The Fine Art Blog of Darren Daz Cox

Ok so I became the change I wanted to see in my local arts community.

I made a social network for the arts in Monmouth county (where I live) because our current options are pretty limited. When you have clip art or no art on an arts organization site it just shows how un-networked an arts site is especially when there are hundreds if not thousands of original local artworks out there.

I built a ning social network and now members can upload Mp3s,videos and pictures from their pcs or phones as well as directly from Youtube and Flickr and then get the pictures in a facebook application if they choose. All the usual things you’d expect in a social network like forums and blogs are there and this is just one days worth of tweaking.

I also bought monmoutharts.com to use as the url to simplify the process but am waiting for it to forward as ning requires an extra step in masking and forwarding. So here is a brief slideshow of my cat art from Flickr to Ning to here! Eventually this slideshow should contain cat art from artists across Monmouth county!
Find more photos like this on Monmouth Arts

**update** well, no one from the Monmouth NJ area joined the Ning site and the MCAC still hasn’t put much effort into social networking. The forums on the Monmouth County Arts Council are practically a ghost town with tumbleweeds blowing down the streets. You can see that I tried to start the one on one dialog that makes social networking so successful but social networking requires participation and the people working at the MCAC just don’t want to interact with the community online.

The MCAC website is still sporting a creatively (not) generic clip art banner, over a year after they first put it up, which, as an artist who paid my money to join, I find a little insulting. Why promote some clip art when you could could my art up there? Isn’t the point of the MCAC to foster creativity? The saddest thing is that they still haven’t figured out that dotnet nuke is too complicated for them and there are far far too many glitches to make their site look anything but sad. I told them this a long time ago and they didn’t listen and their site has not grown, and, not to be mean about it, more people find this art blog than their site when they search for their own name in Google. That’s not a boast it’s just the way social networking works if you do it right.

Mission

Think I’m just being mean? then take at a look at their artist registry! ONLY 31 people on their list and only 17 links to the artist’s personal websites, 17! This cheesy one man fine art blog has more links to local monmouth country artists than they do!

Red Bank New Jersey, home of the MCAC is not some tiny hick town, it’s the epicenter of culture on the NJ side of the New York suburbs. Bruce Springsteen is a regular around there (he donated money to save the historic Count Basie Theatre next door to the MCAC offices), Bon Jovi is from up the road, Jay and Silent Bob have their comic shop there. It’s a vibrant bustling very populated and rich area full of culture, practically no one is without a cell phone and most have the abilty to be involved in online social networking yet only 31 people are on their artist registry, and one of them is me!

The MCAC is hardly living up to it’s mission of fostering the arts when they can’t be bothered to recruit, and promote more than 31 people in an area where there are thousands of artists. Wake up MCAC!!!!!!

Originally posted 2008-05-11 15:18:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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