FastCompany : Society6 Is Etsy for the Artsy, Crowds Curate
/What happens if you take away the curator and leave everything up to your customers?
Society6 aims to find out. Its goals are greater than simply selling high-quality prints. By creating an accessible social network, Society6 has produced a collaborative community of artists and art enthusiasts, where art can be bought, sold, promoted, and created.
"We've sort of taken ourselves out of the equation," said Justin Cooper, who founded the site along with Justin Wills and Lucas Tirigall. "You don't have to get by our personal taste to make your art available for sale. "
Purchased artwork is printed on demand, with Society6 setting a base price to cover production costs and a small profit for the company. The artist (anyone can join) then chooses the mark up and sale price of the piece--giving Society6 a wide range of price points--and when sold, they keep 100 percent of those profits.
NOTE: Check out Etsy art by Peter Durand (http://www.etsy.com/shop/durandgallery
) and Diane Durand (http://www.etsy.com/shop/thislittlefish
).
Primates on Facebook
/
What is the cost of emotion, time and energy do you spend in your social networks “grooming”?
From Feb 26th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO | The Economist print edition
Even online, the neocortex is the limit That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation.
See original article:
TechShop
/Remember your friend's dad with the way over-the-top organized garage with every tool imaginable? (If that was your dad, I'm sorry.) Well, I bet he didn't have plasma cutter or 3-D printer, and if he did, you didn't have the security clearance to touch it!
TechShop is that cyber-cool chop shop. Plus, if you are a member, you can touch all the tools, and, for example, make your own BattleBot. They have wicked classes like "How To Cut Shapes Out of Metal with the Plasma Cutter" and "How To Use a Laser to Cut and Etch Food".
TechShop was founded in 2006 by Jim Newton, a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster. The original TechShop is located in Menlo Park, California, on the San Francisco peninsula 25 miles south of San Francisco, with nine other locations across the US.
[ Thanks to M. Frisse. ]
Anyone can come in and build and make all kinds of things themselves using the TechShop tools, machines and equipment, and draw on the TechShop instructors and experts to help them with their projects.
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