this morning i wanted to find a list of novels with rain in them; at other times, i’ve wanted to find contemporary third person omniscient novels. when you google stuff like that, you often get a hodge podge of irrelevant info. i’d like to see a database where anyone could add info based on a list of categories both already on the site and new ones added by participants. a bit like wikipedia but for lists.
Been looking recently for a site that does what I want to do and am finding a few things that are close, but none that are spot-on what I think would be ideal for both artists and the business built to serve them.
The closest is ArtistShare.com, but they miss the mark on a couple of fronts. First, they’re expensive. Second, their model doesn’t incentive the artists to generate content for the site (what I mean is, the artist gets paid the same regardless of how much material they contribute to the “share” portion of the program–if they put up one photo a month they get paid the same as making a daily audio, video, and textual progress report). Third, they don’t allow for a monthly subscription option. But other than that, I like the general look/feel and functionality (horizontal timeline; allows for audio, video, image, and text content uploads; fan base communication tools).
I first heard about Kevin Kelly’s notion of “1,000 true fans” from Will Wheaton’s blog. Will, being a writer, makes a good point that the first obstacle to the idea that 1,000 fans x $100 per year = $100,000 in income is that he’s not sure he could even create $100 worth of material a year even if he had 1,000 true fans.
Would you pay $8.33 per month to follow a favorite artist’s progress from conception to completion? Over 12 months, that’d be $100. Using the “1,000 true fans” formula, that’d make for a pretty decent income for the artist.
Other “fan-funded” sites (do a web search on “fan funded” and you’ll find them all) seem to exist to help fund projects before the project is begun. You propose a project and if enough people are interested in seeing it completed to contribute, the project happens…but only after the fact of being fully funded. And then shares of the returns are disbursed among the “investors”. I’m talking NOT about pre-funding projects that don’t yet exist. I’m talking about documenting projects as they happen and providing a content-stream of sufficiently rich material that its worth subscribing to.
The monthly subscription angle would incentive participating artists to keep making new content available in the progress of the project, because subscribers would be able to unsubscribe, and resubscribe later, but only ever have access to the months they subscribed to, so it would be very much in their best interest to make each and every month loaded with content.
There could be zero up front cost for the artists (because they’re so heavily incentived to generate content), and the service could simply take a percentage (10%?) of the subscription fees as they’re paid.
If someone wants to code this puppy up, I’d be more than willing to beta test.
A new product idea: pre-packaged roadside shrine kits. Kit would include a cross, a set of large adhesive vinyl letters, slip-covers for easy photo insertion, a sheet of stick-on stock sympathy phrases (we miss you!, love you forever, party on!), a baggie of zip ties for easy lashing of trinkets to the cross, and a disposable camera for taking photos of the finished shrine.
My mom and I play a lot of Scrabble games, and I’m always interested in the way the played words work together to form a narrative or a poem. The next time you play Scrabble (if you’re the type of family that plays Scrabble!) copy down the played words and then work them all into a piece of new writing.
use your music playlist as a creativity generator. set it on shuffle. write what pops into your head based on the song that comes up.
There is a shortage of good writing with the limited vocabularies of early reading levels whose content is geared towards adults. Write stories and books for adults using only the vocabularies of early reading levels. Contact your local literacy council for the word lists. Donate your writings to literacy groups for their use.
An adjustable measuring spoon for coffee, such that once it’s dialed in to the desired setting, one scoop will do the job. Counting to five before I’ve had my coffee can be a challenge some mornings.
for every role and every gender and every culture and every age to celebrate
not father’s day, not mother’s day, not senior’s day, not secretary’s day, not cat lover’s day…just…humans…as in, we all are.
While having a bad putting weekend, I realized that I had so completely lost my touch that I would have really benefited from having putter with strike plate mounted to the blade that would register the amount of force being applied at impact with the ball. I couldn’t determine reliably for myself how hard I was hitting it. I didn’t know if I needed to blame (and thus adjust) the way I was hitting the ball, or if I needed to blame the greens for being wildly inconsistent in their speeds.
And golfers are famous for buying just about anything. I’d've bought one of these if it was there.
Websites and print publications that review books are uniformly about the new, always the new. In my readings I am continually surprised by books that are excellent today, that stand up to today, that are worth reading today and sharing with others, that weren’t ever reviewed when they came out and are thus somehow disqualified from being reviewed due to the fact that they’re no longer new. But if poetry (and by extension literature in general) is the news that stays new, then there should be a publication outlet that’s friendly to new discoveries of old news that’s still new. A blog devoted to reviews of not-recently-published books would be ideal.
People Pointing Here