A friend suggested I update my blog. I’ve been tweaking my news consumption and checking out some new websites recently. For example …

News
Has anyone else out there tried news.me yet? I like it for two reasons:

1) I follow lots of people on social media to keep abreast of arts trends, innovation and reports. What they are reading is often of greater interest than their 140-character re-cap.

2) Usually, I wake up at 6:00am to have coffee and read things. If it were the old days, I’d have a newspaper. A lot of the arts reading is scholarly, statistical stuff that doesn’t lend itself to 5-minute consumption on an iphone during a work break.

News.me is a paid service, which will turn some people off. I really don’t care. Most of what I learn from news.me is arts-industry news. It’s continuing education and if you look at it that way 99 cents is a good deal.

I also like everyblock for hyper-local news about the area where I work (western SoMa) and live (Noe/Bernal).

Websites
I discovered the Andy Warhol Foundation Warhol Initiative Convening website las week and love it. Normally, I don’t have strong feelings about other arts websites … in fact, I’ve been looking at political websites lately to get ideas about enrollment and to seek out innovation.

There are lots of  smart, elegant details in the Warhol site, such as: contact info in the upper right; search engine at the top of the page; blog scroll at the bottom of the page; Project Connect; and a nifty map. It’s clearly designed for a convening.

Many arts websites look cool, but few carry it through to attention to detail: navigation, structure, embodiment of one’s mission. I’m married to a designer and that stuff is daily conversation in our household so it was a breath of fresh air to see a great new arts site.

Another feed added to my rss reader is Summer of Smart, a collaboration between Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the San Francisco Department of Technology, and many others. I’m a sucker for anything remotely smart that connects arts participation with community-building. Bonus points for political engagement. Summer of Smart has all of this and more. For example, this video of our SF mayoral candidates answering the question “What does open government mean to you?”