ArtsAppeal
David Zoltan’s blog about arts management, fundraising, and policy is well-written, engaging, and informed. He’s been keeping up an admirable pace over at ArtsAppeal since this past September, and shows little sign of slowing down. David is part of a bevy of Carnegie Mellon arts administration alums and students who, along with nearly half a dozen applicants to the Createquity Writing Fellowship, have collectively raised my esteem for that program quite a bit over the past few months.

Jumper
Former Mellon Foundation Associate Program Officer and current Ph.D. student Diane Ragsdale has been hitting all the arts policy high points in her new weekly ArtsJournal blog, Jumper. Check out these two recent posts on the question of oversupply in the sector and the search for new business models, as well as this one on funding partnerships that was written partly in response to a comment of mine. While Diane’s essays always make for interesting reading on their own, what makes Jumper especially remarkable is the fact that it has managed, over a very short period of time, to become a hotbed of action in the comment section – a very hard feat to pull off for any blog.

FlowingData
I have my Fractured Atlas colleague Kirsten Nordine to thank for pointing me in the direction of this fantastic data visualization blog by Nathan Yau, a UCLA Ph.D. candidate in statistics. Yau posts frequent examples of infographics, interactive data toys, and the like to his site and makes sure to present topics in a completely accessible way. You will definitely learn something from reading this blog.

Museum 2.0
Nina Simon’s rise to prominence in the museum world has been rather meteoric, and her excellent Museum 2.0 blog is at the root of it all. This four-part series on Paul Light’s book Sustaining Innovation provides an example of the seriousness with which she approaches her craft. Nina’s oft-cited book The Participatory Museum can also be read online. She’s a real-deal Gen Y nonprofit thought leader.

YourTownPerforms.com
Sadly, YourTownPerforms hasn’t been updated in the last two and a half months, but assuming Craige Hoover ever comes back, you can bet that it will be with something well worth reading. Craige is the founder of a consulting shop called Cultural Arts Solutions and the Seaside (FL) Repertory Theatre, which he led until last year. His posts shine an incisive light on local arts-led development initiatives and cultural plans, such as this one about Nashville (Hoover is from outside Nashville) and a cool series on “Great Arts Towns.” He also brings a perspective on new urbanism which will be most welcome in creative placemaking discussions.

This past year hasn’t seen a ton of changes for the blog itself, but during that time my own life has changed dramatically, with a new job, a return to New York, and more direct involvement in the issues I’m writing about at the top of the list. More on that evolution in a future post (after vacation’s over). In the meantime, thank you for your support and remember to vote on November 2!

Some blogroll updates first:

• Do the Math has a new URL and feed. It’s no longer a band blog, but purely the work of Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson.
• Brigid Slipka’s blog is now at brigidslipka.com. The feed should be unchanged.
• The Future of Music Coalition blog’s feed has changed.
• The Idea Feed’s, uh, feed has also changed. I was really glad to discover this one was still active but upset to realize that I’d missed several months’ worth of posts!
• Community Arts Network, the publishers of both APINews and CANBlog, is no more, so I’ve removed them both from the list. The CAN website, which has a number of fantastic educational resources for arts policy nuts, is archived here.

You might have noticed a few aesthetic changes here at Createquity, as well: the rotating backgrounds form a more coherent set, and I’ve consolidated the large number of categories to four “channels” (Policy & Advocacy, Philanthropy, Economy, and Research) and begun using a tag-based system instead. Thanks once again to the talented Evan Stein for his help with this.

Art and Avarice
Voice teacher and opera singer Milena Thomas has a degree in finance and an ardent affection for the free market. It’s a dangerous combination that has caused her to take some headscratching positions, like when she argued that outlawing unpaid internships would disproportionately hurt the poor or that letting big record companies bribe radio stations for airplay would somehow create more opportunity for indie musicians. I went back and forth for a while about linking to her for this reason, but Thomas is a gifted writer whose ideas are often worth considering even when her politics are (in my opinion) misguided. The post that got me off the fence was her most recent one, a beautiful reflection on the balance between art and family. Thomas was nine months pregnant when she wrote it, so understandably she’s been a bit MIA since then, but when she comes back, I’ll be reading.

Buzzing Reed
No relation (that I know of) with his namesake above, Columbus Symphony clarinetist David H. Thomas writes this very active blog about clarinet, classical music, and audience engagement. A reader who plays clarinet will definitely get more out of Buzzing Reed than one who does not, but Thomas is a voracious reader who keeps up with some very different sources than I do, so I appreciate his bite-sized reactions to classical music articles like this one. A good way to keep up with what orchestral musicians are thinking these days.

