Author Topic: Escapenomics  (Read 3296 times)

Dyalos

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on: November 05, 2013, 12:49:06 AM
Hello, I am a very, very long-time listener at all three Escape Pod podcasts (and the Drabblecast) who has never entered the forums before, feeling that doing so and commanding attention by the staff or fans would obligate me to then donate money to the service as an active and recognizable figure within the community, where actually as a grad. student I have little expendable income to spend on extra-curricular interests. My primary means of support for the company has come in the past from recommending different stories from the archives to my many friends and family members as they bring up themes or authors I feel that the Escape Artist podcasts have performed well.

Upon hearing the recent fundraising solicitation from Escape Pod however I feel obligated to give what I can to Escape Artists later this month, because I feel that intelligent storytelling in our Western society is a important, rare, and dwindling resource.

What I worry about in giving this money mirrors the concerns I have in donating microtransactions each year through KIVA to small businesses in third world countries. A number of scientific studies have demarcated fund usage by recipients from those who use loans to drastically expand their viability or market-sustainability (a sheep herder buying a shearing machine and a loom) and those who merely purchase more product for a temporary and ineffectual boost in liquidity (a basket-seller buying more baskets to sell, which does not grow business much over time and still leaves the recipient in poverty).

What do I mean with this analogy? Instead of using my money to make more episodes and keep the story-authors and narrators temporarily paid or as a pad for a risky set of Kickstarters (often involving magnitudes more time, energy, and shipping costs than the campaigners expect, to the point of exhaustion an bankruptcy) I wish that my money could be used to mirror each archived episode from the three podcasts within the Youtube servers, as Youtube videos.

Why?

If each Escape Artist episode was a Youtube video (allowable as I understand it under the Creative Commons license owned by the respective podcasts for each work), then Escape Artists could get extra revenue from playing ads before videos, many new listeners who are comfortable using Youtube and not unfamiliar sites could find and more easily share the episodes (or importantly link to a time-mark halfway through an episode for short story anthologies or their favorite scenes), and allow fancy analytic user breakdown statistics to be viewed by the EA administrators for potential targeted marketing in the future, and wider platform availability for the content within the diverse and strange mobile cellular glasses/cake/doorknobs factions of the coming decade.

If there was a donation or website link in the "about" section of each video and a simple picture of each podcast's logo as the stories played I feel that this could be sufficient to greatly improve the universal visibility of the three podcasts, especially if the videos were one day featured by Youtube's front page or other prominent Youtube creators.

Videogames or software like "Board Game Online" are some of the first to use Youtube as a exclusive user soundtrack, but I very much doubt that this trend will remain so unheard-of.

I have also sent website feeback to Paul the accountant in the past about enhancing search-functionality within the sites in regard to more comprehensive " story tags", better specifying emotional or thematic or characterization content that allow users to locate old episodes they can only dimly recall, and this would also probably be a great feature for Youtube porting if a minimum of ten descriptor tags for each episode could be found in the Youtube search bar by users or the algorithms that recommend new videos after the end of each embedded or site-native clip:

Hello,

I really like the Escape Artist websites but I feel that they could really benefit from enhanced search functionality. Too often I am in a discussion with some friends on various bizarre subjects of the occult or fringe and a perfect opportunity arises where I might send them one of the podcasts in the EA archives I heard in a previous year, but with only vaguely remembered details of the story and no title or author information in my mind I cannot recall specifically whether I heard the tale in Escape Pod, Psuedopod, or Podcastle, and end up lost in odd google domains or helplessly scanning hundreds of pages of archives. To this end I feel like adding a large number of descriptive "search tags" to each story (such as a setting tag, an antagonist tag, an emotion tag, etc. - ie. "Dinosaur Hunter" "Time machine" "Guns" "Betrayal" "Mesozoic" "Adventure" "Revenge" "Indigence" "British Accents" ) with a sorting engine looking through each of the EA sites might add both a good recollection tool for long-term listeners and also help new visitors harvest the sort of stories they might specifically be crazy about (all of the zombie love stories for instance).

Thanks for all your work Paul!



Possible or not, I wish Escape Artists the best and hope very much that they are able to reach their goals. Thanks for your time.




Fenrix

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Reply #1 on: November 05, 2013, 09:10:20 PM
This is largely a volunteer army. Are you interested in enlisting?

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”


Dyalos

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Reply #2 on: November 07, 2013, 07:56:07 PM
As an anti-social and rather flighty cognition researcher I'm afraid that I am very short on the time, expertise, or leadership and personnel coordination skills necessary to aide this organization in any meaningful capacity beyond the occasional proposal of random ideas, but I thank you very much for your offer, though I must decline it is nonetheless an honor to be offered a position within your illustrious and merry band (and in writing this I am not attempting to disingenuously play the anti-cultist "I am not worthy of this honor" card from the Munchkin Cthulhu boardgame).

In the case of my specific suggestions above I feel that collecting "tags" or posting high-fidelity episodes under a single official "Escape Artists" Youtube account (afforded important posting privileges by Youtube after introductory correspondence) would likely be better suited to a large, scalable workforce of sweatshop-wage employees given the sheer size of the information-load involved:

http://www.salon.com/2006/07/24/turks_3/
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/

Attractive for the ability of MTurk workers to listen and be entertained while doing mindless image-related work. Cutting the EA podcasts into small "episode blocks" with careful instructions and then paying 5 cents per episode best properly tagged or first uploaded to Youtube sequentially (then posting a new block) would likely supersede the abilities or efficiencies of hiring a call-center in India or Malaysia to do the entire archive very quickly with a lump single payment (although many modern Silicon Valley corporations prefer this method given the abundant and surprising technological and linguistic proficiencies available through this route).

Likewise one could attempt to harness the listeners to volunteer for this work to save more money, but so soon after a funding drive this risks seeming needy and demanding- which could theoretically be supplanted by making the task into a raffle contest for a stuffed EA "undead unicorn astronaut?" mascot, or a personnel portrait from "The Word Whore", or the exclusive right to demand a full-cast 45 minute production of ANY work (even 50 Shades of Grey), or other such nonsense, although of course on the other hand the response or interest by listeners might be insufficient, and the assignment of tasks though the forums or email could quickly spiral into an organizational clusterfrack, also at the same time discarding the possibility of the first two options permanently increasing the size of the listener-base.

One could offer this work while doing fundraisers or hypothetical Kickstarters as an alternative for "those who would like to help out but have no monetary resources to do so", but this carries many of the same risks of disinterest as the previous scenario, and could also backfire in becoming too popular an option over collecting the money that EA needs, a figurative parallel to The Israeli Childcare Experiment.

If a talented programmer could write a quick "script macro" to automatically transfer episodes from saved audio-engineering files or the website programming into proper Youtube format, that could perhaps cut costs and time significantly, although I assume that this is an unreasonable assumption of available assets.

Lastly one could rely solely on the existing members of the forum, but while this could be the best qualitative insurance of automatic, implicit respect for the subject material, manpower shortages in tagging or uploadership might drag the true fans involved into the realms of Sisyphean madness for years of grinding hardship while distracting from the progression other important facets of the brand (like giving thoughtful story feedback, or assisting with editing or production, or outreach to new listeners, or feeling like they need to continue to be financial donors, etc.)

Those with deeper insight into the community or the finances might hold different opinions on this subject through a superior perceptual vantage-point, but I felt that you might benefit from my recommendation as some food for thought (hopefully).

Thank you for all of the stories.
« Last Edit: November 07, 2013, 10:00:04 PM by Dyalos »