October 16th, 2009, 7 Comments »
Today I attended BookCamp Vancouver at SFU. It’s was a well-run, well-organized event that frequently featured an engaging exchange of ideas. It probably could have used a few more of the unconference features that make BarCamp so special. I expect some industries are more comfortable than others with this kind of open, egalitarian model, so better baby steps than none at all.
Throughout the day, I recommended a number of articles to various writers, editors and publishers. I figured I might as well gather them here in case they’re of interest. Long time readers have probably seen me recommend one or more of these articles before:
- The Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow – From 1994, but still pretty relevant today. Extremely prescient for the time. “Even the physical/digital bottles to which we’ve become accustomed – floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages – will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one. “
- The Next Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow – Six years later, and even more insightful. I’ve been saying this next sentence ever since I read this piece: “Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to “content” is like praying in swear words.”
- 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly – I recommend this to every artist I meet, regardless of medium. It’s an extremely elegant way of thinking about fostering community and building an audience. For some reason it reminds me of the central metaphor in Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”. “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”
I wanted to offset those first three from the next two because the former are truly remarkable, visionary pieces. The next two are smart thinking and worth reading, but might pale a bit by comparison.
7 Comments »
January 2nd, 2009, 1 Comment »
We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.
Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.
The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):
I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:
Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.
This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.
1 Comment »
December 5th, 2008, 1 Comment »
Waxy links to this terrific (though, warning, vulgar) video by Monsieur Frank discussing ideas.
He calls ideas that stay in your head “brain crack”–that’s a very apt metaphor. If they stay in your head, you can never screw them up.
1 Comment »
September 15th, 2008, 5 Comments »
Julie is the maid (ahem, uh, matron) of honour at a wedding next month. This weekend she attended a very thirty-something stagette. It featured a catered meal at one of the bridesmaid’s houses, and a wine-tasting hosted by a sommelier (that Wikipedia article is disappointingly free of sommelier photos). I imagine that everybody got a little tipsy, but there was no dressing the bride up in crazy outfits or undoing of random men’s flies with teeth.
Nor was there a stripper. I’m not a big fan of strippers. In fact, I’ve never been to a strip bar. Not because I’m a Puritan. I just think I’d feel very awkward.
Nonetheless, the sommelier and the lack of male strippers gave me an idea for a new niche in wedding services: the sommelier/stripper. Have a drink of wine, watch a tall drink of water. He cracks open some wine, and then you put money in his crack. You get the idea.
Maybe the stripper market and the sommelier market are distinct, but you never know. As Seth says, safe is risky, and risky is safe. In this case, risky is also risqué.
In Ireland and the UK, stagettes are known as ‘hen parties’. In Dublin, they were notorious for their extreme, uh, behaviour. To the point that certain pubs in the pub district had signs in the windows that read ‘No hen parties’. My only encounter with a hen party was when I was walking home through Trinity College one night. I got shanghai’d into racing two other unsuspecting men while each carrying a bridesmaid, piggy-back style. I can’t remember if I won. I was just glad not to stumble on the cobblestones.
Do you have any juicy stagette (or hen party, if you like) stories?
5 Comments »
August 14th, 2008, 5 Comments »
The Internet, as you know, changed everything. Well, not everything, but it sure disrupted the way we make and distribute art. Ever since I saw geeks posting encoded files to Usenet, I’ve been curious to watch how the web has turned content creation (an awful, generic term) on its head.
One truth of the web in 2008 is that it is a much flatter playing field for creators. If you made an independent film in 1993, and you didn’t get backing from a studio, you couldn’t imagine how, say, 100,000 people would ever see it. YouTube makes that quite achievable in 2008.
But that flatter playing field isn’t necessarily accompanied by a lot of money-wielding players. And an artist has gotta eat. YouTube and other video sites have revenue sharing programs, but I doubt even 100,000 views would generate much money. I did a few quick searches on this, but couldn’t find any sample numbers.
Email Lists and True Fans
In a lot of cases, the old economic models are shot, or in sharp decline, and we haven’t figured out new ones yet. A recent guest columnist–a musician–on the Telegraph’s blog shed some light on how his band has survived in a post-Napster world:
When we left EMI in 1995, our most recent album had sold over 300,000 units. While we were still contracted for more, EMI decided to drop us. We were no longer commercial.
Today, after the internet boom, that level of sales would get us a deal with any of the major labels. After three more badly-marketed albums with an independent label we were down to 100,000 units.
In 1999 we released our final contracted album for Castle Records and, in anticipation of the way we planned to do business in the future, called it Marillion.com. We had already collected the email addresses of more than 20,000 fans through free CDs, downloads, etc. and by asking these fans to order and pay for the upcoming CD in advance, we were able to finance the writing and recording.
The precious email list reminded me of Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay 1000 True Fans.
Indie Games Come of Age?
The video game industry has, by comparison, remained unhindered by piracy. I’m not sure why this is. I assume that the industry’s explosive growth over the last decade has more than compensated for the revenue lost to pirated games. Plus, of course, I suspect that relatively few console players have the skills or inclination to play pirated games.
In any case, I’ve seen the video game industry as kind of like Hollywood’s studio system. There are a few big publishers, and they buy development studios or license their content. Even a ‘small’ development studio would, I think, have dozens of employees.
The revolution in casual gaming, however, enables smaller teams and individuals to earn more attention. There’s a ton of free casual game sites on the web now. I don’t know how much revenue a given game creator sees from advertising, but I do know that their games are constantly copied and posted on new sites with advertising wrapped around them.
