I discovered the Whole Earth Catalog when I was at college and working in a small independent bookstore in Brighton in the UK. The catalog was originally published in 1968 and contained a wealth of information from books to tools to classes and beyond. It had a joyful DIY, countercultural feel and every page contained huge amounts of amazing ideas. I discovered Buckminster Fuller through Whole Earth and immersed myself in his ideas about “whole systems.”

Whole Earth had a profound influence on many technologists. People have described it as a kind of pre-internet internet. Steve Jobs called Whole Earth one of the bibles of his generation, “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues have shaped many aspects of our contemporarty digital world, inspiring the birth of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) and WIRED magazine. As Tim O’Reilly says, “A huge amount of the O’Reilly sensibility, a mix of practicality and idealism, was learned from the Whole Earth Catalog. And of course, the Whole Earth Catalog is one of the wellsprings of the modern DIY movement, for which Make: magazine is now carrying the torch.”

The sections of the catalog included industry and craft, communications, and community, all ideas that continue to inspire us at Shooting People as filmmaking moves into the world of Web 2.0. In this spirit we have launched our new TOOLS blog where we will continue the fine tradition of communicating and sharing resources with each other. It’s not quite as nice as the Whole Earth Catalog to hold in your hands but I hope that it will be useful nonetheless.

Interesting post I just stumbled upon (and I mean this literally, I wasn’t using StumpleUpon!) on Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog. He has posted an email he received from a filmmaker who is finding it very difficult to make a living in long tail land and who argues that it benefits big companies and consumers but that small producers are still struggling to survive:

Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER. But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom. Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.

It feels like niche markets and the tools of Web 2.0 are ideal for small producers but how does everything add up? I would love more stats on this stuff. Anybody know where to find them?

I mentioned Lance Weiler’s Workbook Project in an earlier post but I forgot to put a link to this article from the Winter 2007 edition of Filmmaker Magazine. It has lots of tips from Weiler on setting up websites, syndicating content, increasing your Google rating and links to some useful sites you may not already know about. It’s an inspiring article because as Weiler says: “In the end, there is no one right way to distribute or market your film. But if making Head Trauma has taught me one thing, it’s not to lose the sense of empowerment experienced during the production of a film when you get to the distribution phase. With the new tools of the Web you do not have to be powerless once you finish.”

I was having a browse on the always interesting London-based bigshinything website and rediscovered this video about Web 2.0 – I know it’s been around for a while and the music is just a tad irritating but it’s a nifty little examination of what is happening online.

Bigshinything also have a post which talks about a possible MySpace/Facebook class divide that is very interesting although the whole “hegemonic/subaltern” vocabulary is bringing back my academia-rash! The issue of how divisions and inequalities in the offline world get manifested online is an important one. The research in Danah Boyd’s essay is a little tenuous and incomplete, as she herself admits, but it’s good food for thought.