On branding

[chipotle]

Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech featured some thoughts from Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget et. al.) and Mahalo, on branding. Craigslist, the venerable classified ad service, blocked a site called Craigsfindr which searched all of the Craigslist sites at once. From Craigslist’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter that this is “adding value” to their website—they don’t want somebody scraping their data and taking it out of their sandbox, period.

This led to discussion of why, in the past decade, somebody hasn’t built something “better” than CL. One can argue that the Web 1.0-ness of Craigslist is a feature, not a bug, but it’s not hard to imagine genuine improvements to the searching and cataloging functions, not to mention the potential benefits of a (moderately) open API. So why hasn’t that happened? To do a rough transcript from the episode:

Jason: In order to get people to switch a service, it’s going to require hitting them somewhere between three and seven times with a marketing message, it’s going to require having a product which is 50%, 100% better. You can’t just make it 10% better. There’s zero switching cost, theoretically—you just type in a different domain name—but it means you have to market the heck out of it to displace it. If someone wanted to start “This Seven Days in Tech” and it was a show that was twice as good, it’s gonna take them a couple years to do it.

Leo: Thank God! […] Didn’t Tom Peters say that a product, to supplant another product, has to be not twice as good, not three times as good, but ten times as good as an established brand? You know what you have. Why take the chance unless I can see a significant improvement? And Craigslist does the job.

I couldn’t help but think about this in relation to some discussion I’ve been in on two friends’ journals recently, which those of you who read some of the same LiveJournals I do will have no doubt seen—the discussions about art archive sites. It was asserted that the “Big Brand” in our fandom isn’t very good. It isn’t: the software is slow, fragile and under-featured, and one might argue that spending $16K in donations on a new system with three single points of failure is, shall we say, sub-optimal. So why, my friends asked, aren’t better alternatives succeeding?

Honestly? I think Laporte and Calacanis nailed it. Here’s my own takeaway bullet points; visualize PowerPoint slides if it feels more Web 2.0 for you that way.

FA provided the right service at the right time: they took the deviantArt model of a gallery merged with social networking (home pages, blogs, comments, watch lists) and targeted it squarely at this fandom. It turned out a strong demand wasn’t being met. Whether or not you think FA met it well, before they started nobody else was meeting it at all. Yerf was dead, FurNation was in shambles, VCL remained state of the art for 1994, and dA was perceived as hostile.

But in barely more than a year, everything had completely changed; when you have no competition, going from zero to majority market share is easy. Anyone post-FA doesn’t have that opportunity. A “competing” site has to succeed at what Calacanis outlined above. Are any of them?

• “Significant” improvement is subjective, but the responses I saw suggested that by and large people didn’t feel the new sites were two or three—let alone ten—times as good as FA.

  • ArtSpots is, to me, the best gallery site both technically and in terms of “added value” service, but it’s made a conscious choice to limit its content in both form and rating. I don’t see this as a problem, but limits are limits. If you’re a writer, AS isn’t even under consideration; if you’re an artist who does both all-ages and mature work, you can just put it all on FA.

  • The wincingly-acronymed Furry Art Pile has an innovative approach to organization, but based on what people were saying in discussion, “different” isn’t translating to “better” for most people. It may not be translating to worse, either, but just being different isn’t good enough.

  • YiffStar has an art gallery in addition to their story archive, and they also have a second domain, AnthroStar, which essentially filters the porn out. (Did you know that? I didn’t either, but that goes with the next “slide” about marketing.) But there’s no compelling technical reason to switch from FA to YS; the gallery features seem less about expanding YS’s audience than about expanding the services for their existing audience. That’s a big audience, mind you, but so is FA’s—and my comments about FAP three bullet points down apply here, too.

• Back to Calacanis: “hit [the audience] with a marketing message” means getting a banner, an AdWords ad, a press release, something that makes the case for checking the site out in front of people’s faces, and “three to seven times” means just that: you can’t just do it once or twice, you have to keep doing it. You might object that in this fandom word of mouth is the real advertising, but two points. One, there are places to advertise just to the fandom, from web sites to con books. And two, if the discussion here or on tilton’s journal was the first time you’d heard of ArtSpots or FAP or AnthroStar, what does that say about their name recognition?

And last but not least, two personal observations:

• With the exception of YS, all of these sites—even FA—are comparatively new, and as outlined above, FA has a tremendous “first mover” advantage now. Even if FAP did everything right it would take years to build up significant mind share. And even though it’s doing some seriously cool technical stuff behind the scenes, FAP’s interface and marketing could both use work.

