In academia, text (and lots of it) is the only way serious people make serious arguments, and very polished presentations are often seen as prima facie evidence that the presenter may be hiding a weak argument with graphic frou-frou.

The visual aesthetics that frame and define content are much more than simply a "skin" that we can apply or discard without consequence. Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view.

Lots of great people doing extraordinary work. Lots of little mountains to climb to get where they hope to go. More on that later. But in the meanwhile, I've posted the slides and audio from my public presentation on ''Considering the Creative Ecology,'' which worked to interweave some thoughts on complex ecosystems with the conversations I had heard and facilitated in town.

The foolishness of alienating customers -- audiences -- should be obvious, but the boards and management of arts groups also need to respect their artists. The people who make theater or music or dance are not minimum wage employes who can be downsized in the dark of night. Assuming we want artists in our midst, we must engage them when difficult decisions have to be made, and give them a stake in our cultural future. They may even have some fresh ideas on how to save a buck.... Money may be short, but mutual respect and good judgment costs nothing.

A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialization.... Most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management: librarians are responsible for organizing books on the shelves, newspaper executives are responsible for deciding what goes on the front page. In these cases, the scarcity of the resource itself creates the need for a professional class -- there are few libraries but many patrons, there are few channels but many viewers.

• Their full-time focus on the craft, rather than part-time avocation;
• their entrepreneurial spirit, and focus on the business elements of advancing their careers;
• their continuing quest for improvement and excellence;
• their study of other photographers toward the goal above;
• their individual and unique aesthetic style;
• their technical capacity to achieve excellence with fluidity and speed;
• their passion for the art form -- shown in both a compulsion to create without being paid, and the ability to extract a significant fee for their work.

Sometimes, though, the professional outlook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have the most at stake -- the professionals themselves -- from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession.

Social enterprises...often don't fit neatly into existing ownership structures. Those that register as nonprofits have trouble tapping private capital to expand, while for-profit companies risk compromising their missions because they must put shareholders' returns first. But growing interest in hybrid business models has spurred recent efforts at the state level to create new corporate structures that allow entrepreneurs to integrate nonfinancial goals into for-profit businesses.

• Attendance at the most popular types of arts events -- such as art museums and craft/visual arts festivals -- saw notable declines. Even those most inclined to attend arts events in past years -- college-educated adults -- are participating less than before.
  
• Between 1982 and 2008, attendance at performing arts such as classical music, jazz, opera, ballet, musical theater, and dramatic plays has seen double-digit rates of decline.
• Fewer adults are creating and performing art. Only the share of adults doing photography has increased.

...if we're going to someday build a new kind of economy based less on durable goods -- the old housing-auto, fordist industrial complex so to speak -- and more around experiences, personal development, new technology-based and creative industries, the massive slashing of entertainment spending does not bode well for the longer-run.

You'll need to decide who is doing the Tweeting for your organization.  Will you set up one flagship account and have one or more staff members tweet from that account?  Or will you have an organizational account but also encourage staff to Tweet as well?

1. What compelling reason exists for people to give you money? (or votes or donations)
2. How do you acquire what you're selling for less than it costs to sell it?
3. What structural insulation do you have from relentless commoditization and a price war?
4. How will strangers find out about the business and decide to become customers?

1. We create work that people are passionate about, and want to experience -- or want their friends, neighbors, children, or great-grandchildren to experience.
2. We don't and we can't (nonprofits are designed, after all, to deliver goods and services at below their total cost). So we access revenue beyond the traditional market in the form of gifts, grants, and subsidies (while we also reduce our costs through volunteers, low wages, deferred maintenance, and number shuffling).

The question of what we can and can't see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There's no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People.

Put that way, it's obvious: if search engines set the public agenda, they should be public. What's not obvious is how to make such a thing.

Just as we would question an editorial or curatorial system with one or only a few decision-makers at the helm, he suggests that we should also question the absolute power afforded Google and its peers. The processes and rules by which these systems rank pages in their results has massive implications for the way traffic and attention flows around the web. Yet, the algorithms that drive these results are closely held and continually changing.

It's a direct connection to the role (and responsibility) of the expert or gatekeeper in any knowledge system -- whether for public information, news, or artistic content. We can all celebrate the flood of information and opportunity the web has brought. But we should also continue to question the filters that support or deflect our discovery.

I would certainly question any government's or organized public agency's ability to provide search and filtering that's both transparent and productive. But there seems to be a need for at least some transparency in the flow of such public information.

People give you money because you know how to solve problems. Not because you move email around and respond to things that go "DING!"

Now, in honor of Mr. Mann, I suppose I should get back to my productive work.

It was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity ... it was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.