NYFA Blog
The New York Foundation for the Arts has a long history of providing grant and technical support to artists in New York State and beyond (NYFA Classifieds, for example, is one of the key local sources for job listings in arts administration). Now NYFA has a blog written by executive director Michael Royce, and it looks pretty promising. Of greatest interest to me was an early peek into the NEA’s strategic plan framework for 2012-16, though unfortunately the link to the plan itself no longer seems to be active. Still, there’s lots of other good stuff to keep one occupied here.

OK Trends
I have to hand it to my coworker Tim Cynova: he emailed me a link to a New York Times article that discussed this blog some months ago and my life has not been the same since. Christian Rudder and Chris Coyne perform technically ambitious and highly entertaining data analysis on the 3.5 million active members of OKCupid, a well-known online dating service. The OK Trends blog bucks some pervasive blog-authoring conventional wisdom: posts are infrequent, averaging about one a month, and very, very lengthy. But hey, they’re about romance and sex, so somehow people find the time to read them (one post has, um, attracted more than 1300 comments to, um, date). Math + Cultural Anthropology + Hilarity = Awesome.

• Good Intentions Are Not Enough has a new URL and feed. Still not the most easy-to-type web address, but it’s an improvement over the last one…
• GiveWell has moved from givewell.net to givewell.org. Feeds should still work for the GiveWell Blog.
• I’ve removed several apparently inactive blogs from the list.

And here’s the new crop!

The Art Law Blog
Similar to the Nonprofit Law Blog and Nonprofit Law Prof Blog, Donn Zaretsky’s Art Law Blog is an intelligent and engaging compendium of legal news and disputes from around the globe. The major focus is decidedly on the visual arts, but the blog occasionally dips into issues that affect other art forms as well.

Leading Edge
This is Rosetta Thurman’s semi-regular column for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and boy, does she play the flame-thrower over there! A sample of recent post titles: Nonprofit CEOs Who Want For-Profit Salaries Should Work at For-Profit Companies. Do Nonprofit Boards Really Want Younger Members? How Not to Do Diversity. So far, the Chronicle readers seem to mostly be playing nice, but she’s starting to earn herself a few haters in the comments. Grab the popcorn!

Orchestra R/Evolution
Orchestra R/Evolution, you may remember, is the home of the blog conversation that took place in advance of the League of American Orchestras’s annual conference last month, for which I contributed a handful of articles. It was really one of the best online group conversations I’ve ever participated in, both in terms of structure and content, and gave me lots to think about as I entered and emerged from conference season. Still, I went back and forth on whether to include it, given that it was ostensibly created for a specific event that has now passed. On the off chance that it will continue, however, I think it’s worth adding to the blogroll – and even if not, the archived posts are well worth perusing if you haven’t seen them.

TCG Circle
This is one of three(!) official blogs of Theatre Communications Group, the primary national service organization for theater. Among the bloggers are TCG employee Gus Schulenberg, who is already on our blogroll as the primary writer for the Flux Theatre Ensemble’s blog, and Rob Weinert-Kendt, better known to Createquity readers as the proprietor of The Wicked Stage. Gus has a recent interview up with yet another blogroll denizen, 24 Usable Hours’s Devon Smith.

• The blog of Springboard for the Arts, Springblog, has moved. Here is the new URL and feed.
• The essential Chronicle of Philanthropy recently restructured its entire website and produced a bunch of broken RSS feeds as a result. The new homepage for news is here; it doesn’t seem possible anymore to get all of the story feeds consolidated in one place like before, but here is a site map with (not always up-to-date) feeds for each section. Meanwhile, Give and Take is now located here and you can (re)subscribe at this link.
• Rosetta Thurman’s website has gone through several redesigns recently, and the latest one put her blog on her homepage and caused my Google Reader subscription to become out of date. She is as prolific as ever, and you can read her thoughts by subscribing here. Rosetta also has a new blog at the aforementioned Chronicle of Philanthropy website which I haven’t had a chance to check out yet.
• My link for OnPhilanthropy Stories was leading to some weird search function, so I’ve now changed it to the homepage which has some good, frequent coverage of philanthropy news. You can subscribe here.

And here are some new blogs to check out!