• FurAffinity has positioned itself as allowing erotica without explicitly (ha!) promoting it. By contrast, FAP says: hey, we know you’re really here for the porn, have a front page full of tags that sound a touch fetishy even when you’re not logged in and seeing the really “adult” stuff. Yes, I know that the audience for porn is huge—but from a marketing perspective, “we have everything including porn” trumps “we have porn and also clean stuff.”

So here’s the two million-dollar questions, figuratively speaking:

• What would a site have to offer to be better enough to get people to switch?

• What would be the best ways for that site to get sufficient name recognition to bring in the switchers?

Comments

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

That's the one thing I've been trying to say about ArtSpots for a while now. Back when it first started and folks were all excited, there was a lot of hype between early adopters as that year's FurtherConfusion approached. I went to the con expecting to see a small-but-notable marketing blitz: table banner, printed flyers, notes on bulletin boards, a sign, something. It was a rockin' concept and I figured once the word got out folks would flock to it.

Instead, I saw absolutely nothing about it at the con. Supposedly there was at least a little advertising, but nothing I ran into at least. Nor have I seen much attempt to market it since then, save for lots of livejournalling word-of-mouth during this FA kerfluffle.

As a techie, I really don't like the whole sales/marketing/business side of life. But even I recognize it's wickedly important. I still wonder how well AS, FAP or other sites would do if they gathered up a few donations and went on a marketing binge centered around a major convention or two...

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

At FC2008, ArtSpots had a table, banners, t-shirts, large buttons, flyers, and ran two events (including Iron Artist, with the banner prominently displayed behind.) There were also blurbs on bulletin boards, at several artists tables and in the art show. However, being on staff in the past, I know how hard it is to see things, some years not even getting into the dealer's room or the art show because of being stuck in a couple places through the whole con, so I don't blame you for not seeing them.

I've spent hundreds of dollars on adwords, but have discontinued that because of poor results and because ArtSpots SEO is top-notch. (do a search for 'lion sketch' sometime, one of many.) I've found targeted ads work better. (go read dandyandcompany.com and look under the comic.) Yes, I do track numbers of who creates an account and from what referrers.

AC2008, $800 was spent on the table and promotional materials, including a visible donation to the charity auction and a $500 art scholarship. I'm not including the flight and hotel, even though the only reason I went to AC was to promote ArtSpots. The 2-cents promotion is doing wonders for increasing comments, admittedly.

But what has all this done for AS? Jack. :) As Shockwave and krdbuni mentioned below, there's no reason to switch until a site has the same traffic as FA. So, nobody will switch until another site has the same people as FA. Catch-22? Yes, momentum is a bitch. :)

That's why prints are so important to ArtSpots, and why I'm starting to redirect the site towards other goals. At this point, I feel any more money spent on marketing than the thousands I have spent already would just be wasted on the fandom. There are other niches that are itching to be filled.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While this is a late response, one of my observations above is that FA filled its niche so completely that it's going to take a lot of time to "challenge" it in any meaningful fashion. I can understand the frustration with people not switching to better things when they're out there, but ArtSpots and FAP are InDesign to FA's QuarkXpress. Even when InDesign was getting better reviews and everybody was watching it and everyone more or less agreed Quark was loathsome, including Quark's customers, it took the better part of a decade for InDesign to really start making serious inroads By 2005, after having been on the market for seven years, InDesign had hit about a 20% market share.

You suggested below that 75% of the casual viewers and artists are congregated around FA. Suppose half of the remaining ones are congregated around ArtSpots, in less than two years. I would submit to you that your only "mistake" is in looking at that and saying that it's a mark of failure. By the measure of every other market I can think of with an upstart taking on a massively dominant brand, that qualifies as pretty damn good.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

IIRC, InDesign got traction over QuarkXPress when Quark sat on their thumbs for the OS9/OSX switch a few years too long. Maybe even to the point where you couldn't buy a machine that would let you boot into OS9. People are willing to hold onto an old OS for a little while if their One True Tool needs it, but after a while, the urge for New Hardware made them decide the sunk cost of "already knowing and owning Quark" versus the cost of having an ever-slower machine that couldn't run anything else wasn't worth it, and they blew a week on learning ID.

There's a bunch of Photoshop competitors. Some offer most of the functionality you'd actually use for as little as $30. But unless Adobe goes to great lengths to cripple PS, or let it grow obviously stagnant, it's going to stay on top.

