Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Technology: How participatory is the web, really?


From the Artful Manager blog:

"How participatory is the web, really? And how true is the assumption that web technologies create a world of content-creators rather than a world of content-watchers.
According to Forrester's research, a full 52 percent of on-line consumers are ''inactives,'' engaging in none of the identified social networking activities. Some 33 percent prefer to watch, read, or listen, without contributing to content. While those higher up the ''participation ladder'' are more active collectors of content, critics or commenters, or creators of their own pages, blogs or videos."

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Music: New CDs

Okay, time to catch up on all the new CDs I have purchased over the last couple months:

-LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver - a strong album from dancepunk pioneers
-Ojos de Brujo: Techari - contemporarized flamenco
-The Twilight Sad: Fourteen Autumns Fifteen Winters - dense melodic anthems in a thick Scottish brogue
-The Field: From Here We Go Sublime - solid four-on-the-floor house beats with subtle washes of melody
-Deerhunter: Flourescent Grey - great indie band with shoegazer influences

Friday, May 04, 2007

Zeitgeist: Scale for Non-profits

From a post on the Artful Manager Blog about scale and non-profits.
Excerpt:
"With all the obstacles preventing precise measurements of effectiveness and program quality in the nonprofit sector, it is very easy to use size as a proxy for impact and to embrace the idea that programs serving large numbers of people are contributing more to public welfare than those targeting smaller populations. In this sense, scale is much easier to measure than effectiveness and it represents an appealing way to change the conversation.
But the danger of such a move lies, of course, in the fact that scale is not a particularly good proxy for effectiveness and that many large programs do not deserve the support they receive, while many smaller programs deserve greater acclaim. Scale is not the problem in the nonprofit sector, nor is it the answer."

An article linked from this post: How Nonprofits Get Really Big
Excerpt:
"Further, the way funding flows to organizations this large is neither completely random nor illogical. On the contrary, we identified three important practices common among nonprofits that succeeded in building large-scale funding models: (1) They developed funding in one concentrated source rather than across diverse sources; (2) they found a funding source that was a natural match to their mission and beneficiaries; and (3) they built a professional organization and structure around this funding model."

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Theater: Calling all patrons

A good article from the LA Times about the drama Pulitzer going to Rabbit Hole instead of to one of the three other plays nominated.
Our playwrights get lonely on the cutting edge: "Rabbit Hole" is a fine Pulitzer choice, but up-and-coming, daring writers need support.
Excerpt:
"THAT'S where you come in. Every society gets the theater it deserves. We don't need a lecture about the extent of our consumerist depravity. But even the most unrepentant shoppers among us (no peeking at my credit card bills, please) have to grapple with the reality that art isn't something we greedily purchase, like a pair of Prada shoes. Rather it's an experience we collectively enter to learn more about those parts of ourselves and each other that aren't receiving sufficient contemplation elsewhere.
As a professional theatergoer who was once an avid amateur theatergoer, I don't typically have a cranky reaction to plays that stumble if there's a sense that the writer is honestly grappling with something. I must have seen scads of mediocre plays at Circle Repertory Company in New York in the 1980s, but my memory of that Greenwich Village theater group has a golden glow. New plays mattered there — to the playwrights, directors, actors and most especially the audience. What the culturally hungry are after isn't perfection but truth. Few novelists can match Proust, but that doesn't stop me from reading Mary Gaitskill. Nor do I skip Richard Greenberg or Craig Lucas because they're several notches below Chekhov.
What does, however, make me slightly — OK, acutely — dyspeptic is when I feel as though I'm being sold a bill of goods that the producer knows is shoddy but thinks won't cause waves or will please because of the TV personality in the cast or no one cares much one way or the other. Nothing is more enraging than a time waster — especially at big theater prices."