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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Old Blog, New indieWIRE

There's another premiere planned for the Toronto Film Festival that we've been tight lipped about: our own here at indieWIRE. Technically, it would be indieWIRE version 9 (see a rough ten-year history), but it is the heftiest re-creation of indieWIRE yet. First chunk rolls out in time for the editorial team's arrival in Toronto, with a fuller rollout during the festival. It seemed worth dusting off my year-old blog here at indieWIRE (you're soaking in part of the new design right now) to write a bit about what we're aiming for as we grow toward indieWIRE's tenth anniversary next year. Then I promise I'll return to writing about digital independence instead of community publishing strategy.



Please Send Bronze & Pottery

So today is officially the eighth anniversary of indieWIRE (so the traditional gift would be something bronze or pottery if you feel the burning need to send us something.) Some of those earliest editions of indieWIRE are "lost" to all but the elephantine memory of the Wayback Machine, but I remember when Karol Martesko forwarded me Issue #1 and by the time Issue #3 came around, we were helping Eugene and The Rabbi publish them to the Web. Long ago we stopped numbering the issues, but by my rough count today's edition is probably about Issue #2250.

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Festival Focuses

Next-to-last of my week's series of hidden goodies in indieWIRE: our Festivals section. It's a list of every film festival in IndieFilmmaker that we've also written about at least once in indieWIRE, integrating submission deadlines and festival dates with a custom index of our coverage of that festival. While some of the larger festivals warrent their own special sections (like Tribeca happening now or Cannes coming up), expanding out the pointers we drive to these festival indexes is something else to cram into the homepage revision.



Swimming In Special Sections

When we launched the current indieWIRE structure just before Sundance 2003, we had three "special sections" -- special indexes on particular topics. Now we have fourteen (plus some things that are even more different.) On a day like today, we really want to be plugging three special sections -- "Buzz" (which runs each Friday), Tribeca (which is just starting) and Cannes (which is just around the corner) ... and even then, the Weekly (fresh yesterday) would make fourth. How to deal with the mix of weekly columns, bi-weekly columns and seasonal focuses intuitively is one of our major goals.



indieWIRE for Consumers

indieWIRE gets an odd mix of industry and cinephiles, and figuring out how to service both those audiences is a constant juggle for us. One of our solutions that we need to highlight more is indieWIRE:Weekly, our regular round-up of releases, broadcasts, festivals and events with an indie focus. Fresh each Thursday afternoon (is it really Thursday already?) with it's own seperate email publication (which contains the entire article), the Weekly is something that gets promoted through it's own unique channels. Yet another item that's buried so deep down in indieWIRE that it has its own specialized traffic (and needs more loving in the front page re-design.)



Buried In The Box Office

Each day for the next week, I'm going to post a little something about a feature or resource buried down inside indieWIRE (in part to prepare for a rework of the cover page of the site.) Today is Wednesday, so that means it's box office report day. But few people make use of the amazingly deep resource hidden behind that article, a sign that something needs to change on the front-page of the site.

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Final Isn't Always Final

Today we're putting some of the finishing touches on the blogging system here at indieWIRE, but like many things "alpha" we won't get everything launched today that we would have hoped. Of the 27 blogs in the initial run, 14 of them are live currently and another 8 of them look like they are getting close to prime time. By the end of the day, though, we'll have more of this public, hopefully just in time to answer some of the questions floating around out there.

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The Curtain Slightly Lifted

The next phase of the blogging experiment at indieWIRE launched just now, with the first 9 blogs of the initial set in quiet alpha-mode (along with a unified RSS feed and the first chunks of description about the project.) We'll launch more before the bigger announcements on April 23rd.



Concepts and Blogs

Two major parallel tech development routes happening on indieWIRE.

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