Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The eye's have it

Look at this eye catching montage posted by Pip in the One Million Masterpiece forums

Eye love the way you can compare the different drawing styles when looking at a single subject. Eye watering stuff. OK OK eye'll stop now...

I need some new pictures. Say cheese.

Yesterday was a bit quieter than I had anticipated. I spent much of the day on the plans for new features for the OMM plus a new homepage design. I thought we might hit 3,000 but we're still not there yet.

I also had to delete our first user this morning. This guy had made up all his details and had drawn an extremely offensive picture. In normal circumstances the image would be retained but obscured from view, however each account must have valid personal details for Guinness World Records to validate the attempt, therefore happily I could delete this guy without a seconds thought.

I also had a Myspace message this morning saying that I needed a new profile picture because my current one makes my head look squashed. Flattery will just get you everywhere! I just love being told that I'm unphotogenic (?) first thing in the morning.

Well sir, your email actually coincides with a requirement for some new photos for a local newspaper, therefore I will actually be changing it in the very near future. Watch this face.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Yes, we can hit 2,000

We easily reached the 2,000 mark on Friday night. Friday was our best day in terms of traffic with over 16,000 page impressions. Things fell back a little during the weekend but I'm sure we'll be knocking at the door of 3,000 registrations today or tomorrow.

The surge in members have left a lot to do. Firstly, the last few days have actually been a very successful test. We're going to be lifting the minimum donation shortly to enable free sign-up. This has major implications for how this project is funded and how it will raise money for charity, and how the technology works. For example, until now we have been soft on people that have left a blank square, but in future they will have a strict deadline before they are booted out.

I've also received more emails over the weekend with offers of help. In making sign-up free we are going to need all the support we can get from the community so I really appreciate these emails so keep sending them in. There are loads of things that people can do so don't be afraid to ask.

My favorite addition from the weekend:

Friday, September 22, 2006

Can we hit 2,000 tomorrow?

Wow, so we blasted through 1,000 yesterday, but now I'm thinking we're going to make 2,000 just 48 hours later.

Sign-ups have stormed ahead today, currently standing at 1,693, and at this rate we should definitely top yesterdays new additions. I can't get too excited though, we are still way behind our daily target but at least we're moving in the right direction.

Yesterday we did 10,914 page views and 1,920 unique visitors. Today I reckon we're just going to beat that, mainly because of a link from somethingawful.com and dirty.ru. Both sound really negative but they weren't, promise!

One million is A LOT

Damn, one million is a lot of people. We hear the word so often nowadays that it's lost it's impact. In my early conversations with people about the One Million Masterpiece project I got a lot of "hey, you'll get one million in a few days" or "maybe you should make it the five million". I knew they were talking crap, which is why I set myself a year. Most people thought a year was too long, but I certainly don't.

Let's do the math. We have 292 days remaining and 998,414 people left to find. That's 3,419 per day or 142 per hour or 2ish per second. That's a lot of people. We've started to make some good progress with a new strategy. Yesterday we recorded 716 new artists and I'm hoping we might top that today - but it's still some way off the 3,419 daily target we need. Plus for every day we don't hit that target, the target gets bigger.

In the past people would say "nobody said it would be easy", but in this case everybody said it would be easy. Don't you just love proving people wrong!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Finally, we've reached the 1,000 mark

Switched on my computer this morning to a pleasant surprise. All the hard work that Susaye and I put in yesterday paid off and the OMM membership finally broke the 1,000 mark last night. I guess it wasn't such a surprise as I was hoping that it would over night - knowing that most of the deviantArt users are based in the US.

More users means more email invitations flooding out which is a very good thing. One concern that Eamonn raised was that a large amount of our outbound mail is being spam filtered, so we really need to get someone to look at that. If you know anything about the technicalities of email please let me know!

Today I'll be spending much of my day on administration and catching up on things that I've promised people. The last few days I've been working intensely on the Schools Programme we intend launching, and the funding behind it, and so I literally haven't seen the light of day.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

deviant Ambassadors

I want to thank Susaye who's been working with me on getting all you lovely deviant artists helping us out over at the OMM. You guys are ambassadors because you know your digital art, but don't forget that this project is for all abilities. We need you to send out ecards and invitations to everyone you know - artistic or not - and twist their arm to join.

Thanks guys, and thanks yet again Susaye!

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Change of server - please update links

One of the reasons for a lack of posts recently has been Blogger, and its frequent inability to ftp new posts to my server. I've finally given up and moved over to blogspot hosting, so the new address for my blog is http://www.thepaulfisherblog.blogspot.com.

