We're Moving...

The Creative Spin is now hosted on my new webpage at www.srduncan.com.  You can still subscribe to it via this feed: http://sites.google.com/site/stevenrduncanassociates/home/the-creative-spin/posts.xml
or view it directly at http://sites.google.com/site/stevenrduncanassociates/home/the-creative-spin/

Facebook Changes "Become A Fan" Button to Like

I don't like the idea of making my friends become fans, and I'm not sure some of my friends have necessarily gained my respect enough to consider myself their fans. I've seen this complaint on the FB news feeds a lot!
With Facebook, suddenly any artist can have a "fan club", converting all their "friends" to "fans" and shifting how both fan and celebrity view their relationships with each other.
Well, now FB has changed the "become a fan" button to a "like" button as a way of garnering new members.
A bit deceptive, perhaps.  Just because I "like" someone, doesn't mean I want to hear absolutely everything about them.
Still, the "like" button does take things down to a more rudimentary, broader level. your friends just "like" you or at least something about what you do.
For you - the artist or business owner - your job is think of how to keep people liking you. Consider what that takes when you are determining what to communicate to your audience.

Google Sites - Embed Multiple Calendars (and other things)!

My friend passed along this neat little guide for embedding in Google.

http://www.steegle.com/websites/google-sites-howtos/embed-multiple-calendars

Association Of Book Publishers of BC Launches New Site

All you writers out there should check out the Association's spiffy new site.  Lots of resources there.  The website is  http://books.bc.ca/

Groups or Pages on Facebook Explained

Found this useful article from Social Media Strategy and Marketing consultant Howard Greenstein. It helps to de-mystify these too FB functions.  One thing he doesn't mention is how Pages also offer "Insights" about visitors to the page gleaned from what FB already knows about these members, like age and gender.  Similar to Google Analytics.


“Should I create a group or launch a Page?” It’s the eternal question that gets asked as often as, “What is Twitter?” at introductory social media training classes. Ever since Facebook launched their Pages product as part of their larger advertising strategy (along with the ill-fated Beacon) in November 2007, there has been confusion over which to use. Because
 Groups and Pages have an overlapping feature set, even senior social media marketing consultants are sometimes stumped as to what to tell their clients. And Facebook continues to make changes to how Pages function, complicating the matter even further.

 Read more here>>>

Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

About Elizabeth Gilbert

The author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some large topics. Her next fascination: genius, and how we ruin it. Full bio and more links

A Simple, Slick-looking Document Viewer by Issuu

It's Fringe Festival time in Vancouver and so I took myself to the festival website to check out this year's program guide.

http://www.vancouverfringe.com/2009-program-guide/

They use an interesting viewer to display their program guide which I thought was worth mentioning.
A website called Issuu lets you upload any document you want to an online Flash player which has different page display options, is intuitive and is free to use unless you want the ad-free full version.
The nice thing is that the ads are relevant to the document, employing some Google AdWords-type of platform. The Fringe site had thumbnails of other arty documents in several languages and when you rolled over one a pop-up balloon would have the name and description of the document. Some documents were in foreign languages, which gave me the impression that the Vancouver Fringe was part of a much larger and diverse community.
My one complaint was that I had no quick Table of Contents to link me to what I was looking for, i.e. a map. Instead I had to eyeball the table of contents then go through 2 sets of pages before i could get to the page I wanted.
But it still looked good and I saved a tree.
Here is the Issuu website: http://issuu.com/business