A-N Interview Talk
This is the text of a talk that I gave at A-N magazine as part of a job interview, in which I look at their user-generated content section. It doesn't represent any actual policy by A-N, merely suggestions that I made to them.
Hello, I'm Pete Hindle, and I'm really happy that you asked your interviewees to talk about this subject:
How would you promote greater usage, encouraging artists and students in particular to participate, and what suggestions would you have about managing the large volume of usage that may result.
because I think the answer to this is something I'm deeply concerned with: getting artists to represent themselves effectively via the internet.
This is actually three questions -
1. How would you promote greater usage?
2. How would you encouraging artists and students to participate?
3. How would you manage a busy website?
For the past few years, I've been heavily involved with community-led websites. I help to run two email networks for creatives in the North-East, and I'm also one of the Admins for the Flickr group Angels of the North, where you'll find photographs from over five hundred people, all featuring various aspects of the Tyne and Wear region.
These are online spaces that function as meeting rooms for many different types of people, and there are a wide, wide range of these different meeting rooms, which are used to draw many different interests and communities together. You can find online communities devoted to wine and food, comics and books, writing and photography, and - of course - every topic of computing, including swivel.com, the online spreadsheet community.
However, from my own personal experience, I would say that there is a definite lack of quality discussion available online about the practice of being an artist. Before I talk about my suggestions for the online section of A-N magazine, I want to share with you a quote.
"Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development."
Julius Frontinus, First Century AD.
As you know, A-N Unedited provides artists with a place to comment on issues around their practice, such as ongoing projects and exhibitions. Anybody who wants to can create content on this part of A-N's website, some of which will be reprinted within the pages of the magazine. This is a degree of flexibility which could not have been foreseeable until very recently.
I think this is best represented by the blogs section.
The A-N blogs sections is supposed to be project-led writing, a documentation of a specfic project. My personal favourite is the woman whose doing the residency in the wind turbine factory, Ania Bas. Like many others using A-N unedited, Ania already has a few websites somewhere else, but A-N is a great platform for her to reach out and make an impression on a larger audience.
In order for A-N to maintain that position as a great platform to reach an online audience, I would suggest that the magazine looks at other online services. Blogs are available for free from many different websites, such as Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal and Vox.
These websites offer a community to their users, encouraging those logged into the service to comment on other blogs. Some of them also allow the use of domain names, meaning that an artist can set themselves up with a website like petehindle.com for around eight pounds. And they all have a degree of cross-compatibilty with other web services, such as Flickr or Youtube.
In order for A-N to maintain it's position as an online centre to find out about artistic practice, and in order for it grow, it should offer services similar to these larger networks. A-N unedited would benefit from instituting more community-based features for it's online contributors, such as comments on a blog post or reviews, because they are a type of reward which makes users become more engaged with the website.
The more engaged and active your community becomes, the easier it is to encourage other people to join. I would say that if you want to promote greater usage of A-N's unedited side, turn it over to the community that are creating the content, and allow them to connect with each other.
This is also a key part of getting graduates and students to contribute to the Unedited section. The reason that websites such as Myspace and Facebook are so popular amongst young adults is that they allow them to have a presence on the internet that belongs to them, and it allows others to get in touch with them.
Adding a community aspect to the existing functions of A-N unedited would make A-N's website seem more familiar in terms of what a young adult is expecting from a website with a log-in, but with the additional bonus of being able to act as an online form of professional representation, in a way that the other sites I've mentioned can't.
In terms of the additional volume of usage that this would create, I have two different types of suggestions - technical and social. Any form of social situation can cause problems, even online, and I would suggest that all users are able to report content that they are uncomfortable with.
My technical suggestions would be to use a content management system such as Drupal, Joomla, or Mambo. I personally have some experience with Drupal, which is the technology that Nasa use to run their website. It's extendable, it can cope with thousands of users, it's free, and it's also used to power the Furtherfield.org website which you mention in the current issue.
What might not have occurred to you is that by reconfiguring the Unedited website to offer these extra services - such as professional online representation - you would be able to generate revenue by charging for different levels of service. One example of this would be Flickr's 'pro' users, who pay a small fee each year in order to be able to upload more images.
So, in summing up,my suggestions for the future of the Unedited sections of the website are:
Promote greater usage by:
• Let users comment on blog posts and reviews
• Allow users to create a community
Encourage artists and students to participate by:
• Allow them to use the site as a professional internet presence
• Promoting the online community of A-N Unedited
Manage the expansion of the site by:
• Let the users report questionable content
• Use an expandable, stable CMS
• Consider charging fee for some parts of the service