This is hilarious. Paraphrase: "Maybe I should just give up writing and switch to downloads and widgets..." Tell me about it! The irony is... its just so true.

Here's my question to you. Does book marketing in Web 2.0 world lack the integrity that it had a generation ago or is it just the same schtick with different tools?

My take is that its the same thing but the main difference is that publishers expect the author to do more of the marketing themselves... Since the tools are so self-service. Problem is, artists are most effective as creators. Most artists really want the business side to be handled by somebody else. So, the era of YouPromoteIt! has got a lot of them chafing.

The flip-side, of course, is that it should be easier to build a grassroots marketing campaign and for an artist without institutional backing to build a name; Given they are creative marketers, savvy business people, aggressive sales people, media connected and oh yeah, they are good at their art and still have time to be creative.

What happened to specializing? As an industry emerges to provide these services on behalf of artists, at the expense of the artist, will / has the compensation structure change to account for the shift in cost?

I just had a very nice conversation with Robert Mugge: http://www.robertmugge.com. The world premiere of his film Deep Sea Blues was last night and tonight at the Starz International Film Festival.

We talked a lot about music and about using social networks and alternative avenues such as blogs, email newsletters, affinity sites "Blues Fan" websites to promote. There's a lot of opportunity for viral promotion out there, but it sounds like, without some good buzz in a media publication, ie: Vanity, major theater release is unlikely. Straight to video in a Web 2.0 world can still be lucrative, but without mainstream press, the major theaters are a difficult push.

Even as a film-maker with a unique reach into the world of music and music fans, Mugge feels that sites like MySpace don't seem to work quite as well for him as they have for his musician friends.

What tools / features would help a social site be more effective for filmmakers?

Watch for the full write-up on the interview in the next few days.

Wow, the synergies are just criss-crossing all over the board here. Startup companies have known the benefits of the do it wrong quickly and fix it ASAP approach since Web 1.0. The Agile Development Methodology is just a formalization of that tactic. Its a quick way to collaborate, get to market and adjust to industry trends.

Mike Moran describes a similar approach to book marketing on his Biznology blog. In order to promote his new marketing, he worked with his publisher and Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg to come up with a strategy. They decided to make a game. But, Moran wasn't all that happy with the first rendition. Short on time, they launched anyway, then scrambled to revise it and release V2.

Play the game here

Note: A shout goes out to Chris Webb who also mentioned the Moran game in his publishing industry blog.

Last night was opening night at the Starz Denver International Film Festival. It's my fifth time now in attendance, and I feel like I've been watching it mature out of its adolescence. Though its on its 30th year now, the last 5 have seen rapid changes and maturation. I'll do a full write-up of opening night over the next day or so, but for now, I just wanted to post a couple of interesting tidbits.

Presence: Just showing up and acting confident makes everyone else's job that much easier. It also affords you greater access, and fascinatingly, authority. Simply by appearing informed - without answering falsely a question that you don't really know the answer to - it is easy to be perceived as an expert. Suddenly you will find other journalists and enthusiasts simply hanging back and letting you guide the discussions. At the Red Carpet Interview sessions, the walkway was crowded. While many hovered and loomed, it was easy to walk up to the carpet, speak with the filmmakers in a relatively casual manner and to ask the questions that seemed most interesting to Enfuse readers - the business of marketing and distribution, local resources, the artistic process and social responsibility were the subjects on which I focused. There were a lot of people just along for the ride - taking notes and hanging back. It worked for my temperament and goals - and likely for their's as well.

On a tangent related to presence - there's definitely something in a name. For years I've gotten the response: "Enfuse, yeah I've heard of you guys" or the like from people who most likely have not. It happens often enough that I don't think its simply a canned response. Though some may just be saying that to be polite, I imagine most really think they have heard the name before. The reason is the name itself. Obviously a name is important, it needs to be memorable and to give some sense of the company - or to be nonsense that can become a noun or a verb. Not just something that is, but something you do, ie: Google, Xerox. A good name is important enough that startup business guru Guy Kawasaki devoted an entire chapter to it in The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything. Green as we were when we came up with the name, our instincts must have been good because I think people really believe they've heard of us even if they haven't. A strange way to appear bigger than we really are.

I should speak briefly about the opening night festivities, so let me say this: I was very impressed by the number of Colorado based filmmakers and films shot in Colorado that are present at this year's festival. Not only have organizers made an effort to include more local artists, but the film scene in Colorado is definitely picking up momentum. Everyone I asked spoke very highly of how easy it was to film here - from permits to casting, resources to locations. Local filmmakers included Daniel Junge of Iron Ladies of Liberia, a Just Media production and Monty Miranda, Director of Skills Like This, a Dewey-Obenchaim Film and an Audience Award Winner at South by Southwest. Big name directors in attendance included Norman Jewison and Bob Rafelson.