When did FAP get some major mindshare? Two points. The 'cub porn' kerfuffle on FA, and the recent month-long downtime. FA stopped running and people went to the second-placer for their furry porn.

[megadog.livejournal.com]

As one who prefers his, ahem, erotica to be of the written form, the one killer-app for me would be a decent and flexible text search.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I'll take the 6 sigma position here; I'm far from the norm, even in furry.

Furry artsites are, for me, entertainment. They are a routine operation I do on my computer between playing a game and checking my email. As such, it's a force of habit where I go and what I do. Such habits are hard to break.

I LIKE FA's organization. I LIKE their interface. I log in, and anything new by my favorites is available with one click of a button. If I want to see the most recent art of everyone, again, one click of the button. If I want to see just a single artist, it's two clicks. It's simple, direct and easy to use. And the community feel where everyone can comment and reply to comments adds a great deal. I have found good artists I never heard of by examining who commented on some piece of work.

As a tech head, the backend stuff interests me. But as a furry looking for art and wanting to stay in touch with people I admire, I couldn't care less about the back end. If it works, it could be on a VIC20 and I wouldn't know. So any issue about reliability and single failure points are moot until the failures actually occur (from a fannish consumer POV rather than a developer producer POV).

Right now, FA has a good combination. To leave, someone will have to take that good combination and make it better. I don't see how that's possible - unlike people in Redmond, I don't believe that adding everything is automatically improvement. Many programs were fine as they were (Word) and then got wrecked by adding bells and whistles that nobody wanted and nobody understands (Word2007). When FA screws up the interface like dA (still don't know how to do squat there) then I will want to move. Until then, I like the a) community present, b) already large base, c) ease of use, and d) acceptance of stories and music as well as art.

If it's not broke, I don't fix it.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

This is a tangential point, but it's one I've thought of before -- you're not the first person to compare FA to dA in the way you did, i.e., that FA is better and dA is confusing. So help me understand this: FurAffinity is an unabashed clone of deviantArt. User home page is a profile page with tabs, you have a watch list, you have an anemic journaling option, you have "messages" divided into classes of new things added by people you watch, you have a shoutbox... not only are pretty much all the services identical, they're largely in the same place on the respective pages. From the standpoint of a web UI designer, the differences between the two designs are for the most part in deviantArt's favor, not FurAffinity's: slightly bigger buttons and tabs, better use of white space, more legible color choices [still not good ones, but more legible], a beautiful method for browsing categories [a concept I don't know if FA even has], and generally a marked lack of clutter. (The biggest design knock I have against dA is that they don't seem to really have any idea what to do with the advertisement blocks; they don't merely seem intrusive, they seem like they're just stuck in there with thumb tacks.)

My recollection is that FA was better than dA when FA first opened, but that both of them were still objectively pretty terrible. dA has improved in that time; from a user standpoint, FA not only hasn't, it's been in slight retrograde. (There used to actually be a search box, remember?) I can't help but suspect FA's stickiness is almost entirely due to the community.

I will say that as a writer, I've found FA to be only slightly better than useless. Only accepting files as "objects" that generally have to be downloaded to be viewed (as distinct from images that can be viewed in the browser), having the story be unsearchable except through the most arcane "tag" system I've ever seen (which I'm not sure actually is searchable), and asking you for an expletive deleted thumbnail graphic for the story to avoid getting a generic icon -- sorry, I just can't buy the idea that this is just such a darn good environment for authors that it can't possibly be improved, you know?

Deleted expletives

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

Oh, make no mistke. I loathe FA's handling of writers and the written word in general. It's not that I support FA in any regard because of this, and as I commented to Higgins below, my readership on FA is low enough that I could easily bail were there something better, and I'd do so gladly. I can safely say that I really don't use FA for the art; I go there because YS has a reputation of being a gigantic junkpile into which everyone dumps their sewage. Yes, it has a ratings system, but in general I don't trust the people who give the ratings to do so on actual quality of writing as opposed to spooginess of topic. This is, in fact, what killed Gotfox for me, back in the day. Too often I would see utter shazbot ranked at a five-across-the-board because the pieces in question catered to some specific kink in a way that nothing else had, and everyone would grade them up to encourage the author to write more of the same.

