The Acumen Fund Blog
The Acumen Fund is good people. I added this one after Rob Katz visited my school and gave a really great presentation about the organization. The blog itself is a mix of profiles of Acumen Fund investment recipients/fellows and broader thought pieces from the likes of Sasha Dichter and Jacqueline Novogratz.

david toub
“David’s waste of bandwidth,” as he calls it, has been around for a while, covering topics as varied as music, Apple technology, medical trends, and politics. I know David from my Sequenza21 days, where he was and remains a frequent commenter.

Full of IT
So, I found this blog because I noticed it had linked to mine, and realized that the culprit was likely Morgan Lindsey Tachco, whose name I had first encountered on Sarah McLellan’s now-dormant Resources for Emerging Arts Leaders blog. Full of IT appears to have some relationship to the Innovative Theater (IT) Awards Foundation, as Morgan is their Community Relations Manager, although confusingly there is another IT Awards blog on Myspace that seems to have different but concurrent content. Despite its organization-specific focus, Full of IT has some good stuff about local advocacy and off-off-Broadway theaters which is worth reading.

Nico Muhly
Nico is a wünderkind composer who has worked with Björk, Philip Glass, and other big names in the classical and not-so-classical fields. But that’s not why you should read his blog—you should read it because it’s some of the most entertaining damn stuff on the web. Nico’s writing style is ebullient and effusive, with lots of intentionally creative spellings and linguistic gymnastics like Icelandicizing various words. He also makes good use of media as he documents his many travels and performances.

Parabasis
Young writer/director Isaac Butler served on the Obama Arts Policy Committee during the 2008 campaign, and now I see his blog quoted everywhere. Isaac somehow finds time to write intelligently about pretty much everything, ranging from arts policy commentary to theater reviews to electoral politics to “Battlestar blogging” to an online book club for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and much more. Seriously, sometimes he knocks out like five posts in an hour—I’m lucky if I do two a week.

Philanthropy 2173
Lucy Bernholz is the founder of Blueprint Research & Design, a very well respected consultant to foundations and donors, and a former board member of GiveWell which has received some virtual ink in the past here. Lucy was apparently one of the first philanthropy bloggers out there, and her main interests have to do with the concept of philanthropy as a field and the building of information markets for donors and social investors. She’s also a huge Twitter cheerleader and is pretty much the reason why I joined.

PhilanTopic
This is the official blog of the Foundation Center, which is one of the most important information resources in the philanthropy community. Mitch Nauffts and Regina Mahone hold down the fort here, but PhilanTopic also features guest commentary from people in the field and other recurring features like Quote of the Day and Weekend Link Roundup.

Ted Hearne
My buddy Ted Hearne, composer, has a blog called “Teddy Boy.” His posts tend to be either tiny twitteresque hits (many related in some way to his awesome music) or long, cogent essays. I’m listening at the moment to an absolutely sick performance by his bandsemble Your Bad Self courtesy of the blog. I recommend you do the same.

Arts Issues by Alex Aldrich
Alex Aldrich is executive director of the Vermont Arts Council and a Yale SOM grad. His posts give an insider’s perspective on the day-to-day realities of leading a state arts organization, and are laced with pointed commentary on issues of the moment.

API News and Community Arts Network blog
Community Arts Network is a program of an organization called Art in the Public Interest (API). API News is primarily a source for full-length essays from professionals in the community arts, uh, community. The CAN blog, on the other hand, tends to feature shorter riffs on stuff going on elsewhere on the web. Both resources are very helpful for those interested in the intersection between the arts and their communities.

Barry’s Arts Blog and Update
Barry Hessenius is the former director of the California Arts Council, back in the good old days when it had money. He’s now a consultant and has this blog hosted by the Western States Arts Federation. It started out as a monthly newsletter, and though Barry posts a bit more often these days, the style is definitely more op-ed than open thread. Barry has an extensive familiarity with the pantheon of iconic leaders in arts management which sometimes finds its way into his posts in interesting ways, such as his ranking of the 25 most powerful people in the field or his nominations for NEA Chair.

Future Leaders in Philanthropy
What could be better than young people in philanthropy? A cause that one would think would be close to my heart. Except….this site commits an obfuscation of which many others are also guilty, conflating philanthropy (in the sense of giving out money) with fundraising (in the sense of seeking money). That wouldn’t be so bad except that I do believe that the actual field of philanthropy could definitely use more input from young voices, whereas fundraising already has plenty of them. That said, I appreciate their model, especially the idea of hosting networking events. And one of the first blog posts of theirs I saw was an interview with a fellow Yale Glee Club and SOM alum, Shana Katz Ross. Yeah small world!