This does mean that I loose my Google PR4, plus my rankings in Technorati have dropped. I'm gutted about this, so please update any links you might have posted to this site!!!

BTW just found a great picture on the OMM, thought I'd drop it in.

Website down, media calling

What a miserable day. Started off with a big press release going out about the easyBully story, and how we're increasing the security of the website to prevent abuse. Just as it hits the shelves at around 8am the site goes down for some unexplained reason.

Apparently it was off line between 7am and 9am, but was on and off until at least 12pm. I had a few newspapers call, and it was extremely unhelpful not to be able to show them round the site.

So I ended up canceling my entire day to sort out the problems that this outage had caused, and now I'm knackered.

At the moment my four main focuses are

1) The Schools Programme, which requires grant funding (a very long process).

2) Visual projection of the image in London as it's developing. Again involving funding, plus negotiations with the site owner.

3) Marketing. We're finishing off a round of local PR, and some more viral marketing plus general PR work. I'm sick of celebrities and have completely given up on them for the time being.

4) Website developments - of which there are zillions. Eamonn came up with some more good ideas today which I want to expand on when I meet him on monday. I also keep getting emails with good ideas so lots to work on.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Two interesting incidents – explicit content censorship

Two interesting censorship issues have occurred over the last two months. As an arts project and something that is trying to represent global society, The One Million Masterpiece should be a censorship free zone. That's the way I always envisaged it - if someone wants to draw about a subject then it's a valid viewpoint of this world - good or bad.

However, that just won't wash. We're planning to take this project in to schools from January and there can be zero risk that kids will see anything remotely controversial.

There are already a few systems on the site that protect against explicit content, but recently we've had two breaches. First up was a guy who drew a female nude in an uncompromising position – think of an anatomical sketch that wouldn't be out of place on the men's toilet wall. This is an easy one. The image is marked as adult, and therefore obscured from view on the public website. The image is safe and will be printed in the final artwork, however it cannot be seen by anyone other than the artist.

The second one has been more controversial and involves possible copyright infringement and slander!

Philip Stone recently amended his image from a rather innocuous easyBully (in reference of UK based easyGroup's court cases) to easyC**t. Obviously a massive swing on the offensiveness scale.

Again, our moderators picked this up pretty quickly (in under 15 minutes) and the picture was obscured, but we did receive some complaints. Philip should have marked his image as adult in nature, but he failed to, which led to its publication on the main site.

This is going to be a recurrent issue. When you're dealing with large numbers of people, artistic integrity, freedom of expression and charitable fundraising there will be some flash points. We're already beefing up the security controls in preparation for our Schools Programme but will continue to work on a solution that will keep everyone happy

Monday, September 04, 2006

The ups and downs of website traffic

Time for a review of how the The One Million Masterpiece has been performing traffic wise.

After the initial boom created around launch, primarily off the back of the BBC online coverage, there was a steady decline. Of course there was - because this is a totally new website with very few supporting links. At that time (we're talking the end of July) we had around 10 inbound links, which any SEO pundit will tell you is low. However, these links were all from the big boys (BBC, The Times etc) so Google responded by giving us a generous PR4 within a few days. Nice.

So traffic from these sites has slowly declined, but as that has happened we've been gaining more and more inbound links. As of today the number stands at 782, which is pretty good going. The vast majority of these have been project members posting messages about the website all over the place, and this has had the effect of generating a really stable upward traffic trend.

Within the past few days traffic has ramped up yet again. It looks like this has been caused by links at Blueyonder and Wikipedia, plus a posting at bored.overnow.com which obviously receives far more traffic than I would have assumed.

We're still looking for a break-through on the really big sites, but I'm confident that we're on the right track. People keep asking me whether I'm worried that we wont reach the one million target, but at the moment I'm pretty relaxed. We've got a Schools Programme coming out in January that will make the project accessible to 250,000 kids, plus a range of new features that have only just been implemented which will make viral and word-of-mouth marketing much more powerful.

So we're still plugging away. Loads of things to do as usual, and just not enough time in the day!

Meet Matthew, my brother

Big thank you to my brother Matt who made this video for the website. I just found it by chance shortly after he'd uploaded it.

Friday, September 01, 2006

You're a star... seriously

The great think about a big charity project is that it attracts really great people who want to help out. Some really interesting proposals and offers have dropped through my inbox over the past few weeks ranging from some excellent exhibition venues to pr help.

One interesting email this morning was from Jonathan at StellarNight. He is part of a new website that is creating a night's sky of links to high quality web content. Very kindly, he has added the OMM as a very prominent star for free simply because he really likes the concept. Big thank-you Jonathan.