2am Theatre
Quite possibly one of the first instances of a Twitter conversation giving birth to a blog, 2am Theatre is making a lot of noise despite being a relatively new kid on the block. 2am grew out of an actual 2am Twitter conversation among folks of a theatrical bent that many involved found mind-blowing. Not having the patience to read through the entire thing, I’m glad it has partially migrated to blog format, where a recent screed by Trisha Mead on ticket pricing has been one of the more buzzworthy contributions of late.

Brands Plus Music
Brands Plus Music is a music industry blog primarily authored these days by Suzanne Lainson. Lainson’s posts are often long and fairly infrequent, but they are always incredibly detailed and reveal a researcher’s mind at work. Recent highlights include a helpful heuristic for describing DIY music business models, a treatise on the ramifications of hypercompetition, and an epic two–part examination of the 10,000-hours-to-success concept popularized by Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers.

FutureBlog
The Future of Music Coalition is one of the few organizations out there to focus specifically on the intersection between the arts and federal law. In recent years, FMC has focused like a laser on such hot-button issues as copyright, licensing of the open airwaves, and net neutrality as they relate to musicians’ lives. It’s great to have an arts organization that looks at how government interacts with our field in ways beyond the NEA’s budget, and a great way to stay up to date with the latest developments is to follow FutureBlog.

State of the Art
I’m tickled to welcome James Undercofler, who used to serve as the President of the American Music Center’s Board of Directors back when I was working there, to the blogosphere. Jim is now a professor in Drexel University’s arts management program, and his blog (a recent addition to Douglas McLennan’s ArtsJournal empire) covers a single, very specific topic: the problems with the 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal form and potential alternatives. Unlike many of us who like to complain about the burdens that the nonprofit form places on very small and/or informal organizations, Jim is coming at this from the perspective of having led several large institutions, where he claims the nonprofit form is equally problematic, particularly from the standpoint of governance. In a recent two-part series, he argues for dramatically reducing the size of most boards and instituting a standardized certification process for the ones that remain.

Image by Nikita Kashner, Creative Commons license

So last week, I tried a little experiment. I’ve been wondering for a while what to do about my weekly series “Around the Horn.” It’s the only thing I write for Createquity that’s on a timed schedule (every Monday), and as I’ve cut back my level of writing somewhat due to my new job, I found myself questioning the future of the series. After all, the Around the Horn posts never seem to go anywhere after I write them, and I rarely get any kind of feedback in the form of comments or other reactions, so it was natural of me to wonder whether they were having any impact. So I decided I’d ask readers directly.

As I was putting the question to readers in my weekly missive, I came up with the idea of giving people a more formal way to respond than by just leaving a comment. And while I was at it, I figured I’d make it into a broader questionnaire about a number of issues I’d been wondering about with respect to the blog.  All told, I got 85 responses, which is about a 12-13% response rate depending on how many regular readers there are who are not formally subscribed to this blog’s feed. Respectable for an online poll – probably not a random sample, but I figure that’s okay since (a) I’m more interested in broad strokes of reader opinion than the exact numbers; and (b) the primary bias one would expect is that people who responded are more likely to care a lot about the site, and I’m more interested in their opinions anyway. (Sorry, anyone else who’s reading this…what can I say, you had your chance!)

Before I get into the numbers and the details, I want to offer a few topline takeaways I had from the process itself.

• This was the best idea I’ve had in a long time. Some of my good ideas take months to marinate in my head before they’re ready. This one, from coming up with the idea for the survey, to designing it in Google Forms, to finishing the post with the link to the published survey, came to fruition on a single Sunday evening. I think every blogger who’s serious about their craft should consider doing a reader poll like this one. I got so much valuable insight into readers’ thoughts that I never would have unearthed otherwise. And all I had to do was ask.
• Don’t use Google Forms for your polls. I mean, sure, it’s neat, and it’s a useful tool for other purposes (like Createquity Tipster). But Forms offers little of the analytical capability that comes with other survey sites like Qualtrics or even Surveymonkey. And at least in my survey, it’s tallying the responses to one of the questions blatantly incorrectly.
• “Other” is your friend. It doesn’t always result in the friendliest data, but qualitative responses add incomparable richness to survey results, and if you don’t give people a chance to share them you’ll miss out on a lot.

In fact, doing this survey was actually kind of therapeutic for me because of the completely amazing comments that people left. Here were some of my favorites:

This is the internet as it should be. Keep up the good work. I’m a newly-minted cultural industry consultant (and before that the exec director of a performing arts festival and ensemble-based experimental theatre company in Canada for eleven years). It’s things like Createquity that create a sense of substance, thoughtfulness and interconnectedness to our ‘sector’.

