that Section 329 is untenable, and encouraging lawmakers to reform it. All the site does is aggregate tweets with the hash tag #tweetheresults. It replicates functionality that’s native to Twitter.
A good, bad or impractical law?
In response to our little site, some people have suggested that social media users “respect the spirit of the law”. I’m more interested in emphasizing the impracticality of Section 329 than debating its underlying ethics.
That said, the argument for it seems pretty philosophical. According to journalist Paula Simons, there’s no evidence that voting patterns would change. In 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada considered a case where a Vancouver blogger published election results from Atlantic Canada. In her dissent of the 5-4 decision which upheld the blogger’s conviction, Justice Rosalie Abella wrote:
“There is only speculative and unpersuasive evidence to support the government’s claim that the information imbalance is of sufficient harm to voter behaviour or perceptions of electoral unfairness that it outweighs any damage done to a fundamental and constitutionally protected right.”
It’s also worth noting that other big democracies–the US, Australia and Russia–have no such blackout rule in place.
Law professor Michael Geist points out that enforcing the law would require banning access to Facebook and Twitter on election night:
Given the current popularity of social media tools that did not exist at the time, a similar ban today is simply not possible without inflicting enormous harm to freedom of expression and public confidence in the election system.
Finally, there’s a simple solution to the results blackout: Elections Canada should simply delay publicizing any results anywhere in the country until polls have closed in British Columbia. Democracy can wait three hours.
I genuinely don’t care if anybody actually tweets or post to Facebook about election results on May 2. I do care about changing this silly law to one that works for this century.
What do you think? Are you going to stay off Twitter and Facebook on election night to avoid hearing the results?
Yesterday I was reading this list of things that babies born in 2011 will never do, and was struck by this one:
Forgotten friends: Remember when an old friend would bring up someone you went to high school with, and you’d say, “Oh yeah, I forgot about them!” The next generation will automatically be in touch with everyone they’ve ever known even slightly via Facebook.
That’s an idea that’s been kicking around in my head for a while. The web makes it increasingly difficult to close a chapter in your life. Whether that’s coming out of the closet or just leaving middle school, the increasingly detailed memory of the web means that artifacts and relationships of your previous chapter will follow you, possibly forever.
Today, of course, you can manage your privacy settings in Facebook and LinkedIn, and block people on Twitter, but the trend is toward more openness and findability for individuals online.
There’s value in forgetting and moving on, isn’t there? Whether it’s just a high school bully or an overly-clingy college roommate, there are always people we want to leave behind. And I think there’s a certain cognitive burden in being that findable, or even being able to find just about anybody from your whole life. The web’s long term memory is going to make that harder and harder to do.
Do you think we’re better off remembering everything, or selectively forgetting?