Life’s a Pitch
Fresh off coordinating the Program Notes mega-blog for the National Peforming Arts Convention, classical music publicist Amanda Ameer landed her own venting space at ArtsJournal called Life’s a Pitch. Ameer, who represented big name artists for a few years at IMG before branching out on her own, is entertaining as all hell and brims over with creative ideas for marketing her stars and yours. One of the best new blogs of 2008.

The Rambler
I had been aware of Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s musicology blog for a few years, but only started subscribing last summer. Much of his content takes the form of CD and concert reviews and the like, but he also occasionally reports on cultural developments, especially across the pond in Europe (he is based in England).

Advance the Arts
Not too long after I started Createquity, I was poking around Google and noticed that a site with the mysterious title “wg test blog” had picked it up and added it to the blogroll (in fact, it was the first blog to hand Createquity that honor). Turns out it was the pre-release of the James Irvine Foundation’s Advance the Arts blog, which is part of its Communities Advancing the Arts initiative. (Communities Advancing the Arts is an effort to work with community foundations in California to promote sponsorship of the arts from individual donors.) AdvancetheArts.org shares “on-the-ground knowledge, resources and experiences among those working to grow local funding for the arts.” The blog has a good round-up of arts-related news and commentary, though I hope the administrators will see fit to include more “on-the ground experiences” of the participants in the CAA initiative itself; I believe it would be an interesting and unique perspective to add to the conversation.

Birdwoman: The Art of Kaetlyn Wilcox
Kaetlyn Wilcox is a wonderful artist based in the Boston area who I’ve been privileged to get to know over the past year. Her “virtual artist’s journal” features a lovely pictures of her artwork in progress and plenty of insightful reflection about the artistic process. She also gives Createquity props in the blogroll. Yeah Kaetlyn!

Mind the Gap
My good friend and former co-worker Molly Sheridan finally acquired a blog last year, after holding forth for years at NewMusicBox, Symphony Magazine, the Carnegie Hall podcasts, and Time Out New York. Hosted at the ArtsJournal conglomerate, Mind the Gap serves up lots of questions about music, intellectual property law, politics, and other pressing matters with a heavy shot of irony.

PhilanthroMedia
Last April was when I really started getting into philanthropy blogs for the first time. PhilanthroMedia is one of these, and one with some mystery to it at first. Is it its own company? What is its agenda? The six main contributors seem to hail from a hodgepodge of backgrounds including GivingNet and Swarthmore College. Dig a little further and you’ll find founder Susan Herr’s profile, which states that PhilanthroMedia “works with foundations, associations and nonprofits to advance ideas that matter using new media tools including blogs, audio/video podcasts, and social networks.” Yale SOM grad Tim Walter (Association of Small Foundations) is a guest contributor.

Resources for Emerging Arts Leaders
This blog by Sarah McLellan (this Sarah McLellan, I wonder? Inquiring minds, etc.!) discovered me in April via my live-blogging of the Yale SOM Arts & Culture Conference. I was quite impressed with it at that time, as it boasts some really intelligent writing and she’s funny to boot. Alas, aside from a single post a few months ago from fellow contributor Morgan Lindsey Tachco, REAL has been mysteriously silent since July.

Tactical Philanthropy
Sean Stannard-Stockton’s blog is one of the most important in philanthropy today. Recently, he led a something of a crusade on behalf of a struggling nonprofit called FORGE as a sort of grand experiment in transparency during crisis; thanks in no small measure to his efforts, the organization has (for now) staved off financial disaster. He makes incredibly cogent arguments that I usually find myself agreeing with — and unlike some prominent bloggers, he’s just as compelling in person. He was kind enough to make the long trip across the country to speak at the Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference and did an awesome job. He even got Paul Brest to blog!

The Chronicle of Philanthropy
The Chronicle is as essential reading for philanthropy and nonprofit professionals as ArtsJournal is for the arts world. Every business day I get 10 new articles in my inbox containing important new info on stuff like the Madoff scandal or the new administration’s plans. There is a ton of other info on this site and it can be hard to navigate directly, so I recommend signing up for the RSS feeds or the email updates.

BONUS! Program Notes
This was the official blog of the National Performing Arts Convention, which I attended in June 2008. It’s dead now, but all of the original entries are still up there and some of it makes for interesting reading. I found the contributions by “MOJO” particularly entertaining.