There needs to be an easier way of selling on etsy. Their posting form is way too long. There's a total of 14 fields to fill out.

-- Who made it?
-- Categories
-- Photos
-- Item Title
-- Description
-- Shop section
-- Recipient
-- Occasion
-- Style
-- Tags
-- Materials
-- Price
-- Quantity
-- Shipping

Seriously. 14 fields. I know these are all important to help people find your work. But really. I just want to simply post stuff. Let me post a photo, a title, and a price. DONE. If I want to add more stuff, then let me add it later.

In fact, it should be so easy I should be able to do it via my cell phone. With an experience as easy as Instagram. I guarantee you, if someone comes out with a super-easy way to sell stuff with your cell phone, it will become wildly popular.

(btw, this item is for sale on etsy, "Difficulty of selling")

Looking for a teapot in the Prairie School Style? Good luck. I was looking to buy my girlfriend a teapot for her birthday. She lives in Oak Park the Prairie School center, and she likes that style. I looked high and low for a teapot that is sorta like a Frank Lloyd Wright style. Or even in a bauhaus style.

Along the way I learned some lessons about teapots.

1) There are tea pots and there are tea kettles
You do not put tea pots on the stove top. You put tea kettles on the stove top to heat up the water, and then you pour the water into a tea pot to brew the tea. Who knew?!

From here on out in this post, I will call it tea kettle, because that's what I was really looking for. Something to heat water on the stovetop.

2) The best tea kettles don't have a seam on the bottom
The stainless steel tea kettles that have the wall perpendicular to base are bad. Those involve having a seam. The seam will rust or be hard to clean. The best tea kettles have a rounded curve where the wall meets the base.

3) Enamel tea kettles are better than raw stainless steel
According to many tea kettle reviewers on Amazon, stainless steel might rust. (Which blows my mind, cuz I thought stainless steel didn't rust). Enamel is better. But then, some reviews for enamel tea kettles said the enamel might flake off. I like the look of stainless steel better, so I went with that.

4) There are no Frank Lloyd Wright style tea kettles
They simply do not exist. Please, find one and prove me wrong.

5) Higher handles are good
Some handles on tea kettles get too hot and you have to use an oven mitt to hold the handle. That's dumb.

6) Low plastic handles are bad
You don't want the plastic to melt. That would be bad

7) Plastic covers on the blower-whistle part are bad
That can melt. And that would be bad.

8) Low heat tea kettles are a waste of time
Some tea kettles say that you have to put your tea kettle on a low flame. What? No. I want my water to boil and boil fast!

Ok, so to show how much research I did into both the form and the function of the tea kettle, here are the google searches I did over the course of five hours of research:

Christopher Dresser teapot
Danish Soholm Atelier Teapot
danish Teapot
do i put ceramic teapots on the stove?
frank lloyd wright tea
frank lloyd wright tea pot
frank lloyd wright tea pot -guggenheim
general electric tea kettle
globo teapot
Marianne Brandt tea
modern teapot
naoko teapot
Naum Slutzky tea
Naum Slutzky teapot
Object Creative - Tea
Otto Lindig
Otto Lindig teapot
russel wright teapot
russell wright teapot
Scandinavian teapot
soho teapot
Soholm Atelier Teapot
sorapot
Stelton Potter Tea Pot
Storia Teapot
Storia Teapot, Herman Kahler
tea kettle
tea kettle amazon
teapot design
teapot hello-tiger
toast indian teapot
walter gropius
walter gropius tea

Here's some nice tea kettles on my Modern Tea Kettles pinterest board. Do you have a tea kettle? If so, what type do you have?

We consume a lot. But what do we do with it? I explore these thoughts in a post, "3 keys to doing something with what we consume" on my blog about syndication.

Last week I met someone online that will be attending a conference with me on May 1 for Eloqua. We exchanged contact info via email, and it got me thinking about how when I meet him in person and I'll give him my business card, which will seem redundant, but also kinda, cuz it's an actual physical object.

When exchanging the real business card, can there be something extra that adds to the sensory experience? I'm thinking a cupcake.

Do you tell any online services where you are currently are? Foursquare, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook Places?

What happens when a service aggregates all the locations of your friends into one service? Find out at "Where are your friends?" on my blog about syndication.

The Art institute of Chicago has this thing on their website where you can browse all their artwork. You can even make collections of their artworks to show to other people!

Last week a chicago twitter account @badatsports asked, "Who else do we need holograms of?" So I made a collection of artworks at the Art Institute that should be made into holograms. Check it out! artic.edu/aic/collections/my/hologram-requests-spudart/17037. I'm looking forward to the potential to do other fun things with collections on the art institute website.

