Zero-cost publishing online has the potential to be revolutionary. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can now publish to the world for free and without seeking permission. The only thing blocking this revolution is people’s awareness of how easy it is and, once they know that, their ability to cast off preconceptions about what it means to publish so they can engage with the medium effectively. And that, in a nutshell, is what I do.
But enough about me. I came across a website today that pleased me immensely. The Margaret St MA Show would traditionally use flyers (either on paper or emailed as jpegs) and be listed on the BIAD website, both of which are perfectly valid forms of promotion but which have costs involved, be they financial, temporal or bureaucratic. What if the students themselves want to do something online that bypasses all three of these costs? Why not set up a blog?
They’ve using Tumblr here but any of the instant microblogging services would suffice and the posting strategy seems to be to throw as much stuff as possible at it in no discernible order. Here’s a photo, here’s an mp3, here a quote, here’s a link, here’s a bio, and so on. In the long term this would be a nightmare but for a website that, by definition, is redundant come Friday 29th August it’s perfect because it cost nothing, probably took about 20 minutes to set up and populate and really gives a sense of the scope of work on show.
As much as I like Tumblr and use it myself for my internet scrapbook I’d have gone for Posterous in this case because it’s even easier to post to and displays content in much more streamlined ways. Email 5 images to Posterous and it creates a mini-gallery. Send in an mp3 and you get a player and download link. And it’s all based around email so you can update it from anywhere. Tumblr can do all this too but is better for curating the web, in my view.
But tools aside it’s the attitude that excites me here. It shows an understanding that while websites can be beautifully crafted things they can also be disposable, and that that disposability doesn’t diminish their value. It seems like every week I hear about a website that cost tens of thousands of pounds to create before anyone’s even been employed to run the thing so its refreshing to see people, especially from the Art world which isn’t traditionally that internet-savvy, really get it.
Link came via Created in Birmingham. Did I mention CiB took an evening and cost £0.00 to set up?
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