So, here's another couple of nice features for you:
5) A user-driven content ratings system. I want to be able to say, not just "+watch" but "I gave this a four out of five". I think a single dimension rating is fine, and any scale larger than one-to-five, or maybe even one-to-four to eliminate 'average', would be unnecessary. However, I want to be able to say, "I liked it a lot" or "I didn't like this but it didn't suck" in a publishable format.
6) A user-driven ratings weighting system. As much as I want to be able to publish what I think of stuff, I know other people do as well, and I don't always want their opinions influencing me. If a hundred people whose opinions don't matter hate something, and one person whose opinions count all evaluate a story, I want some way of telling the site to disregard the opinions of the vox populi. Perhaps this would work like Amazon's also-liked system, or Pandora's music-suggestion functions. However it's implemented, I want a way of tuning what the ratings mean, not just getting a number.

Kristy

Re: Deleted expletives

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I think being better than FA for a writer isn't actually a high hurdle, no. I'm fairly confident I get more hits on stories that are on my personal site. And my somewhat more risqué, we'll say, alter ego is still getting 1500+ hits a month on her web site despite having posted no new fiction there for over two years now; I'm fairly confident that FA would be a giant leap backward for her. (I suspect there's more to learn from her site's success than "have stuff that appeals to prurient interests," too, but I'm still chewing over those -- for starters, her page is well-indexed by search engines and gets a measurable amount of traffic from links from other sites. How do you make an FA-like site that encourages that?)

As for ratings, I'd thought about a very simple Ebert-esque system, in which you could just vote something up or down; this may be a little too simple, but of course the idea is that it's useful in the aggregate, and of course to say "people who liked X also commonly liked Y." Your idea of being able to limit ratings to specific people is intriguing -- perhaps giving higher weight to ratings from people you watch (or only including them).

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

There, you've answered one of your own questions. What could be better? Make the uploading of text easier would be nice. It's been so long since I tried it, I have to take your word for it here.

I differ with the notion that FA is a clone of DA. In DA, I haven't the faintest idea where to browse the newest art or look at the new stuff from artists I like. Not even one clue - that's why I don't go there anymore. But FA tells me at login how many journals and images are waiting for me, right there on the top right of the screen. And the word "Browse" is easy to find, too. If FA is a clone, the DA got all the evil genes.

Could be that having a Reduced webpage with only a couple of buttons (unless you click on the Full Function button) would make an art site much easier to use. Reduce the basic functionality to the following:

View my Favorite artists and journals
View all new art
Search for artist
My Page / uploads
View Random Artist
Full Functionality (switchs to the more complex screen)

This would cover 90% of what furry viewers need in a page. A more user friendly interface may be the key, provided you can have all the functions back again with a press of the button for those who need them.

[inaki.livejournal.com]

DA actually has the same message system that FA has, including the "new messages" tag at the top next to your login name. They are actually clones. FA was originally designed as a DA replacement, and the sites diverged from that point, however the base feature sets are the same.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

FA is a clone of DA ala 2002. Currently, DA is seriously kicking ass and taking names.

To browse the newest art? http://www.deviantart.com
That's browse. Huge 'Newest' and 'Popular' buttons on the right. Down the left side, all the categories you can browse to narrow focus. Tell me that the Browse button on DA isn't easy to find. It's monstrous. :)

It couldn't be simpler, really. I agree, 6 years ago, DA was a pain, now they are one of the easiest art sites to browse. DA also has had the messaging system you describe from the start.

Creature Feep!

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

In no particular order, here's what a site would have to provide me to encourage me to leave FA:
1) Content locking. I hate to say it, but right now I'm looking at publication of Beautiful World through SofaWolf, and that means that at least until the first rounds of negotiation are complete, I probably ought to keep any piece of the work not already posted somewhere out of the limelight. That means a friends-only or alpha-readers-only or X-group-only filter on my posts so I can ensure that a few people can see them for preview and everyone else has to wait until the final purchase. Ideally, this feature would let me set on a post-by-post basis who's in and who's out.
2) Text markup at least as intelligent as BBcode if not pure HTML insert. Right now, FA offers embedded text and links to .rtf and .doc files, but if I want to post HTML-markup, I can't unless I cleverly rename it a .doc, and even then it's not embedded in the page itself. It's instead a link available for download, which isn't what I want. I want to be able to embed markup in my documents and then have them pre-rendered so people don't have to go through the extra step of downloading and reading with an alternate tool.
3) A collaboration forum intended to bring artists of multiple stripes together. "Writer seeking artist," "lyricist seeking musician," "animator seeking scripts," et cetera. I want to start encouraging mixed-media presentation and so far everyone partitions individual categories and lumps in mixed-media presentations into other categories that might or might not be appropriate.
4) The true challenge: an audience large enough to justify deleting my FA account. I don't want the hassle of having to maintain multiple "art site" accounts and then remember who has what rules about posting where. I want one account to which I can point people that serves as a gallery of all my work. In fact, I have one, on my website, but I'm too lazy to code up the content-control features I want, and I dislike the idea of getting a second LJ account and giving them any more support just to have the content-control.