Maybe the Art Institute will be excited to see someone use the collection feature. Then maybe someone at the art institute will find it so funny, they will print it out and hang it up at the art institute water cooler. Thus making my collection into an official work of art.

If there are any artworks you'd like me to add to this collection, let me know in the comments!

Did you know the great third baseman Luis Salazar of the 1989-1992 Chicago Cubs also played for the 1984 Padres? The despised 1984 Padres that beat the beloved Cubs in the 1984 playoffs. Luis Salazar even played three games in those playoffs against the Cubs. Here's how he did:

Game 2: Hitting 7th, 3B, 0-for-3, 1 K

-- Top 2nd, Padres behind 0-1
Strikeout swinging for 3rd out with one man on, against Steve Trout
-- Top 5th, Padres behind 1-4
Flyball to RF for 2nd out against Steve Trout
-- Top 7th, Padres behind 204
Flyball to RF for 3rd out against Steve Trout

Game 4: Luis Salazar pinch hits for Kevin McReynolds (CF) batting 6th, 0-for-1

-- Bottom 8th, Padres tied 5-5
Groundout: 3B-1B for 2nd out against Lee Smith

Game 7: Luis Salazar replaces Bobby Brown playing CF batting 6th, 1-for-1 triple

-- Bottom 8th, Padres head 6-3
Triple to CF leadoff against Warren Brusstar
Caught stealing home

I'd like to see what happened when he tried stealing home. He was caught during the next batter, so there were no outs with him on third.

My twin brother Erik is writing a blog post about Luis Salazar's 1984 Donruss baseball card:

On the Grand Moff wookieepedia page, there is an ad for Huggies diapers. I love seeing Huggies diapers next to the Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin of the Death Star.

If you want to buy a bunch of baseball cards from one seller online, where do you go? Checkoutmycards.com has lots of great sellers of cards. But you probably don't want to pay shipping from multiple sellers. You want one seller. You want two things. 1) A large inventory 2) Cheap prices

I took the top ten sellers on checkoutmycards.com and did a test with them using Matt Kemp. I looked up how many Matt Kemp cards they have and what were their cheapest Matt Kemp cards.

Joel's Hit Show not only had the most cards, but they were the cheapest as well.

Name of shop	cost of cheapest card	# of Matt Kemp cards	Average price of 12 cheapest cards	median price
JoelsHitShow	$0.22	55	$0.27	$0.25
cardsrus1	$0.20	7	$0.40	$0.45
buymore	$0.49	4	$0.49	$0.49
samjams3	$0.20	16	$0.90	$0.55
Highgradeplus	$0.50	6	$0.61	$0.60
Rookies_n_Jerseys	$0.24	22	$0.64	$0.62
baseballcardsetc	$0.39	8	$0.78	$0.63
TSJCT	$0.34	21	$1.29	$1.17
eaglescards	$0.90	8	$3.29	$3.50
SwagCards	$1.25	35	$5.58	$3.75

Do you have a favorite place to shop for baseball cards online?

---

You'll enjoy more posts about baseball cards:

• Backs of famous baseball cards
• Critique of Dick Perez's Grover Alexander painting
• The crazy backgrounds of Donruss Diamond Kings
• Fold a baseball card to create excitement
• $500 for one pack of baseball cards
• Questions for Topps and Beckett Media
• Best baseball card shop online
• The aesthetics of baseball autographs

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The clouds were moving very fast yesterday. I took eight shots--normal exposures, each about 30 seconds apart. Then I brought each photo into one photoshop file as a layer. Each layer got its own hue. And then each layer was set to color burn.

Even though the movement of the clouds isn't apparent, as I was hoping; the colors that came out are really neat. It's also cool how the NBC Tower got a very high contrast.



Here's one of the original eight photos:

Base stealers in baseball are the best. Sports highlights should show ballplayers stealing bases instead of hitting homeruns.

The greatest basestealer of all time, Rickey Henderson has his own autobiography from 1993, "Off Base: Confessions of a Thief." Given Henderson's arrogance, you'd think there would be some bad reviews of the book, but instead all four reviews on amazon give the book a perfect five stars.

I'd really like this book to be available on the Kindle, as I'm not buying print books anymore. Perhaps this will be the first time I'll buy a book, cut off the spine, and run it through our Xerox machine that makes PDFs.

I've been thinking a lot about how much I consume and how much I actually produce. I think my consuming-to-creating ratio is leaning too much on the consuming side and not enough on the creating side. Over on my blog about syndication, I give "3 keys to doing something with what we consume."