Instinct: On the subject of instinct and confidence - sometimes it pays to ask when you aren't sure what's going on. I was in the middle of interviewing Rafelson when the next interviewee was announced. As a result, I had not heard the introduction. I was going to skip the interview but Rafelson was being interviewed right next to me by Starz so the unidentified interviewees - a husband and wife were stuck standing directly in front of me and I felt obligated to say something (almost for their sake:~). Instinctively I turned to the gentleman - all the other interviewees had been men, so I suppose I can blame conditioning. Hopefully I don't come off as a total chauvinist - I never thought that I was...

At the onset of the interview, the man says, "She's the boss" - which I should have picked up on, but instead, trying to be witty I referenced the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding and their joke about the head being controlled by the neck. Regardless, I asked a couple of canned questions - of the bloke - regarding the industry, alternative forms of distribution and promotion, and so on, and thanked them for their time.

Embarrassment: When they moved on, I saw that the Starz interviewer began asking the woman questions. Upon inquiring, I learned that she was Britta Erickson - Media & Industry Relations Director at the Denver Film Society. Erickson was newly appointed director of festivals in the change of leadership resulting from the stepping down of Film Society founder Ron Henderson from the day to day leadership responsibilities in his role as Artistic Directory. The man I was interviewing - according to unconfirmed sources, is counsel for the Film Society. He sure answered my questions about the film industry with confidence. Perhaps, he and I were playing the same game. So, embarrassed as I am by the incident, I plan to follow up with Britta with a letter of explanation.

The last couple weeks I've taken a fairly wide detour out to the Facebook Platform. I was intrigued by the idea of a social network that lets other developers write applications to enhance it. It's a notion that we've bounced around ourselves - facilitating a platform that allows developers to distribute tools for photographers, bands, artists, and so on. So, I was interested to see how the facebook model worked. Of course, I'm also always interested in building modules that help spread Enfuse's reach through the "distributed" and "embedded" web.

Inevitably, building an app that is actually useful in a social context, that is viral and interesting - and that preserves the integrity with which we want to represent the content our users have entrusted us with takes time. Scope can tend to creep quickly. That, plus a few technical problems such as unpredictable session expiration, trouble with FBML (as compared to iFrame) based Canvas Pages, mediocre (at best) documentation and very few Cold Fusion - based implementations to learn from all swallowed a lot more time than I had anticipated.

Note: I did find a few Cold Fusion resources, notably Facebook Rest Client CFC v1.0 by Andrew Duckett and some sample get and setFBML functions by Cory Johnson did help. It turns out that Cory also had trouble with FBML based Canvas pages and I'm curious to know whether he ever worked that out, and if so, how. Cory, if you're listening...give me a holler.

One such 'aha' moment came when I understood the difference between coding for the canvas vs. the profile page. In truth, the profile page mostly houses FBML which is set in place using the API. Most of the work is done on the Canvas page which can be more or less independent. Of course, any activity on the Canvas can be used to generate FBML to the profile - but once set, the profile FBML the requires an application setFBML call to be updated. The markup on the profile can also be changed independently of user action by using an infinite session and a Chron Job on your application's server. Meanwhile, the Canvas can be as dynamic as you can build it - especially in an iFrame - within the limitations of the Framework.

A few key lessons I learned were to limit the necessary trips between the two servers - to limit what I needed to get from Facebook to as little as possible and to get as much as I could up front rather than to make numerous requests throughout the flow of the application. This meant doing a lot more client side by storing data in JSON objects, using more JQuery, Flash and Javascript interface elements and tuning the interface to as few pages (requests) as possible. Additionally, it is very useful to know which API calls allow "Infinite Sessions" - keys which can be stored at the application level as compared to request based session keys with unpredictable and sometimes very short lived authorizations. Assuming you want to build it taking into account the few users who may not want to allow the application to stay logged in (a default option).

A site that offered some other tips on Facebook "Gotchas" was a resource I read more than once. In fact, the quality of the documentation had me reading just about everything over and over again, trying things several times before it would click.

We're now in Beta on ArtFusion - an application that lets users rate, keyword, comment on a different piece of art a day and provides reports and search capabilities on previous artwork and a new interface to other featured art by the rated artists. At its core it is based on the "Art of the Day" Google Gadget we built a while back - but as a social utility. Contact me if you're interested in trying it out before its released to the Facebook base.

Over the long run, my hope is that a well-tagged, user-rated art database will really help potential buyers browse and purchase. Only a few changes will be required to roll all the functionality of ArtFusion back in Enfuse and integrate it into the Google Gadget as well.