Speaking of publications, by the way, I'd like to talk with you at some point about Why Coyotes Howl and the "publication through SofaWolf" process if you have the time. Beautiful World may have just expanded slightly in scope, and before I settle on a publisher I'd like to hear some thoughts from you on your experiences with them.

Kristy

Re: Creature Feep!

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

A collaboration forum would be wonderful, even though I've given up on artists in general.
"Oh, I want to concentrate on my own stories!"
"Okay. What story are you working on?"
"Nothing. But I'm not interested in working with you."
"Umm, okay then. Sorry to bother you."
"Hey, you're a writer! Can you help me figure out a way out of this corner I've written myself into?"
"..."

Re: Creature Feep!

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

You have my deepest sympathies with this. I've been there.

Kristy

Re: Creature Feep!

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

4) The true challenge: an audience large enough to justify deleting my FA account. I don't want the hassle of having to maintain multiple "art site" accounts and then remember who has what rules about posting where. I want one account to which I can point people that serves as a gallery of all my work.

Just as an FYI, this is what's going to prevent any other site from getting to the size of FA. Even if a site does every feature you want and more, you're not going to switch until everyone switches, and everyone isn't going to switch until everyone else switches. So why even bother trying to please folks with stuff they want? :) That's probably one of the most important lessons of marketing I've learned at my current job--don't design features people say they want, because 90% of the time, those aren't the features they want.

Re: Creature Feep!

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

In this case, I'd be willing to argue that the fourth is a nicety, but not a necessity. If I had a way of posting HTML-encoded stories directly to a site, locking posts to certain users, and otherwise managing my content the way I'd like, I'd be willing to jump ship and I would. However, I can get away with saying this because my readership on FA is in the teens. I'm really not losing anything by moving, and I might very well be the one that motivates a couple of other writers to jump ship, since FA only barely caters to us at all.

Still, your point in the general case is well taken. The reason LJ continues to survive is because everyone's using it, not because it has the best feature-set or quality of service.

Kristy

[astolpho.livejournal.com]

I think there might maybe be too much emphasis being placed on 'switching'. I've got accounts that I contribute to on Artspots, Furaffinity, and Deviantart, in addition to my own websites. I like to drink Mountain Dew, but that doesn't mean I won't also drink Coke or Dr. Pepper.

I also know many artists will sign up at new art sites as they pop up for the sole purpose of camping their preferred username should the site in question begin to pick up momentum, or just to make it harder for other users to pretend to be them on sites they don't post to.

I don't think it's really the artists that need to be pursuaded to switch, because artists tend to move in this giant clump; I think it's more the casual viewers that need attracting.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you, actually. The problem is that casual viewers are hard to find if artists don't post art, and artists tend to focus on one gallery. Understandably so, because they don't want to have to post to three or four places. My main thing is getting artists to just use ArtSpots to attract said casual viewers. But again, there isn't much point because all the artists and all the casual viewers (well, at least 75% of them) are at one place. I wouldn't mind if more artists were like you, who appreciate posting to several places. But when commissions of my own character end up on FA without regards to ArtSpots, it's a bit vexing, ya know? :)

Although we're taking ArtSpots in a totally different direction currently. I think you'll like where its going, purely from an artist's standpoint. It's starting to attract a rather different community.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

Absolutely correct on all points. The rules of business and of marketing apply even when it's fannish, nonprofit projects like furry art archives. Conventions also rise and fall for similar reasons. It's too big a fandom for word of mouth alone to give you a boost, although it's still a sure way to kill you. FA got people on its side during their tech troubles and kept them informed, so they waited for it to come back up. Now I think people are MORE invested in FA than before, although alternatives saw a spike in traffic, it will be that much harder for them to compete going fowards.

[bfdragon.livejournal.com]

When it comes down to it, it's just a matter of where I can find more of who and what that I like. I don't want to have to deal with checking 40 different sites when I come home in the evening, I just want to take a nice look around then be done. Until a large group of the people I like migrate (or a new one shows up) it's pretty much what I'm calling home, despite it's flaws (how did gerbil ever end up a species in the browse before gryphon did? o.o).