I only discovered Createquity in the last month, yet I already highly recommend and praise it to others. Not sure if my feedback is as important as the thoughts of a longtime reader, but it’s my lunch break and I’m devoting it to this survey regardless. [Wow! Eight more paragraphs of comment follow, including this:] Because of “Around the Horn” I have followed several links to incredibly helpful sources, news, and research. For example, this week’s link to the Kresge Foundation’s new Institutional Capitalization grant program was exactly something my organization was seeking…and you are the reason I got brownie points for bringing this to my higher up’s attention.

You and Paul Krugman (NYT) are my favorite feeds. [Holy crap! -IDM] I’m attending business school next fall, but plan to remain in the arts/nonprofit sector after graduating.  I find that your blog validates my own interests.  Your posts are not only professional and well-researched, but also full of personality and opinion.

I was going to put “never read anything by you again” but wasn’t sure you’d appreciate the joke.  -dad

So aside from finding out that I made somebody look good at work (sweet!), what else did I get from the results? Well, quite a bit actually.

I learned that most people don’t mind when I cross-post content here that I’ve written for other sites. Over 90% of people who responded to this question told me that they either didn’t care or hadn’t noticed when I do this.  A small minority said it bothered them a little, and only one person asked me to stop – and since that person said they don’t enjoy any of the content here, I’m not exactly sure why they’re reading me at all. This is good news for me since I am getting more offers to guest-blog for various one-off salons, online panel discussions, etc., and it’s great when that content can do double-duty.

I learned that people want more coverage of arts research on the site. Unlike non-arts philanthropy and economics, of which most people said the level of coverage was about right, 35 respondents wanted to see more arts research items as compared with only three who wanted to see less. This is interesting to me because when I asked about the Arts Policy Library, which is the Createquity feature that deals most directly with arts research, a number of people responded that they don’t read it. I also got a few admonitions to keep my posts short, which the APL essays most certainly aren’t. So I’m interested to know what people mean, or thought I meant, when they said they wanted more arts research coverage. Is it just keeping on top of newly published studies, reports, etc.? Or do you all want more of a synthesis, a meta-level guide to what’s out there? In any case, it’s good to know that this is a niche with, apparently, some unmet demand.

I learned that my current posting schedule is in line with people’s preferences. There was a considerable range on this question, but the average response was about twice a week, so that works out well. I think I can do that pretty sustainably.

I learned that a majority of readers want to see more state and local arts policy coverage. This was the most popular of the new ideas with 58% in support, followed by interviews at 44%, and international coverage at 36%. Only 28% want to see more posts by guest authors.

And finally, I learned that Around the Horn is actually the most popular recurring feature on the site. Out of 84 respondents, only one said they didn’t like it, and another nine said they don’t read it. That leaves a whopping 88% who gave it the thumbs up, more than the 70% who like the Arts Policy Library, 76% who enjoy New Blogs, and 63% who heart the conference live-blogging and wrap-ups. (Not surprisingly, my attempts to unload my own music upon an unsuspecting readership garnered the lowest marks, at 32%. Too bad guys, it ain’t lettin’ up anytime soon.)

And therein lies my dilemma. When asked for suggestions for Around the Horn, a majority of you, 54%, wanted me to “keep it going as is.” No one said I should dump it. Yet I realized after I did the poll that the reason I asked what to do about Around the Horn in the first place is because I feel keeping it as is is simply not an option. To be blunt about it, I don’t want half of all of my posts for Createquity to be link round-ups. It only serves to put ideas that have been smoldering in my head on a further back burner, and puts me in what I feel is a reactive stance relative to whatever conversations other people are having instead of giving me an opportunity to help move those conversations forward by generating fully original content. If I still harbored ambitions to write for Createquity every day, as I once did, I wouldn’t mind at all continuing Around the Horn the way it is. But for right now, I just don’t think that’s going to be realistic.

