Featured Blogs…something new

Over the past few weeks I have been work­ing on cre­at­ing ways to fea­ture Artists and their blogs in a way that encour­ages them to grow. Two of the ways I have come up with are

• Adding a fea­ture blog
• Hold­ing con­tests built around learning

How­ever, I have been stew­ing about the “How” details want­ing to make it “just right” before I launched it. As all to often hap­pens when we get stuck “chas­ing our tails” some­thing unex­pected shows up to snap us out of our end­less chase.

Well, that some­thing hap­pened recently when I exceeded 400 Twit­ter fol­low­ers. The per­son who put me over the mark was so elated that I vis­ited her blog. I came away inspired about her ded­i­ca­tion to sup­port­ing what I have come to call “Open Source Art” the every­day efforts of ordi­nary folks to touch their cre­ativ­ity. I decided then and there that I would start my Fea­tured Blog with her and con­tinue it when­ever I came across an art blog that sup­ported and fur­thered not only the act of cre­ation but also rec­og­nized the need to honor it.

At his point I have no set cri­te­ria for decid­ing but I will be look­ing at basic things like:

• Design
• Con­tent
• Con­nect­ed­ness
• Pur­pose

What a fea­tured blog gets

Each Fea­tured blog will receive:

• A fea­ture arti­cle –The arti­cle will fea­ture my impres­sions of the blog and why I picked it.
• A book­mark on Digg,StumbleUpon,Reddit and any oth­ers they would like
• A tweet — sent out when the arti­cle is pub­lished plus  spe­cial #fol­lowfri­day list­ing and addi­tion to the #fea­turedart­blog listing
• A cus­tom wid­get — A wid­get sim­i­lar to the one now at the top of the sec­ond side­bar col­umn that will be ded­i­cated to their posts. The wid­get will be placed in cir­cu­la­tion within the Wid­get­Box gallery which will give the blog wider circulation.
• A link from this site — An inbound link to help build cred­i­bil­ity and readers
• Other sur­prises — A grab bag of unknown (even to me) things that may be added.

Nom­i­nat­ing a blog

I have been assem­bling a list of blogs to fea­ture I also want to give oth­ers the abil­ity to nom­i­nate blogs. For now the sim­plest way to nom­i­nate is to use the com­ment form below, enter the fol­low­ing basic info

• Blog’s name
• A link to the blog using its’ URL (the http:// web address)
• Owner/Author’s name
• Brief descrip­tion of why you think the blog should be featured.