Walgreens writes some unrelevant posts on their wall. I am starting a project where I write silly responses on their wall. What sort of silly stuff am I writing? Find out on my Google Plus post, "Unrelevant Facebook posts?"

(if you can't see the post, then add me to your Google circles)

Three dance critics got together to talk about "The art of the critic" at the Chicago Cultural Center.
-- Zachary Whittenburg, Time Out Chicago
-- Laura Molzhan, Chicago Reader
-- Sharon Hoyer, New City

The three critics were all very interesting, in particular, Zachary Whittenburg of Time Out Chicago. I wrote an email to Zachary about several of the points he made during the panel discussion.

Zachary,

I enjoyed your participation at today's "the art of critique: a dance critics panel." (I attended a dance appreciator.) I would like to highlight some of my favorite parts of the talk--in particular the points that you made, along with some thoughts.

You made a wonderful point about the capitalism and academia in two worlds. You said that you are able to be in both worlds by taking different "containers of language to express my memory of the performance." (and then you went to explain how you wrote about the hip hop challenge as a sports column.) "Containers of language" is such a great phrase.

It was great how you were able to give body to tonight's discussion. At first I was afraid the panel was going to be only about the structure of critique. I had a feeling that there was going to be only a framework about the ins and outs of critique and the state of the dance world, but not about dance itself. Every time you gave actual examples of dance performances, it gave life and substance to the discussion. That really fleshed out the conversation and made it more real and relatable.

I also greatly appreciate your how a thread within your thoughts tonight was the need to understand the performers and choreographers' history, progress and vocabulary. It shows that you truly go into performances understanding where you are coming from and where the dance is coming from in order for you to give clear assessments and interpretations.

One point you made about the media world being too concerned about the distribution models before the business models... While I see your overall point as being true... actually, newspapers were more concerned about the business model at first and thus they didn't get into the distribution model early enough. Once they got into the distribution model, it was too late to start charging money. So in a way, it wasn't because they considered distribution first before money. It was the money that prohibited them from even getting into the game early enough to start. (I've been working at the Tribune for 12 years). But I understand your point of how now we are backtracking trying to find methods of gaining revenue for the content online.

The panel briefly touched on youtube. I wanted to ask, but I didn't want to put anyone on the spot. But I'm wondering if anyone has considered doing dance critiques via youtube videos. And not just a talking head video. But have it include short quick, engaging videos of the dance. Dance is so immensely popular on youtube, it would be great to see some critiques take part in curating some of the dance on youtube.

You also brought up a very realistic point of view of the future of dance criticism. One thing I am excited about the future of dance and dance criticism, is that dance is such a basic expression. Even with naysayers of dance, there is still something very powerful about the expression of the human body. Dance will always be around. And with dance always being around, there will always be people who talk about dance.

Now I'm going to subscribe out your blog and make sure to read your writings in Time Out Chicago.

You can also find Zachary on twitter, @trailerpilot

Did you know your friends can pin stuff to your boards? Yeah! You can add contributors to specific boards on your pinterest.

Ideas on how to use collaborative boards on pinterest:

1) Research at work
Does your company want to share design research for a project? Make a board and then share it with your coworkers.

2) Gift ideas for parents
Looking for gift ideas for your parents? Enlist your family members to post ideas to a board.

3) Your neglected boards
Do you run out of time to pin stuff to particular topic areas? Enlist your friends to help!

4) Wedding ideas
Get your freinds and family involved in ideas for your wedding

5) Love board
Share a board with your mate and post cutesy things for each other.

6) All-star board
If you are able to get some people in your industry together to post things to a a board, you might end up with a really popular board that many others will follow.

7) Do it daily
Use 30 Days of Creativity as a model. Their idea is for people to create something every day for one month. They made 30 public boards, one for each day of the month.

8) Open projects
What project can you do that is open to the public where people can contribute? Maybe have people post photos of their favorite trees. Or make a "my favorite door" board where people can contribute.

Once you have collaborative boards, the comments feature on each pin becomes alive! Because you know your friends/coworkers have pinned that item on a board you are working on together, you are much more likekly to make comments.

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Just a side note. Right now I'm having some problems making my boards collaborative. On the board settings, there's an area for "Who can pin?" with the options of "Just Me" and "Me + Contributors" I click on the second option and enter a username, but I get an alert "Username not found." I've tried different usernames, and it still gives me the error alert.



Anyone having issues making contributor boards on pinterest?

I bought "Orange Happy Tree" from the artist Todd Webb. I really like Todd's work, it's very optimistic. Here's my message to Todd when I bought "Orange Happy Tree" on etsy.