So what to do? Obviously, ATH fulfills a need out there. It’s not about the aggregation, it seems; many of you wrote eloquently that you enjoy my commentary and editorial selections, and wouldn’t want it to become just another link list or Twitter feed. So what I’m going to try to do is give you what you want in a way that works better for me. I’m not sure yet exactly what that way is going to be, as I think it’s going to take some trial and error. But I’m thinking I will probably experiment with several of these strategies and see what works:

• I’m going to liberate Around the Horn from its weekly rotation. I think at least half of my stress around ATH is simply the deadline, the feeling that I HAVE to keep it up no matter what. I’m going to try loosening up the schedule a bit and posting the round-ups whenever it seems appropriate and I have time. Hopefully that will help.
• I’m going to try to write more short posts reacting to items I read in the meantime. Since a number of people noted that it’s my commentary that they liked most about ATH, I will try to expand that a little and be more selective and purposeful about it. In the meantime, I will try to funnel stories and posts that I find notable but don’t have much to say about to Twitter, which is clearly built for that sort of thing, with possible re-posting to the blog.
• I’m going to experiment with crowdsourcing it — eventually. I think realistically it’s going to take a while to get enough of the right contributors on board to entrust a shared approach to ATH. If you’re interested in working on this with me, do get in touch; but for the rest of you, it’s probably going to continue to be a solo effort for the immediate future.

Anyway, look at that, it’s been another super-long post from Createquity – and this one was all meta, even! But seriously, thank you all so much for your support – it means the world to me to know that I’ve helped to make a difference in some of your lives with my writing, and I hope to continue to do so for a long time to come.

Last year, when I was unemployed/consulting and considered this blog part of my “work,” it made sense for me to push as much content out there as possible, so Around the horn stayed. Now, though, I have a full-time job and I need to be strategic about the time I devote to Createquity. So, how about it, readers? Given everything I’ve said above, should Around the horn continue or not?

Actually, it doesn’t have to be quite that black and white. In addition to keeping up the status quo and discontinuing the series entirely, I could also explore the following alternatives:

• Move it to Twitter. This was my original suggestion, and currently my Twitter feed is rather underutilized. It’d certainly be more efficient, but you’d lose the commentary, and I know not everyone’s on Twitter (though I could loop it into a sidebar on the blog easily enough).
• Crowdsource it. This may be the ideal scenario, but I’m not sure whether it would work in practice. Part of the reason why I made the Createquity Tipster form and spreadsheet was so that something like this, a weekly feature co-authored by several contributors, could be an option. But it’s going to require interested and committed web-scourers or else it will just end up going back to the status quo. Anyway, if you think you might be up for something like this, would you let me know?
• Slice and dice it. Maybe I just need to be more selective about and/or split up what gets included in Around the horn. For example, since Createquity specializes in research, I could do an occasional (i.e., not weekly) research round-up. Or I could focus exclusively on news that affects the arts sector. I kind of liked the topical structure I experimented with in this post, did you?

So here’s your chance to tell me what you want. In fact, I’ll make it easy for you: just take this quick survey, and tell me your thoughts not just on this issue, but on how things are going in general. I can’t wait for your response!

Oh, and since it’s that time of the week again:

• Following the news from last week about the possible elimination of the Georgia Council for the Arts, a protest from arts groups around the state led to a Georgia Senate committee restoring almost $900,000 to the council’s budget. While this is obviously an improvement and has been hailed as good news, let’s not lose sight of the fact that (a) this actually represents a likely upper bound on state arts funding, since the House version of the budget still doesn’t contain any money for the council, the Senate bill has yet to pass the full chamber, and the whole thing faces a Republican governor with a line-item veto at the end; (b) even if this passes, it’s still nearly a two-thirds cut from this year; and (c) Georgia is the ninth-most populous state in the union, meaning that the best possible outcome would take its level of state arts support to almost California-level patheticness.
• Georgia wasn’t the only place where the jaws of life were employed recently: Bloomberg reports that the Harlem School of the Arts has received a $1 million infusion of foundation money that will allow it to stay open through the summer. The HSA also has a new board after all previous members stepped down this week. The donations and board changes were engineered by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin. We’ll see if this crew comes out with a better result than last time.
• Holy moly: foundation grantmaking went down by 8.4% in 2009. Take out the Gates Foundation and the numbers look even worse.
• I wish we saw more of this: a foundation CEO giving an insider’s account of its own Board-level strategy meetings. Meanwhile, the Kresge Foundation has announced a new strategy for its nationwide arts and culture program focusing on community revitalization through the arts, support services and institutional capitalization.
• Get ready for another gigantic foundation on the horizon. Good news: this one will support the arts.
• Sounds like the L3C supporters’ utopian vision of a red-tape-free legal form for social enterprise is about to be put to the test. Meanwhile, another hybrid organization type is on the loose in Maryland.
• Some inside dish on the Grantsfire project and what it might mean for the future of grant reporting.
• Your weekly Richard Florida (and Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick) publication is out. This one tackles music clusters in the United States.
• A new report is being billed as “the most significant compilation of evidence-based dance research ever undertaken” in England. (h/t LabforCulture)
• Tom Borrup on DIY Culture in Silicon Valley.
• Nice personal recap of Arts Advocacy Day from TCG’s Alissa Moore.
• RIP Alan Rich. And speaking of rich, the arts’ ultra-rich are now slightly less so.
• I thought this video was pretty effective. People have chimed in to say that it’s not that big a deal, but still…lining up at 1am in the cold for an open-call audition? You gotta admit that’s a little nuts.
• Congrats are in order to Createquity super-commenter Ann Sachs for being one of the honorees at the annual Ensemble Studio Theatre Gala, and to Isaac on the new look.

