Online Communities for Creative People

This article will be published in the forthcoming edition of TEN4 magazine.

One of the Internet’s biggest success stories in recent years has been the rise and rise of online communities – sites that allow anyone, technically able or not, to communicate with each other and publish their own content.

Many of these websites centre on people expressing their creativity through photography, art, writing, or anything that can be represented in digital form. As well as helping people market their work, it’s also helping them improve their skills by giving them an opportunity to exhibit, showcase and discuss their work with a community of peers.

Online communities are becoming increasingly valuable across the creative spectrum. Stories of musicians achieving fame through MySpace have already become journalistic clichés – but in the last six months a similar phenomenon has begun in other disciplines.

Just over a year ago, Rebekka Guoleifsdottir was teaching herself how to use her first camera. She started posting on the photographic community site Flickr.com, and within a year her photostream had attracted 1.5 million visitors, making it the most viewed of all 4 million members.

Over in film and TV, the gigantic response to David Lehre’s web film MySpace: The Movie provoked a frenzy of Hollywood agents clamouring to represent the amateur filmmaker.

And slightly closer to home, writer Zoe Margolis was recently outed as the true identity of Abby Lee, who shot to fame after extracts from a blog detailing her true-life sexual adventures were published as a bestselling book.

We’re going to start hearing stories like this more and more often. However, you don’t have to become world famous to find success with online communities. They’re all about allowing people to publish content they’ve made, discuss and connect with other people.

Most communities are tailored to a particular type of content. For example, YouTube.com is currently the most popular video sharing site. At a basic level it allows members to upload their own videos, which are then accessible by anyone who visits the site. Videos can be discussed and rated, so that over time the best content floats to the top.

If the producer finds other people doing similar work, he or she can start a ‘group’ where fellow filmmakers can post related work and discuss style, content and inspiration. And ‘tags’ or keywords can be added to videos to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Most other communities work in a similar way to YouTube, but use other types of content as their main focus. Flickr is the community of choice for photographers, and is one of the most developed creative communities around at the moment.

Animation sites are a little less developed (partly because so much is posted on YouTube) but NewGrounds.com and AlbinoBlacksheep.com are good places to start. A handful of visual art communities also exist – such as DeviantArt.com and GFXArtist.com – but style and quality can vary so it’s worth scouting the site before you join. 

Then of course there’s the ubiquitous MySpace.com which lets you do pretty much anything, but until now has been the most popular site for building communities around music. MySpace is probably worth joining just because of the sheer number of people signed up to it – but it’s a badly built system, and is beginning to slip out of fashion.

On a slightly different tack, the site LinkedIn.com is a great tool purely for connecting with new people, while the more business-oriented Ecademy.com is helpful for forging professional connections – although it does charge for membership.

It’s also worth ditching your browser’s bookmarking system and using the site deli.cio.us – that’s actually the web address – to store all your useful links. Whenever you bookmark an interesting page, it can tell you who else has added the same page, useful for finding new sites as well as meeting like-minded people.

A local case-study: Emily Quinton is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham. Her specialism is biodiversity and the illegal trade in wild flowers. But after tapping an unexpected reservoir of interest in her work through Flickr, she’s now also working as a photographer.

“Photography has been a hobby of mine for a few years, but I’d never taken photos in any serious capacity,” she admits. “A year ago I signed up to Flickr so I could upload some pictures of a friend’s wedding, and as an experiment added a few botanical photos I’d taken as part of my research.“

“The feedback was good, so I started to take more photos and upload them,” she goes on. “I couldn’t believe how quick the process was – I could have an idea, take the photo, process and exhibit it all within an hour or two. It got a bit addictive, and before long I was producing and uploading new work almost every day.”

Skip forward three months, and Emily’s photostream had become a success. It had been visited over 13,000 times, and she was getting a lot of good feedback. What’s more, people were starting to ask if they could buy her work.

Spurred on by the success of her Flickr stream, Emily set up a company which she now runs part-time alongside her academic work. As well as photographic commissions she makes products from her work which she sells both locally and internationally through her website. At least half of the website traffic comes through Flickr.

Emily is adamant that she would never have become a photographer if it wasn’t for Flickr. “What’s amazing about the system is that it gives anyone a permanent exhibition space, where they can perpetually showcase new work,” she enthuses. “The better your work, the more people visit that space. Then if you need advice on how to improve your technique there are always other members who are willing to help.”

Obviously allowing other people to comment on your work can have its downsides. Negative feedback can be hard to take, and it definitely pays to be thick skinned. Even worse is content which is plain offensive or the unwanted interest of murkier members of the community, especially for female members who’ve posted self portraits. Fortunately it’s easy to delete messages that are inappropriate. Most communities are also pretty strict about banning those who act out of line.

Another core feature of most online communities is the ability to assign other members as your friends or contacts – leading to invaluable smaller networks within the larger umbrella. “When you find someone you like and want to see more good work, you should be guaranteed to find it in that member’s contacts,” reasons Emily. “This very quickly creates a web of high quality content, which is great for getting inspired.”

It also partly addresses the problem of the sheer amount of content on any community. Flickr has over 4 million users – more than the population of Wales. Most of them aren’t great photographers, so it’s important to be able to sift through the amateurs and find the high quality work.

Going down the online route means a fundamental change in the way career development pans out. Until now, most disciplines have had at least roughly established entry routes – nowadays these rules are gradually being thrown out the window. A new set of rules will be undoubtedly be established over time, but at the moment everything’s in a state of flux.

In the past, getting into TV or film inevitably meant starting off making the tea and working your way up. In the future, if you make a film which generates a big enough buzz on the web, you’ll get picked up by someone who wants to harness that talent. If that many people are into what you do they’d be crazy not to.

Of course over time competition will increase too, and you’ll be rubbing shoulders with other talent worldwide. Things aren’t necessarily going to get easier. But online communities are guaranteed to level the playing field – both for those living in geographically isolated places and for those keen to stay small and independent, and not sell out to the media moguls.

Online communities are not a fad: the principles that are slowly being developed now will form the basis of how creative people will work for years to come. As well as commissioners using the web to find new talent, we’ll also see more local, national and international collaboration. And without big companies guessing what we’re going to like next, niche, inventive and experimental work looks set to become more popular the world over.