Wooo! I saw your tweet about the goose, and I thought, "hmm, I wonder if todd has posted anything new in etsy for sale." And look! It's a tree! I like this one (well, I like all of them, but especially one) because the tree is looking down at his leaf.

OR maybe it's a leaf from another tree! We assume it's his leaf, but it might be another tree's! Anyways. I also like how the trunks all reach out in different directions. And the orange.

Trees in the fall are cool. I almost got the green tree, cuz his green foliage looks like a big afro. But since this one has the extra bonus leaf, I decided to go with this one.

matt

Last year I bought, Snowflake Mountain from Todd. He is one of my top five favorite artists from 2010. He draws one of the world's most wonderful comics. I HIGHLY recommend one of his books, "Casual Poet: the cartoon journals of todd webb."

Note: The green tree is still available! ("Sunset Happy Tree")

Art.sy has 15,000 works of art from over 3,000 artists represented by over 200 of the world’s most respected galleries and museums. They describe their site: The people behind art.sy are big peeps:
-- Sebastian Cwilich, a former executive at Christie's Auction House
-- Art.sy's Senior Advisor is John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-- Investor Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal
-- Investor Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter
-- Advisor Joe Kennedy, CEO of Pandora

The website invite only, and I got in! They have a feedback form, and last night I sent them 11 separate questions. Here's the archive of my questions:

How do I find specific galleries or museums on art.sy?

Can I sort the artwork for sale by price? I love collecting, but I don't have the deep pockets to pay $1000.

It is possible to share my art wall/collection with others?

When I click "View your collection on wall" Many of the image appear really small. As in, under 30x30 pixels.

Is there an iPad app in development for art.sy? Several reasons why art.sy would be a great fit for the iPad
1) I really enjoy browsing the site. The iPad is primarily a browsing device.
2) art.sy is very visual. The iPad makes visuals look stunning
3) Art-type people love apple.
4) The iPad is a higher end device, thus attracting a higher end audience. One that would be interested in the higher end quality of art.sy

Do my submissions automatically get emailed back to me? Reasons why form submissions on art.sy should be auto-emailed to the user:
1) When I get an auto-reply email with the contents of my email, it makes me feel like my submission actually got through.
2) I like to have a record of what I sent.

Do you keep track of what people search for on the site? I searched for a bunch of artists on the site that weren't on here yet. It might be cool for you to track what people are searching for and then fill in the gaps with the artists that people most frequently try to find.

For the artists I'm following:
1) Will I get notifications when there is new artwork on the website by them?
2) Will I get notifications when they are showing at particular museums?
3) If you establish "friends" on this site, can I get notifications when a friend of mine adds artwork from an artist that I like?

For the artists I like, but aren't on the site; can you make a waiting list for these artists? It would be cool to get a notification when a particular artist I like gets to be on art.sy.

Can I get alerts when new artwork for sale under $100 is added to art.sy?

As a member of art.sy, can I send invites to my friends? Everyone is so jealous that I got in!

I wonder if the art.sy people are freaking out because some guy sent them 11 different messages with questions. Then again, maybe they will appreciate my insight and hire me as a consultant to their site.

I like at-replying.

You ever get someone completely unrelated following you on twitter or facebook? I'll at-reply a ridiculous question to these people. Lately a car dealership started following me on Twitter. Yes. A car dealership.

Why a car dealer following me on twitter is completely ridiculous:

1) Who in the freaking world will want a car dealer to follow them? Please! Stay away! Stay away!
2) I don't own a GMC. MAYBE if I bought a car from that dealer, then I might follow that person, because there's a connection. But I don't own a GMC.
3) I don't own a car.
4) I never owned a car.
5) I don't plan on ever buying a car.
6) I think cars are a waste on our planet.
7) I think cars are a waste of money.
8) Cars ruin the way urban planning is done.
9) Because urban planning is ruined, our neighborhoods are ruined by not being as walkable.

Yeah, you can say I don't like cars. A car dealer following me on twitter is like the NRA following a democrat peace-lover.

So yeah, so I got a kick that @CastleBuickGMC was following me on twitter. Here's what I at-replied to them. I have to at least hand it to them that they did actually reply... and with a funny tweet at that.

word:
pinbombed

definition:
When someone pins many many pins of the same topic/theme to Pinterest, so it takes over the screen when someone looks through their feed.

example:
I just pinbombed 30 different photos of potatoes! All my followers will have to scroll through a potatoland field!

tags:
pinterest, pin, pinning, bomb, attack, a lot, many, quantity, excessive

first usage:


This word has never been used online in reference to pinterest. Surprising, since pinterest is the media's newest social media darling. Actually, Google only has 8 results for pinbombed.


Here's a sample pinbomb: