It’s the last day of the month already! January is in full swing, and today is the last day of the Street Art Cities Best of 2023, so vote if you haven’t already! Winners will be announced at 5PM GMT.
I thought it might be good to give you an update of the tech changes we’ve made in the last month. Some of these are very visible, some less so, so here’s a short overview:
Artists dashboard: We’ve launched the first version of our insights dashboard for artists! This allows a verified artist to at a glance see how many people are looking at their artworks across the Street Art Cities website and app, and how people are interacting with them.
Street Art Community: The SAC forum has received a little bit of rebranding, now located on streetart.community, and titled the “Street Art Community”. I’ve also added a new category “Hunting stories”. Hopefully this is a small move towards making the forum more about Street Art and hunting in general, even outside the scope of SAC.
Clearer language: Thanks to some great input from the community, we’ve fixed and improved some language across our dashboards and website, including making it more clear when you’re “permanently deleting” an artwork, and normalising our language around cities/towns/places. More to be done there, but it’s a start!
Filters and search updates: Hunters now have more advanced filters and search options, as proposed by @Andrew_Haysom. Thanks!
Merge “Painted at” and “Date created”: We’ve had conversations previously about the fact that the date fields on SAC weren’t the clearest. With our new Tags feature from a few months ago, we’ve now merged the “Painted at” field that used to exist into the “Date created” tag.
Integration with other social networks: We’ve also started to implement something called ActivityPub. It’s a bit technical, but it’s what a lot of new social networks, including Meta’s Threads and Mastodon are using to make sure users can follow people across social networks, decreasing the lock-in that places like Instagram and Twitter have. Whilst this already theoretically allows you to follow SAC artists on Mastodon, the current version is very basic, and needs more work to make it into something user friendly (and users taking up those social networks ).
Bug fixes: we’ve fixed some small bugs around the formatting bar in the artwork description editor, and the fact that marking an artwork as “seen” changed the updated timestamp.
With respect to the Artists dashboard, is there any chance we could get a hold of a sample, ie screenshots of what it looks like for an artist. It might be useful in our campaign to try to get some artists to claim their pages (an area where we are not having great success at the moment).
I was a bit fast to show these screenshots, so i’m just going to list the things artists will see in their dashboard that’s kinda similar to our hunters dashboard with the following metrics:
artworks: number of artworks on the platform
impressions: number of times profile has been viewed
likes: total likes for all artworks
top artworks: top 3 of artworks based on likes
Platform activity: artists profile visits of last 30 days on website and mobile app
Links activity: several charts that show the number of times your social links have been clicked. This data is collected from the links in your profile
Activity log: the same chronological backlog of changes (same as on the hunter dashboard)
This page has the potential of becoming something good for artists to learn from these metrics.
The one I’m looking forward to is the Integration with other social networks (Activity Pub). Honestly, I can’t figure out Instagram. I started uploading photos of artworks again back before Christmas but ever since then my follower count has gone DOWN. Quite deflating, even with the whole hashtag pile thing that people put at the end and trying to interact with people (I really don’t understand how they work).
I really invest and put in a lot of effort to try and make the map as detailed and fine as possible. However, despite most of my hard work and over 200 additions being in Sydney, it’s actually Canberra that has more viewership and popularity within the last 30 days. Maybe because it’s the capital? I am feeling a little bit fatigued, but I think it will get better when I start documenting the regional artworks (including some silo art).
Looking forward to an easier and more accessible way to share artworks, and more platform features coming soon. More suggestions coming from me soon.
Have you thought of the potential of Street Art Cities becoming the next social media platform. You can follow hunters artist and even cities. Although still at the beginning, but some artists already spoke about these aspirations.
Looking at IG, we don’t look at the numbers of likes anymore? We try to bring content we like and hope our audience will like also.
There most certainly is potential. It is a bit of a niche but we’re definitely on the right track and it’s great to be part of this early on as more artists and hunters join.
I know I shouldn’t look at things like likes/followers these day but naturally as a numbers/analytics type of guy, it seems to impact me far more when people do follow on Instagram but just disappear a few days alter even as I try to engage with them. Need to get that mentality out of my head. I only really use Instagram for research and updates for new artworks being added by artists and also try to share places I’ve been to also, but when other street art photographers enjoy organic growth on their social media for their content and I seem to be in reverse… that is the thinking I need to get rid of.
Just little personal things, that’s all. Feel free to ignore.
Briggs, just wanted to let you know every work you share with the world is appreciated! And taking the time to share your experiences on top of that is amazing. This is the only way our community moves forward. Again, much appreciated my man!
This absolutely means more than you might think it does. I am truly grateful, thank you Bart! I might need that reminder every now and then, but with your support, @Stef and the support terms’s quick responses when adding new cities, I will aim high to make New South Wales + Sydney a formidable street art challenger for Melbourne! And also document all across Asia and the Pacific Islands when my trips start rolling in. I have several trips to Asia planned this year, and I will dedicate a lot of the time there to Street Art!
Just wanted to say thanks for the shoutout in your most recent email! It’s great to see Australia really making its mark in SAC.
I’m a winter boy by the way. Love the cold, don’t love the short days of sunlight.
P.S. Is there a place where we can see our grand total of artworks added? There are individual numbers for artworks in each city’s hunter team page but not a full total. Also I’d like to see how I’m faring in terms of total hunting, maybe like a ranking?
Haha, you noticed it huh? Aussie power!
I’d spam @Noa_Heutz with that question of a dedicated global/local ranking overview for hunters and all other visitors. Would be a cool idea for a page that is updated once every X days or so. Nielsen soundscan, but then for hunters, artists and other KPI’s?
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