Still, I recently read about a success in the relatively new world of casual gaming on the consoles. Jonathan Blow developed a reportedly excellent game called Braid. He released it on XBox Live Arcade, an in-game system where players buy and download (I gather) generally cheap games. Braid had no in-store distribution–you can only get it through your XBox 360. It cost $15 to download the game. Via Silicon Alley Insider, I read Blow’s blog post about his first week of sales:
As I write this, there are 62,242 entries on the main leaderboards. I don’t have official sales numbers for the full week, but I would guess about 55,000 people have bought the game so far.
That works out to $825,000 in the first week. Microsoft takes a cut–possibly 33%–but that’s still terrific revenue for an independent game developer. Wikipedia provides a little information about the development process, but I’m unsure of what the budget for such a game would be, and how many people contributed to it. It’s enough, apparently, so that Blog can build another game without a day job.
I’m not sure, but I guess XBox Live Arcade and its competitors casual gaming portals can (have?) become the iTunes and YouTubes of the gaming industry, enabling the little guys to get greater distribution and, hopefully, revenue. Will indie game developers be as, on average, penniless as documentary film makers, despite their new-found distribution? Or will Johnathan Blow’s experience be repeated a thousand times over?
Clearly there are more questions than answers about the new economics of content. I mostly wrote this post to point to these two developments, and two industries at, seemingly, different stages of their evolution. For anybody interested in the background or context of these shifting tides, check out John Perry Barlow’s The Economy of Ideas and The Next Economy of Ideas.
UPDATE: Speaking of casual games, Andy points to a clever game called Coign of Vantage.
5 Comments »
April 17th, 2008, 5 Comments »
On the CBC’s Ideas podcast, I’m currently listening to “Canada: Nation or Notion” (MP3, 25 MB, 53:46), a debate between two Canadians who live in the US: Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell. They’re both very smart, eloquent speakers, and it makes for an hour of enjoyable listening:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The talk was sponsored by Maclean’s, and there’s text from the debate on their site. It’s not an exact transcript, though, because I couldn’t find this self-effacing joke that Gladwell made:
I thought I would begin by drawing on an example that may seem a little far fetched. But trust me, I will circle around and make it make sense. And that is to talk about the success of ethnic Chinese immigrants throughout the world.
Now, those of you who are familiar with my writing will know that this practice of talking about X by discussing Y is my only rhetorical move.
I gather this is just one in a number of discussions that Gopnik and Gladwell have been having over the years. Here’s the text from a 2000 debate about American vs. Canadian healthcare systems.
If you haven’t read Gopnik’s beautiful book Paris to the Moon, I highly recommend it.
5 Comments »
September 21st, 2007, 59 Comments »
Recently I saw Chris Brogan’s blog post entitled 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write. It’s a big list of blog posts he’d like to read, with a real focus on Web 2.0 and releated technologies. In his introduction, he writes:
People often ask me how I come up with things to blog about, and I find the question strange, because my problem is the opposite. I have too much to blog about. Why? Because there’s a whole fast revolution rolling through, and right now – today – is our time to make it all work for us.
People ask me the same question occasionally, and I really don’t have a good answer. I don’t have Chris’s problem, but I never have to look very hard for something to write about.
When people ask about the topic of my blog, I sometimes say (with a little fay wave of my hand), “whatever strikes my fancy”. And that’s kind of true. When I started this blog, I made the mistake of writing about everything (excepting the particularly personal), so it’s turned out to be a kind of grab bag.
In any case, I liked Chris’s idea of a list of posts I’d like to read. However, I read enough about bloody Twitter and Flickr and the transformational power of Ajax.
Here are fifty posts I’d like to read that have nothing to do with technology. These aren’t very original. I’ve read many of them elsewhere, and written a few of them myself. Nonetheless, I think they’d make for interesting reading:
- The Story of My Most Serious Injury
- The Person I Admire Most
- This Will Be My Epitaph
- Why I Love My Hometown
- Why I Hate My Hometown
- Why I Was a Childhood Bully
- How I Shop
- How I Choose to Spend My Money
- I Wish I Spent Less Money on This
- Why I’m in My Current Job
- My Ideal Job
- My High School Clique
- My Worst Subject in School
- If I Had a Super Power
- Here’s Where My Opinion Differs From the Majority
- Why I Voted the Way I Did in the Last Election
- Why I Don’t Vote
- The Cause I Really Believe In
- Why I Came To Religion
- Why I Don’t Believe Anymore
- Where I Find Spirituality
- My First Kiss
- My Worst Kiss
- The First Time I Had My Heart Broken
- Why I Travel
- Why I Don’t Travel
- My Philosophy on Raising Children
- Why I Chose My University Degree
- My Favourite Place on the Planet
- My Greatest Sin Against the Environment
- Why I Married My Spouse
- My Most Hated Movie
- The Book That Changed My Life
- My Unexpected Mentor
- I Couldn’t Live Without This Song
- If I Hear This Song Again, Radio Personalities Will Suffer
- I Have the Craziest Uncle Ever
- Why I Believe in Luck
- Why I Don’t Believe in Luck
- How I Earned My Worst Karma
- Where I Volunteer
- Why I Don’t Volunteer
- My Favourite Item of Clothing Growing Up
- If This Celebrity Knocked On My Door, I’d Run Away With Them
- Why I Care About Celebrities
- Why I Love This Sport
- Why I Hate Sports
- When I’m at My Most Self-Indulgent
- How To Be Selfless
- My Childhood Dreams, and How I’ve Fulfilled Them
- How I Learned Patience
- How My Hard Work Paid Off
- I’ve Never Been More Surprised in My Life
- What Scares the Shit Out of Me
- The Only Thing I Can Teach You
59 Comments »