I've been conflicted for a few days now as a result of a fuse mail I received from one of our users. It was a reply to my note about the resume builder. Here, in part, is the response:

" Thank you, that's very helpful, in theory. In practice, however, I thought you should know that Enfuse is painfully slow on most occasions. I'm not likely to become a regular member of this community if I encounter such long delays in navigating around the site. I hope you'll take this as constructively and non-whinily as can be imagined, as I am not normally a complainer-kind-of-person. I actually think enfuse is really great and I just hope that if you ever have to choose between buying something new for the enfuse staff lounge, like a big HD flatscreen or a pasta-maker or whatever, versus buying a new X server, or finding a new/better webhost -- I hope you'll go with a better server or a better host. What you've got going now just doesn't seem to be working out for you. "

First off: OUCH. That hurts. Secondly... thank you. Thank you for your honesty. Thank you for not being afraid to tell us the painful truth about difficult problems. Thanks also, for your perception of us. Wouldn't it be cool if we had a staff lounge, let alone a big HD flatscreen or whatever. The truth is, we're a virtual team, working pretty much for free, trying to build a grassroots company because we believe in it. We have limited resources, all of us have dayjobs, and we have no salesforce.

That said, we have confidence that we offer a valuable service, that our business model is sound, and that we will keep growing. There is no reason to believe that we can't be hanging out by the HD flatscreen in the employee lounge brainstorming about the future of publishing and social media.

The conflict that arises is when perception and reality collide. When we are percieved as big, but people experience lag or feel as if we are unprofessional, it is much more difficult to resolve than if they know they are dealing with a hobby site. However, if we act like a hobby site, and we put out the message that this is just a side-project, will people feel disenfranchised, underwhelmed. Will they feel like they're not ever going to get anywhere working with us because we're not going anywhere?

Or, do we advertise our lifestyle company background, our indie backbone, our bootstrapped financial situation and get people motivated about building something from the ground up.

Well, we are not a hobby site. We have every intention of making this company. There is a clear business plan and a strategy for making money that we are actively implementing. However, until we begin to really bring cash in or look for additional financing, we can not afford to spend much more on our infrastructure.

That does not mean that we should not take action to fix problems with lag. I took the poignant comments made by this user to heart and I took a hard look at some of the areas of the site that were causing slowdown. We had a couple of tables in the database that stored historical data such as past events and usage logs that were massive (gigs of data). Accessing any data out of these tables was causing a serious drain on resources. Yet, this data was being used for some nice (though not crucial) features - such as past event info, bands who have played at bars, article view status for featured artists, etc... I didn't want to lose all of this data and throw away those features.

In some cases - the past events, for instance. I went ahead and simply threw away the functionality. In this case, I figured that the speed increase was worth the loss of the feature. In the case of the article view stats, I reworked the way we did that. Then, I deleted the data - all of it. It hurt a little, I have to admit. After that, I went through and did a partial audit of the site and looked for other areas that we can make improvements. I made some changes and have identified others that I intend to do. The result is pretty significant. I hope that you will find the site to be far more responsive, quicker to navigate and user - friendly as a result of this clean-up effort. And, I did it without getting that X Server.

BTW: We did upgrade our host several months ago and are now on a Virtual Private Server. It may not be the fastest or biggest one on the market, but we're not being cheap or bush-league either. That upgrade was a signficant effort and a major milestone for us. It also had a pretty significant impact on our performance, so, we are moving on up.

So, lessons learned:

• Sometimes you have to do some cleanup
• Some features are not worth their weight - don't keep the baggage
• Perception and reality don't always play nice

I am curious, regarding the perception vs. reality question? Where does one stand. Do you posture as if you are already established because you intend to be, do you just let people decide for themselves and not say anything, or do you give people the sense that they are helping to build something from the ground up in order to inspire a sense of collective ownership?

I really want to spread the word about the Artist CV tool. I know that a big reason why I feel so excited about it is that it is something that bridges the gab for the individual artist who doesn't find value in some of the more event and media centric artist tools we have in place. Writers in particular haven't had a ton of stuff to do on Enfuse before now.

So, being a writer myself, and having recognized this gap for a long time, I feel a particular sense of satisfaction for having finally gotten to build this tool. Now I want to get the word out.

I could have put together a mass email that went out to our userbase, or even a subset therein. But, instead, I wanted to poke around and get a sense of our writers, what their profiles look like now, and sent them Fuse Mail directly. Eat my own dogfood, if you will. And, in the process, verify what I had feared. Writers have been overlooked. Many of their profiles are fairly thin, perhaps an article or two that they have published with us... at best. Maybe a picture or two.

I'm hoping that in a few days, I'll be wildly impressed by how strong these profiles look now. One can hope. It is a great feeling to know that something you build can actually be of use to someone in the pursuit of their dreams. That, there, maybe the primary motivation behind Enfuse and the thing that has kept us going. We'll see if the resume tool gets used as much as I had hoped.

I just got wind that there's a truemor floating around that Enfuse just got VC Funding. Wild! I wonder how this got out?

http://truemors.com/?p=7360#comments