Writing online
Our class is informally joyful : )
We took group photos! (The first batch of Orbital bootcamp students after their public talks on Lessons Learned this week)
We’re missing a few of the students and team members. Congrats and thank you to everyone for being such a great group to work with.
The first orbital bootcamp classes. Good looking group! #lessonslearned
https://blog.rememberlenny.com/2014/09/11/our-class-is-informally-joyful-hellodrell/
Our class is informally joyful : )
We took group photos! (The first batch of Orbital bootcamp students after their public talks on Lessons Learned this week)
We’re missing a few of the students and team members. Congrats and thank you to everyone for being such a great group to work with.
The first orbital bootcamp classes. Good looking group! #lessonslearned
https://blog.rememberlenny.com/2014/09/11/our-class-is-informally-joyful-hellodrell-2/
We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.
https://blog.rememberlenny.com/2014/09/11/we-do-not-learn-from-experience-we-learn-from/
Up until now, I struggled with the “empty party” syndrome. I was building a community for content sharing and storing, but didn’t have any content. As a result, I was trying to attract an audience without any reason for them to take Public Artfound.
The value created from the twitter bot I created made me realize I needed to do something with it. I was creating a lot of value for observers but unable to capture much of it for myself.
Since I recognized the IFTTT stream is useful to a wide public audience, I decided to build out my own IFTTT functionality. Instead of using IFTTT to move pictures from Instagram to Twitter, I am pulling them into the Public Artfound.
This solves two major problems I had in past experiments. First, I can curate. Second, I can attract users.
Based on controlling the stream of images, I will be able to throttle the frequency of posts put on Twitter. Before, I depended on IFTTT and didn’t have any control of the content. As a result, the current bot functionality overwhelms many user’s timelines.
The ability to leverage the exposure opportunity from Twitter is important. Until now, I have been receiving 30-100 daily favorites/replies/retweets on twitter. The majority of users are surfacing through search queries related to street art or graffiti. These users are not going to follow my account through twitter, but are likely to click a link with a photo.
The real value here is targeting Google. I’m leverage the images to capture the long tail of Google search traffic for small and mid tier graffiti artists. I’m going to be attempting to present the images in individual web pages. Using the existing tags and geo data, I will generate content to gain Google’s attention. This is a unknown field for me.
My name is Lenny Bogdonoff and I’ve been working on a platform for graffiti and street artists to showcase their work online. Think Wikipedia for graffiti artists. During the day, I am a software engineer for the New Yorker magazine.
I joined Orbital after I read Gary’s blog posts titled “On Self-Sufficiency.” The post discusses the importance of financial sustainability in personal and entreprenuial endeavors. Immediately, I wanted to join his Entrepreneurial Design class and complete his assignments. Not too long after, Orbital began.
I applied without a exact project to work on, but a clear expectation of the value I would gain in the process. Until now, I have accumulated a long list of uncompleted side projects. I use side-projects as a way to learn something new. I came into Orbital with two potential projects, but without any particular reason to work on one over the other. I decided to work on the project that I was more passionate about. I painted graffiti for over 8 years, so I decided I wanted to give my self a way to contribute back to the graffiti community.
Orbital became a reason to work on a side-project to its completion. I started out working on a mapping service. The focus was to help graffiti artists coordinate their painting expeditions without getting caught. I was thinking a mobile-Google Docs for localized maps.
Instead, each week, I made something completely different. I started out with a portfolio for graffiti artists. Then I started making a way to find all best painting spots of a city. Then I started a weekly graffiti email newsletter. And then I made a competitive game for people to identify the artists of a graffiti piece. The list goes on, but each of these projects was not wasted effort.
I adjusted my targeted audiences, recognized assumptions, built micro communities, selectively accepted advice, and made many new friends. I eventually settled on working on the project I am working on now, a graffiti artists showcase tool. **I discovered many things – mainly I discovered what I don’t enjoy doing. **My current idea will transition again. I’m almost sure of it. Regardless, one thing is very certain. I’ve deepened my own intuition by knowing where I stand in the realm of graffiti and the Internet.
I know clearly what I know to be true, based on my experience exploring the graffiti community in the way that I did. I’ve developed a deeper insight about where I will be investing my effort, based on my own awareness of the potential growth. Before, I was pursuing experiments based on not having a reason not to. I was confident I would learn more from trying out an idea than to intellectually conceive of reasons for or against it.
Now, I’m working on the project that I want to and can sustain. I discovered in the end, my own sustainability is the most important thing.