Want to make a living as a creator online? Find your ‘true fan’ number.
While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:
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.
A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.
He goes on to explain that the number of ‘true fans’ may be different depending on what you want to do, how many people you work with and even where you live. Personally, I would drop the ‘1,000’ bit.
Anyway, I’ve heard this notion expressed before, I think in an interview with Jonathan Coulton. As someone who has been a passionate fan of several writers, artists and filmmakers I can totally believe in this model. You don’t have to buy into the notion that you either become a megastar or a failure. So long as you know you’re great at whatever it is you do, there should be a way to make a living out of it.
What exactly is it I want to do?
I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to what exactly it is I want to do for a living. The key themes come through pretty strong: I want to do something creative, something with a big internet component, and something independent or with a small team. I don’t expect for one second that someone will read this post and just give me my dream job, but the very act of collecting all these thoughts has been hugely valuable to me. And who knows, perhaps I’ll find a programmer or writer to collaborate with on something.
What follows is a list of examples of the kind of work I could easily see myself doing…
“Mad libs” style form increases conversion 25-40%
A while ago, I came across a unique registration form built by Jeremy Keith for his audio sharing site, Huffduffer. Though it asked people the same questions found in typical sign-up forms, the Huffduffer registration form did so in a narrative format. It presented input fields to people as blanks within sentences (Mad Libs-style, if you will).
There’s even some A/B testing information to lend some weight.
I know I posted a link to this article on Twitter yesterday, but I thought it was such a clever and simple idea that I wanted to make a note of it here.
3ds Max vs. Blender: Revealing results of a CG software user survey
It’s clear from the pie chart that 3ds Max is the giant in the market here, with Maya (also an Autodesk product) the next big player. If you scroll down the article, what really stands out is that both of these packages consistently rank the lowest in user satisfaction.
I was surprised to see that Lightwave has such a small share. I’ve always had a soft spot for it, but perhaps in recent years the situation has changed. I stopped doing 3D work around the same time that Modo came out, and I was aware that many were switching loyalties then.
The Cinema and Houdini get big positives, but I’m especially pleased to see the open-source Blender rank so highly in most responses. I’m hoping to get back into CG graphics soon, and I’d love to invest my energies in free software.
The Internet is hard
Banners, logos, carefully crafted wordsmithery - this is all filler, we’ve found out. Users have been calloused by 15 or so years of surfing through bad ads and marketing babble, and they are unconsciously tuning out everything but the one thing they came to find.
For example, none of the 200 or so confused Facebook users who commented on our earlier post read the post itself, the huge logo at the top of the page, the many links to non-Facebook-related content or the huge, all-bold paragraph about how ReadWriteWeb is not, in fact, some ill-conceived redesign of Facebook. They simply searched for “Facebook login” and, upon navigating to our site, scrolled until they found the one button they wanted to click. Which brings us to our third assertion.
RRW has a post up about the confusion that was caused recently when one of their stories became a top Google result for ‘Facebook login’, and hundreds of confused Facebookers mistook the blog for a new Facebook design.
Some important lessons here.
Awesome column about which NY Times stories are the most shared
More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics.
[…]
Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”
They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.
“It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” write Dr. Berger and Dr. Milkman, who is a behavioral economist at Wharton.
It sounds like a really interesting study. I’ve had a notion for some years now to start a blog on ‘futurology’ or something similar. Now I’m wondering if that could be a hit…
Is there any good reason to use title case?
The convention followed by many British publishers (including scientific publishers, like Nature, magazines, like The Economist and New Scientist, and newspapers, like The Guardian and The Times) is the same used in other languages (e.g., French), namely to use sentence-style capitalization in titles and headlines, where capitalization follows the same rules that apply for sentences. This convention is sometimes called sentence case where a term is desired to clarify that title case shall not be applied. It is also widely used in the United States, especially in bibliographic references and library catalogues. Examples of global publishers whose English-language house styles prescribe sentence-case titles and headings include the International Organization for Standardization.
I’ve developed the habit of using sentence case for headlines, but now I’m facing a situation where I’m probably going to have to adapt to a new style guide and start using Title Case at work. I’ve developed a strong preference for sentence case, and now find title case to be ugly and tabloid-esque.
It seems likely to me that title case is a hangover from the days of more primitive typesetting, when you would need to distinguish between BIG HEADLINES, Important Headlines, and regular text.
In these days of HTML and CSS, is there really any good reason to use title case?
Emotion Markup Language
The W3C just completed the first draft of the Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML 1.0). Um, why?If you’re still not getting the why, they have a list of 39 possible use cases. I’m wondering if it could be used for interactive fiction somehow? I love crap like this!Use cases for EmotionML can be grouped into three broad types:
- Manual annotation of material involving emotionality, such as annotation of videos, of speech recordings, of faces, of texts, etc;
- Automatic recognition of emotions from sensors, including physiological sensors, speech recordings, facial expressions, etc., as well as from multi-modal combinations of sensors;
- Generation of emotion-related system responses, which may involve reasoning about the emotional implications of events, emotional prosody in synthetic speech, facial expressions and gestures of embodied agents or robots, the choice of music and colors of lighting in a room, etc.
WikiReader
The WikiReader is a funky Hitch-Hikers Guide style gadget that gives you Wikipedia in your pocket. I love the form, the touchscreen, the low power consumption, the low price and that it uses a MicroSD card. You can subscribe to bi-annual updates and they will post you the cards, or you can download the (4GBs of) data yourself.
