Private Messages

This one has been on the task list for some time – I finally got around to it. Until now, sending a private message to another member would only result in an email being sent but there is now a proper message system. The implementation is still a little rough but it does the job.

We’re all in Marketing Now

In an interview by Derek Sivers, Seth Godin talks about what musicians can do to make it in this world where the music industry is revolting. “Very good music is unheard every day, because very good music is not in short supply.” This article about the trend for film music makers points out at least one area where it’s very clear. In general, all of us who work with data – musicians, designers, writers as well as programmers have suddendly have found ourselves competing with the entire rest of the world. Basically, the supply is in an entirely different league now. The same has happened to the demand obviously, but if you live in a first world country, this development is not to your advantage.

So what do you do to survive? You have to stand out – you’re in marketing now. Personal branding should be on your agenda.

I intend to write about this topic quite a bit but for now, here are a couple of resources that you should check out no matter what your industry is:
Seth’s Blog
Derek Sivers’ Music Marketing Advice book
Music Marketing – Gen-Y Rock Stars

..and if you want the firehose, subscribe to these: AdAge Power150

Twitter Accounts

If you are on Twitter, follow us on @minimumnoise and @graphicster. You can also follow me personally if you should be interested in my personal stream of ramblings and non-insight: @kristiandupont

See you there!

Pre-paid Projects and Deadlines

A popular request has always been for project dealines and the possibility of pre-paid projects.
These two features are implemented and have been running for a while. There is a default deadline of two weeks after the project has been approved. In the future, it will be possible to choose other project lengths, but two weeks seems reasonable for now.
This means that all the old projects on Minimum Noise have been closed, but this is alright for they had no activity anyway.

We are communicating with a number of producers from various industries who are interested in trying out these platforms, so we expect to see some interesting proejcts soon. Stay tuned!

Ratings System

We are discussing how to make the best rating system for MN and G here:
http://www.graphicster.com/ForumPosts.aspx/29

There are lots of sites that have systems in place (a star-ratings system is common), but I have never felt that they worked completely as intended. I would love any sort of feedback on how to improve this.

Graphicster Logo

The first Graphicster project has been successfully completed.
Grahicster has a logo now. Thanks to all the participants and especially to Djosh for the winning design – we love it!

We hope to see all of you on the site for many interesting projects.

Merry Christmas and happy new year to all of you!

Being a humble visionary

In the excellent blog entry Let pedestrians define the walkways, Derek Sivers makes an analogy to running a company based highly on user feedback.

In agile software development, the idea of evolving design is considered by many to be the ultimate approach to software architecture. Rather than creating a design and then implementing it, you start coding right off the bat and let the structure reveal itself. The underlying idea is to make decisions as late as possible as this is when you have the most information.

Does this mean, then, that you should not be visionary? Should you never decide on anything but just kind of stumble into things and hope something turns up?

I don’t think so. I more or less used to (in fact, in 2006 I told people not to design before coding), but today I think that planning does in fact do some good. However, I still don’t think that the plan is worth much more than the paper it is written on. Sammy and I have spent quite a bit of time figuring out where we are going with this project of ours. We have a pretty clear vision and a quite detailed road map. However, as soon as we realize that there is something that our users miss, don’t like or ask for, we will take that into account and change this plan accoordingly.

Moby’s Manhattan Studio

Moby collects vintage drum machines. And he’s a geek. Pretty interesting interview

Graphicster is Live

Graphicster is a sister site to Minimum Noise. As you surely have guessed, it is crowdsourced graphics production.

What, you say, another one? Aren’t you just competing with 99designs, crowdspring and lord knows how many other design sites then? Well, yes, we are. However, those sites focus solely on graphics design. Having worked for many years with tv production and video games, we really wanted to applyh this concept to other forms of graphics as well. You can use Graphicster for everything from a cover for your new album through 3D models and textures to logo and web design.

We are going to eat our own dog food by creating a project for the logo of the site itself.
So, if you have graphics skills and want to join in, you can participate in the first Graphicster project – and potentially win $250.

Cheers!
Kristian and Sammy

Interview in MusicKO

I was interviewed for MusicKO.
Read the interview here