Sheila MacNeill GUEST INFORMANT: Kim Boekbinder Musician Kim Boekbinder has kindly dropped in to explain why she’s having to reinvent the concepts of the gig and the tour. A few weeks ago I played a concert in Portland, Oregon which was attended by exactly 18 people. After everyone else got paid, I made exactly $12.50 USD. I know that independent musicians all over the world play to empty rooms all the time. I’m not hugely famous, most people have never heard of me. The dilemma: I need to play live to have a real connection to an audience but the expense of touring is debilitating. My solution: Pre-sell the shows before they are even booked. The old music paradigm had us musicians rolling around the world in cars and vans and busses, playing to whatever bar would have us on their dingy stages in the hopes that one day we would “Make It.” The problem, as I see it, is that we’re living in THE FUTURE (cue theremin!) There is no “Making It” or rather, this is making it. I’m not blaming anybody. Me again.
Start An Education Revolution In Seven Steps | Co. Design First, a little background: We’re three undergrad industrial design students at the University of Cincinnati who teamed up for an experiment in education. We set out to partner with our university, a high school, and several footwear companies to create a curriculum that would engage and empower inner-city youth through footwear design. We titled the experiment the Tread Project. The pitch was simple: Tread wanted to create an engaging curriculum that would channel these urban students’ passion for (and sometimes obsession with) footwear into their high school education. Once the Tread Project idea was born, we pitched it to several global footwear brands. [The students took part in a build-your-own-shoe exercise with masking tape. What started off as our senior thesis turned out to be an exhilarating lesson in the power of grassroots collaboration between the public and private sector. What’s the Point? How to Start Your Own Revolution1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) 7.)
Why You Should Be Optimizing If you work in technology or web development, you’ve likely heard the term “optimization” thrown around quite a bit. It’s the process of incrementally improving a product or service through small iterations. As anyone who manages an online business knows, launching a great site is just the beginning – constant tweaks and upgrades are required to create something truly extraordinary. But why should we limit the concept of optimization to the world of technology? I would argue that we should spend just as much time on optimizing ourselves and our teams. Here are some insights to consider when pursuing optimization: 1. When you make an error, you are likely to persevere and keep trying until you get it right. I call this the “horizon of success” effect, because it’s hard to see the potential that lies beyond something that works. The old adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ cripples us when it comes to optimizing what works. 2. Optimization isn’t about making drastic changes. 3.
Research and Development: Create your own BBC QRCode The Complete Guide to Not Giving a Fuck Ok, I have a confession to make. I have spent almost my whole life– 31 years–  caring far too much about offending people, worrying if I’m cool enough for them, or asking myself if they are judging me. I can’t take it anymore. Today, ladies and gentlemen, is different. We’re going to talk about the cure. Do you wonder if someone is talking shit about you? Well, it’s time you started not giving a fuck. FACT NUMBER 1. Yes, it’s really happening right at this moment. What people truly respect is when you draw the line and say “you will go no further.” Right. Regular people are fine– you don’t actually hear it when they’re talking behind your back. Thankfully, that’s not actually true. FACT NUMBER 2. This stuff is crazy, I know, but it’s cool, you’ll get used to it. How liberating this is may not even hit you yet, but it will. You know when they say “the best revenge is a life well lived”? So not giving a fuck is actually a necessary precedent to create a good life for yourself. STEP 1.
The top 50 iPad apps | Technology | The Observer It's easy to forget that when Apple's first iPad was unveiled in January 2010, there were plenty of cynics questioning the need for a slate-shaped device sitting somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop computer. Microsoft had pitched tablets a decade before, to little interest. So what were iPads for? Scroll on 21 months and a second-generation model later, and we have a better idea: iPads are for lounging on the sofa, browsing, emailing, tweeting and Facebooking, for sure. There are currently more than 100,000 native iPad apps available, although, as with the iPhone, a big chunk of those are filler. Developers are bringing multimedia bells and whistles to poetry; splicing books and games to find new ways to educate and entertain children; tapping into social networks and filtering technology to aggregate news and recommend music; and they offer tactile touchscreen ways to explore the earth, the human body and the solar system. JAMIE'S RECIPES free. MARK ON CALL HD £2.99.
