That little box you see on the righthand side of the screen is an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed from my Google reader. Recently, I've become a little obsessed with my RSS feeds. I started gathering them in late December, and I already have 147 coming into my Google reader, where I track fundraising, nonprofit tech, arts management, advocacy, culture, design, arts marketing, and social media blogs and resources. Then I opened a separate RSS account on Bloglines to specfically track Theatre blogs and resources. I track 26 in that account.
Kind of a lot to take in every day, but I can't believe how addictive it is. It's like every morning some friendly person has combed through all the information in the world, and sent me a bunch of things I might be interested in. In-depth coverage of the Arts Council dispute in the UK? Check. An editorial on the effective use of Twitter in nonprofit management? Check. An update from the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society? Check. A hack-script that splits my Gmail screen between mail and GCal? Check! An update from the NEA on available grants? Check, check, check!
The best part of this obsession is I finally feel like I have a productive way to goof off. Instead of reading TMZ for half an hour and feeling like I have to take a shower, I spend that time catching up on the Philanthropy News Digest, cranky theatre bloggers from New York to San Francisco, tips and tools for cheap market research, best practices in board governance... kind of a lazy nerd's utopia.
If you're new to the RSS-bliss, I highly recommend getting started with Google Reader: reader.google.com (doubly convenient if you already use Gmail). Bloglines is also pretty good, but I prefer Google for simplicity and convenience. To get started, I've listed a few of my favorite sites with feeds, but anywhere you see that orange wireless-looking button means the page has an RSS feed you can subscribe to.
ArtsJournal, home of Daily Arts News, and my very favorite blog, Andrew Taylor's The Artful Manager. If you subscribe to anything, I would make it Mr. Taylor's clear, entertaining, and enlightening posts on the art of arts management.
Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, the Mommy of all nonprofit tech blogs
Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog, near-perfect advice on nonprofit management and marketing
Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog: Theatre, I find Lyn Gardner's posts particularly inspiring
Lifehacker, want to learn how to send emails to yourself via voicemail? Convert a PDF to a Word document? Take a free accounting class? Get your Google Calendar and Gmail on the same page? This site will tell you how.
Fractured Atlas Blog, underrated in the small world of Arts Management blogs, in my opinion
If this all sounds like too much trouble, you can actually subscribe to my shared Google Reader items (here), and let me sift through the daily news for you. Nothing would make me happier.
3 comments:
Yay! I'm doing the same thing over at Theater for the Future. RSS and the multitude of technologies and services built upon it has huge potential to connect theaters serving different regions and allow them to share information and models that work in their markets.
And damn if it isn't a lot to read while you're also producing shows, but it's worth it.
I'm mostly focused on the Chicago scene and the national thought that affects it (I'm finding you through TheaterIdeas), but I share flabbergasted astonishment with another post of yours:
You are one of only about ONE or TWO women who are talking about the structure of theater, and that is a potentially huge, huge problem. I'm reading several playwrights like Sheila Callaghan, Marisa Wegrzyn, and Tanya Saracho, but they tend to use blogs in the traditional way - as a journal of developing thoughts - rather than as a political or social tool to initialize change. I know all three of these women are active in developing new models for theater on the local level - Sheila is a member of 13 p which has pretty radical thoughts on new play development, but she doesn't use her blog to talk about those ideas. Tanya is an incredibly active and inspiring leader of the Latino community in Chicago through her theater, but her blog is more about her own career and thoughts than promoting her mission and vision for a healthier theater. Which she has.
They've also been blogging like this for years, and the trend of using blogs to beat the drum of revolution in theater is a very recent phenomenon. They're all three very busy women (Sheila is expecting), and my hope is that they're just processing the movement and what it means before they unleash their ideas upon it.
I do think a lot of women are reading the "Regional Rebellion" (this kind of increased blog buzz and shift in tone that have noticed since the Mike Daisey article), but something about spreading their ideas about the change they'd like to see in the industry is either discouraging them from jumping in or is unpalatable. Perhaps the very idea that your ideas should be spread and conquer the industry is one that appeals to more men. I think that could spell disaster for the growing movement if it isn't addressed, and I'm thrilled to have found your thoughts.
For myself, the answer is not in retooling the national top-down regional theater movement, but turning the whole mechanism on its head and building a grassroots, bottom-up, and web-community-fueled structure that can cooperate with the current model while also changing it permanently. But that's just my theory, and the world that I can have an impact on, and I'm glad there are different perspectives out there.
Looking forward to Google Reading you!
Who is the other woman? Tell me!
Wow, Nick, thank you so much for your wonderful comment. It's great to get some feedback!
Very interesting thoughts about the possibly male tendency to want to conquer the world... especially because I personally find Mr. Daisey's approach kind of counter-productive (see my post "weird and wonderful" from January).
I also love 13p - love their approach, love their work, love what they do. A great experiment, and a potentially great model. I'm looking forward to checking out these blogs you mention - and Google Reading you, as well!
The other woman is for a kind of misguided dramatic emphasis. In fact, you may be the only one doing what you're doing - engaging the structural difficulties of theater and seeking a new model from a woman's perspective. I'll let you know when that claim is proved wrong... hopefully soon.
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