Honestly, I still miss the centralization that mailing lists offered, it was all right there in my mailbox waiting for me, but, that seems to be a thing of the past now, oh well.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I recall someone else complaining about the "sandbox" aspect of social networking sites, which applies to FurAffinity and friends -- few of them give you any option to even get notifications about new things in email, and not that many of them even support RSS. I suspect in some cases that's intentional: if you're not at the site, you're not seeing ads. But one hopes there's a better way to make money than by frustrating your users.

[inaki.livejournal.com]

Actually Artspots does both offer e-mail alerts and RSS feeds. I get the alerts all the time in my mailbox and find them quite useful. I do agree that it'd be nice for other sites to follow in that pattern.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

This has been nagging at me for a while, obviously, because I just now thought of it. But I used to check Yerf's Recent Art as a daily bookmark, and while there are now plenty of similar alternatives (like ArtSpots), I no longer look at them, despite bookmarking them and saying I'll check them.

I have finally figured out why: Livejournal has become my "recent art" bookmark. A lot of artists upload here. I can do my own content filtering. It's not restricted to furry-only. And with the syndication option, I've added a lot of artists off livejournal who use Wordpress or something else that creates RSS feeds to my list. This way I not only get art, if I can to I can get context, because a lot of artists talk about their work when they post it, much more than they ever did in a thumbnail description of it. Plus I can interact with them directly about their uploads. I suppose FurAffinity might have come close, but it would be a duplication—a furry-specific one—of something that Livejournal already does for me without having to worry if someone's posting something furry enough.

So, I think furry art archives are dead for me. This method works better.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

This is actually something else that FAP -- as much as I keep ragging on their acronym -- arguably does 'right': it automatically generates RSS feeds for, well, just about everything. You could get a recent feed list of all uploads, featured uploads, any individual artist, tags, or even search results. The generated feeds include the title, thumbnail, and whatever commentary the artist left, as well as tags the artist gave the image.

ArtSpots also has a "recent art" feed, but it doesn't look like it has the same feeds-everywhere approach, and while it looks like it's supposed to generate per-artist feeds, at the moment that seems to be broken.

(Bemusingly, I don't think either of them supports the feed that I'd actually want most: a single RSS feed of new works from your "watch list" of selected artists.)

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

http://chipotle.artspots.com/favorites/rss

The only one that's truly broken right now is per-artist, and that's going to be fixed at the next push. There's also artspotsrecents which uses the recents RSS feed to pull into LJ. A handful of folks use that too. :)


EDIT: This also brings up an amusing observation. About 4 out of 5 times, every time someone asks of ArtSpots, "I wish it did this.." I point them to the spot where it does that. I need to figure out some way of getting these features more into the open. :)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

RSS feeds are "discoverable" for people who want to use them, generally speaking, I think -- the RSS icon at the top of the page should logically be the RSS feed for whatever's on the page. This is actually what I missed checking to see if ArtSpots had a "generate an RSS feed for this search query" functionality, I confess; with FAP, there's an RSS feed on the search result page, whereas it looks like in ArtSpots you turn a search result page into a "fetch folder" first and then subscribe to that. (I presume that's what the RSS feed on the fetch folder page is supposed to be; I created one now as a test and the XML file is empty.)

If there's a way on either ArtSpots or FAP to create a single RSS feed of "new stuff from my watchlist," it's not obvious to me, I'll admit. I'd assume that if such existed, it would show up somewhere on my watchlist page, e.g., "http://chipotle.artspots.com/favorites/watching".

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

The URL I gave you was your own "new stuff from my watchlist" rss feed. :) At least in Safari, going to your Favorites page shows the RSS icon up in the URL bar.

username.artspots.com/favorites is the recent art from those you are watching

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Apparently the actual problem in this instance is: I am a dork.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

artspotsrecents - 'Cuz I tend to check LJ more than I do recents as well. :) Also, as I always point out, Artspots is not limited specifically to furry art, just happens that most folks post it there, but anything is allowed that's illustrative in nature.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, I remembered there was some restriction. :)

Anyway, the RSS feed is cool, but a lot of the artists who post to Artspots already have livejournals, which means if I comment on their art on their journals they'll see it, whereas the RSS feed creates a black hole. :)

It's a cool feature, though! It's just... not as interactive as I've become accustomed to. And these days, one does discriminate based on interactivity. :)