8 great examples of nonprofit storytelling “A Glimmer of Hope – LTBH Feature – Austin 2009″ How to convey a powerful message with videos & photos Target audience: Nonprofits, social enterprises, NGOs, foundations, cause organizations, Web publishers, small businesses. As regular readers know, I’ve been a longtime proponent of visual storytelling to advance the missions of nonprofits, cause organizations and businesses. (Heck, I co-founded Ourmedia.org before there was a YouTube.) What we tell people in our Socialbrite bootcamps and in our consulting work is this: Every nonprofit is now a media organization (the same goes for social enterprises and businesses). So why aren’t you taking advantage of visual storytelling yet? There are dozens of ways to convey your story, and we’ve laid out lots of ways to get started — see the links at the bottom of this article. Today we’d like to highlight a few best-of-breed examples of visual storytelling so that you can think about how to take a similar approach for your organization. Related
Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin » TechBubble I have always been fascinated by the visual clarity of the London Underground map. Given the number of cities that have adopted this mapping approach for their own subway systems, clearly this is a popular opinion. At a conference some years back, I saw a poster for the Yahoo! University departments, offices, student groupsGovernmentOpen Source projectsInternet startups by category More examples on this blog: Ten Examples of the Subway Map Metaphor. Fast-forward to now. Anyone should be able to create a beautiful, interactive subway map visualization for their website using HTML markupThe map should be as faithful as possible to the London Underground map style with smooth curves and interchange connectors and 45-degree diagonalsThe map size, line width and colors should all be customizableStations, interchanges and linked interchanges should be distinguishable from each otherThe markup used to create the map should be search engine friendly Download or get it on GitHub Step-by-Step Guide 2.
Write Epic Shit A reader asked me on Twitter the other day if I would start writing more traffic-building tips here. The implication was that I haven’t been publishing content that will directly help you build a bigger online audience. I think it’s time again to clear something up here. If you’re looking for the same ineffective/unimaginative/played-out tips on using social media more effectively, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Other blogs and social media “experts” will tell you that if you just learn how to use Twitter better or create a great Facebook fan page, you’ll become rich and famous or whatever. Don’t just take my word for it. I’ve been talking with some of the smartest, most popular and successful people online lately. Guess what percentage of our conversations so far have been spent discussing promotional strategies. The answer? In every conversation I’ve had with wildly successful entrepreneurs and bloggers about building website traffic, promotional tactics only make up 20% of our talks.
Guggenheim Museum Makes 65 Exhibit Catalogues Free Online The Guggenheim is one of the real standouts in the global modern art arena. The New York-based institution is no light-weight in the area of arts education. They’ve now extended that mission extensively by making dozens of high-quality publications on artists available to anyone with an Internet connection. The books, art catalogues for major exhibitions at the museum, pop out into a clean, fast virtual book reader. Open Culture points out that the books are also available for download in a number of e-book formats, including ePub and PDF, at Archive.org’s Guggenheim page. Above: Reader view of Egon Schiele from “Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele“ The offerings range from the ubiquitous Alexander Calder to Fernand Léger, from Francis Bacon to Wassily Kandinsky. They also offer theme and anthology-type books, such as 1954’s “Younger American Painters” and “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” (which seems to be one of the few offerings to feature women artists). Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia
The 100 Best Books of All Time Many publishers have lists of 100 best books, defined by their own criteria. This article enumerates some lists of "100 best" books for which there are fuller articles. Among them, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (Xanadu, 1985) and Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels (Grafton, 1988) are collections of 100 short essays by a single author, David Pringle, with moderately long critical introductory chapters also by Pringle. For publisher Xanadu, Science Fiction was the first of four "100 Best" books published from 1985 to 1988. The sequels covered crime & mystery, horror, and fantasy. Lists[edit] See also[edit] References[edit]
XKCD-Inspired Cartoon Maps the World's Social Networks [PIC] This cartoon map shows the relative sizes of social networks based on real 2010 user data, and does so in a quirky and amusing way.The quirky and amusing aspect is hardly surprising, because this map — titled the "2010 Social Networking Map" — was inspired by geeky-yet-popular web comic XKCD's once sort-of-viral "Map of Online Communities." The original was made based on the whims of XKCD's author, but marketing firm Flowtown took the idea and ran with it for this 2010 variation, sizing the various regions (each named after a social network) based on info collected or published by USA Today, Alexa, Compete and other sources. The firm also provides commentary on trends with its humorous names — for example, the "Former Kingdom of MySpace," the "Receding Glaciers of AOL and Windows Live," the "Rising Island of Google Buzz" and the "Land of Defunct Social Networks."