• Barry’s Arts Blog and Update, the home of Barry Hessenius’s invaluable weekly rants, is now known simply as Barry’s Blog and has a new URL and feed.
• New Music Strategies, originally an e-book of sorts, has died and come back to life several times and most recently transformed into…well, I’m not sure what exactly, but they are telling us to stay tuned.
• Mark Robinson’s engaging Arts Counselling blog appears to be no more now that its author has left his post at Arts Council England (sounds like he was laid off as a result of a restructuring, poor guy). If you’d like to keep following his exploits, he will be writing a blog for his consulting shop, Thinking Practice.
• When Grantmakers in the Arts redesigned its website this past winter, that meant the integration of Janet Brown’s and Tommer Peterson’s blogs and new URLs and feeds for both. Janet’s blog is still called Better Together and you can subscribe to it here. Tommer’s blog is now simply called GIA News and the link to subscribe is here.
• The ever-nomadic Scott Walters has abandoned the >100k Project site in favor of the CRADLE Arts blog (better known as Rocking the Cradle), whose feed is here. The sidebar has been updated accordingly.
• Thanks to the magic of Google Reader, I found the link for Deceptively Simple’s feed (this is how I found Rocking the Cradle’s as well). If you’ve come across a blog you want to subscribe to but don’t see a link, just click “Add Subscription” in Google Reader and search on the name. Likely as not you’ll find it.
• As it’s now been over a year since Paul Brest last posted at the Huffington Post, I think it’s safe to assume that that blog is not coming back anytime soon. Similarly, PhilanthroMedia ceased to exist last summer. I’ve removed both from the link list.

OK, and now for the new crop!

Actually Giving and Pam Klainer’s Day
Previously discussed here on Createquity, these two blogs are full of reflections on personal giving and generosity. Brigid Slipka, a fellow Yale SOM alum, writes about her journey to find the right reasons for altruism, typified most recently in her 40 Days of Giving generosity experiment. Pam Klainer, my aunt, writes what is really a personal journal that nevertheless contains many nuggets of wisdom on philanthropy, class, and cultural anthropology driven by her experiences in Panama. Both blogs are well-written and well worth the time.

The Communications Network blog
The aforementioned PhilanthroMedia’s Susan Herr has joined forces with the formidable Bruce Trachtenburg at this philanthropy consulting practice’s blog. The most recent piece, which discusses the political ramifications of three foundations’ very active role in reshaping an economically devastated city of Detroit, is a good example of why the blog is worth reading.

The Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship Blog
The Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship looks to be a relatively new organization that provides fellowships and training to entrepreneurs around the world for their creative entreprises. The blog feels like it is still finding its voice (the bloggers appear to be unrelated to each other except by common interest), but given the subject matter it may well be one to watch. What I’d love to see is some blog posts from the entrepreneurs themselves, perhaps translated if necessary.

TACT
Scott Walters is really blogging around these days. The verbally promiscuous and acronym-loving professor now writes at Theatre Ideas, CRADLE Arts, and has recently begun a new venture with fellow theater prof Tom Loughlin called Theatre Arts Curriculum Transformation (or TACT). Dedicated “to the assessment and re-imagining of theatre training and education at the college and university level,” TACT has already featured some great posts, like these two on why the current system for theater education stacks the deck in favor of children of economic privilege.

I still can’t figure out if Createquity has four syllables or five.

Indeed it has five syllables: cree-ay-TEH-qui-tee. And in case anyone’s wondering, there’s no glottal before “equity,” I just lean right into the “t” before it.

Also, not that I really need to remind you if you’re reading this, but the blog is not called “Createequity” or “Creatiquity,” both of which I’ve seen more than once around the web. Furthermore, my name is not “David Ian Moss,” though that may well be catchier than my actual name.

I hope this was helpful. Carry on!