The Jul 2–8, 2009 of Time Out Chicago published an article by Doyle Armbrust that features fellow Inside The Arts blogger Jason Heath and his myriad of blogging activity. What’s especially interesting is how Jason recounts his path into the cultural blogosphere. It’s a well written feature and it goes a long way at demonstrating new media’s effectiveness when wielded by someone with the skills and fortitude.
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I Just Might Throw My Dictionary Away
Over the past week I’ve been up to my eyeballs in writing reports and anyone who is used to tossing out tens of thousands of words in a short time span knows that after awhile, a traditional thesaurus or online synonym resource can feel awfully limited. Enter visuwords.com, a refreshingly useful online resource that functions as a sort of graphical dictionary/thesaurus. What I found particularly useful is how it uses diagrams to illustrate word relationships that actually helped me break out of the tunnel vision writing style instigated by marathon writing sessions…
Putting A New Face Forward
A bit of new media oriented discussion today. Smashing Magazine published an intriguing article last week about what it defines as best practices for effective “about” pages. The article starts off with a simple but powerful statement: The “about me”-page is one of the most overlooked pages in development and one of the highest ranked pages on many websites. They’re correct, next to the home page, Adaptistration’s “About” pages are the most popular but for years now, they haven’t been meeting their potential…
Who Doesn’t Like Timelines And Big Audiences?
I always enjoy it when an orchestra website includes some worthwhile info about their history at their website. Case in point, the New York Philharmonic recently released a fascinating searchable database of their performances going all the back to 1842 (BTW, they performed Beethoven’s fifth but it was only 35 years old at that time). Another recent entry is the Grant Park Music Festival’s (GPMF) interactive timeline that coincides with the release of the 75th Anniversary book…
A Race To The Bottom
The 6/29/09 edition of huffingtonpost.com published a piece by Kennedy Center for the Arts CEO, Michael Kaiser, that warns of the folly associated with reactive turtling strategies. It is gratifying to see someone else in the business stepping up and pointing out the need to stop panic driven decision making processes responsible for producing a wide variety of long term crippling strategic plans. We’ve been examining these very same issues since the …