Days 2-4: The Joys of a Scene

Reflections from the amazing communal experience that was ARGFest-o-Con from the POV of the search for independence during my Death by Junket: the most amazing and terrifying phase of any independent arts movement is when it is a scene but still growing. Scenes are different than industries or genres or movements (although they sometimes grow into those things if they are successful) because they can maintain a sense of intimacy and collaboration -- what you have in common with other members of the scene tends to transcend whatever differences there might be.

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Day Zero: Overture to Indie

I love a good metaphoric roadtrip story, probably more than I actually love being on roadtrips. For the next two weeks I'm on just such a journey, exploring a broad set of communities of American artistic independence. Unfortunately, there's always that pesky and boring travel part, which for me started with 11 hours of airports and travel from Orlando to San Francisco via Texas. I had a companion for the journy, though: songs from 737 of the bands playing at SXSW this year (worth the 3.1 GB download for the glimpse into where the independent music scene breathes and snarls.) The budding Kerouac in me thinks of it as an overture to the exploration -- my personal definitions of indie baked in the oven of SXSW and Midwest independent music scene of the early 1990s, and my roadtrip will eventually end back there again in a couple of weeks (or a decade and a half later, depending on how you view it.)

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Loopy Ambitions Plus 5 Free Ideas

The most exciting aspects to me about our new community indieLOOP are my high ambitions for what the indieWIRE community will end doing with it. As a community, we've also got the advantage that one group's not-quite-shameful self-promotion is almost always another group's valuable content: film festival deadlines and information are valuable to filmmakers, deeper information about film projects is of interest to others in the industry, etc. With a tool as complex as indieLOOP, though, it's going to take some smart innovative thinkers to build the "first of breed" that other independents look to for good ideas. I'm doing my part trying to get a public group about film blogging going, but if I could wave a magic wand and make six more examples appear that I'd be pointing people to, they'd be:

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The Point of the Loop

On Friday, we quietly launched indieLOOP (see my profile), our new social networking space at indieWIRE. Gone are the days of just providing classified and event announcements and a scattering of discussion boards: we've always wanted to provide the community something far more substantial than just that.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be blogging about indieLOOP and some of the cool things we hope the indie film community do with the tools inside it (and, hopefully, I can point out some good examples to give other people ideas.) The place to start, though, is with what the point of the LOOP is (as it helps to visualize some of the things we imagine people might do with it.)

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January is Always indieCRAZY

The hectic energy around Park City alone is usually enough to make January the most insane month of the year for indieWIRE. This year, though, we have even more going on than normal. With the publishing of this year's Top 10 Undistributed Films list, it means it is time to start ramping up the Undiscovered Gems program with the California Film Institute and Emerging Pictures (in ways that make it bigger than ever.) We're in the process of relaunching our Community with a really amazing social networking system from Sparta Social Networks instead of simple discussion boards and classifieds. It will be integrated seemlessly into our existing Member system (so your free indieWIRE membership is going to unlock more functionality than ever before.) And we're hoping to get all of those done before an indieWIRE co-hosted bash in Park City with the San Francisco Film Society, with whom we'll be announcing a major new West Coast initiative. And between now and then, I resolve to blog a little bit more about each of those.



How to Write a Killer BlogAd

After working with tens of thousands of dollars of BlogAds across hundred of different blogs for a number of different clients, I started to realize that part of the reason I saw such better response (as an advertiser) from BlogAds as compared to other advertisements (even on other blogs) was the format of the ads. Freed from the constraints of official banner sizes and given the flexibility of "mixed elements," we consistently saw BlogAds over-perform for us if you found ways to make the most of those potentials.

As the publisher of indieWIRE, I'm wearing the opposite hat – I want you as an advertiser to have all of those same advantages when you're advertising with us. The lessons we learned across so many BlogAd placements about how to make the elements perform the best ended up being the same kind of advice we give indieWIRE advertisers: you're talking to a close knit community of regular readers.

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Explaining the indieWIRE Relaunch to Members

The core of the indieWIRE experience is the community, especially that edge where it becomes physical (the indie film community that we're a part of.) That's best manifested in the indieWIRE membership that recieves indieWIRE:Daily (you can sign up as a member for free here.) We're getting ready to send out one of our extremely-rare emails that isn't an actual issue of the Daily explaining to that core community what the indieWIRE relaunch is about and where we are heading in the next few months.

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Professionals, Consumers, Prosumers

In the past, indieWIRE has served three different audiences ... and not particularly well, I might add. Professionals look to indieWIRE to cover the "indie biz" as comprehensively as possible. Consumers, from film fanatics to occassionally just fanatics, see indieWIRE as a glimpse into thriving world of independent film. The prosumer audience (call them "the emerging indie filmmaker") is looking for indieWIRE as a resource, a native guide to the landscape. We try to scratch all three itches (as people frequently want more than one of them scratched), but scratching them better and more distinctly is a big part of what's driving the thinking of the "new indieWIRE."

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