Have you ever wondered what PostSecret would look like if all the confessions were written on toilet paper? Yeah, I never have either. But someone did, and that's why yesterday saw the launch of Artinimity, a collaborative photo blog "where people from all horizons express what they are thinking about... while sitting alone in a toilet." What that means is notes, confessions, and doodles scrawled on pieces of toilet paper.
I don't profess to understand this type of collaborative blog, but many of them are very creative and have struck a real nerve with people.
]]> PostSecret, for example, has spawned no less than four books, while Overheard in New York has one (which is being updated this winter). There's no telling if Artinimity will enjoy that type of success -- I expect that for every wildly successful collaborative art blog there are hundreds that flounder -- but that they avoided any toilet humor on the first day is an accomplishment.
The creator of Artinimity is a 30 year old Belgian blogger/artist named Renaud who has been slowly building a nascent network of community blogs. One of those is Damn Receipt, a buzz marketing experiment in which consumers post photos of a receipt and advertisers refund the amount in return for getting the logo displayed on the blog. So far, it doesn't look like anyone has taken the bait, but the idea is interesting and with traffic, could work.
"I love creating original, totally bizarre, powerfull [sic] and strange methods to promote websites on the web," wrote Renaud about Damn Receipt. Most of the collaborative blogs Renaud has created over the past few weeks are a certainly a bit bizarre, and I'm not sure if Artinimity differs enough from PostSecret to be successful long term, but this sort of project is certainly interesting and worth keeping an eye on.
What are you favorite collaborative blogs? What do you think makes this sort of project so appealing to readers? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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