Weekly FWSR: Snacks, Bosses & Competitors

Two weeks ago, we started a new feature at the Prosperity Blog: Fun With Search Referrers! And yes, I know, we start more features here than a first run movie theater, but what can we say. If it sounds like something that can help us fill blog content, we’ll take it! So, here’s the latest Fun with Search Referrers, featuring snacks, bosses, competitors and more.

Prosperity Blog Fun with Search Referrers

I know this guy who runs a website called Bridge and Tunnel Club, which is sort of an all-encompassing resource on New York City and its environs. Because of the comprehensive nature of the site, it often comes up in the listings when people do their internet searches (hopefully on Bing). And so he made a different website called “bridgeandtunnelclub.com Search Referrers of the Day,” where he lists, analyzes and often answers various queries that get referred to his site. I happen to think it’s laugh out loud hilarious, but you all know how weird my sense of humor is.

For a fun Friday activity, let’s play the Prosperity Blog’s version of Search Referrers of the Day. Specifically, here are some of the most interesting ones we’ve gotten this week:

Weekly REDEW: Putting Art at IKEA

It’s that time again for the regular feature we like to call REDEW: the Random Economic Development Email of the Week. Which is exactly what it sounds like…me talking about random emails that I receive that have something to do with economic development. Now, usually these REDEWs center around emails that I receive from various listservs and mailing lists that I somehow get added to. But this week I’m pleased to present an actual email sent from a real person to me. How could that be random, you ask? Well, just wait to read it. And by it, I mean the “Weekly REDEW: Putting Art at IKEA.”

Weekly B-MOW: Next Week’s Legislative Session

I’ve bent a lot of rules with this feature. Some of the “Best Meeting of the Week” posts have been post titles made up entirely of acronyms. Some B-MOWs are ties between two meetings. There’s even been a B-MOW that’s a prep meeting for another B-MOW. But this is a new horizon: the Best Meeting of the Week that hasn’t even happened yet! How do I know it’s going to be so great? You’ll have to read below to find out…in the Weekly B-MOW: Next Week’s Legislative Session.

Pictures of Horses Sure Generate a Lot of Revenue!

A couple weeks ago, the Jack Donaghy character on the show “30 Rock” responded to someone saying “What is Art?” with the phrase “We know what art is! It’s paintings of horses!” Which is funny to me – as a former theater major – for a number of reasons (not the least of which being a story involving Neil Hellegers and Cary Mazer and Alfred Hitchcock’s definition of theater, which none of you would find interesting). But I was surprised to see the same quote in a very entertaining profile of some huckster painter in Saudi Arabia in the NYT Magazine (“The galleries here are still rejecting me,” Gharem said. “They think art is still pictures of horses, you know.”).

What does all of this have to do with regional economic development? Well, we’ve actually got a lot of horse-painting art organizations in this region, and it turns out that they have quite the economic impact.

Is There Too Much Economic Development Happening in the Puget Sound Region?

I sort of wanted to title this post “Weekly C-POW: the Controversial Proposal of the Week.” We already have our “weekly” B-MOW and REDEW features, so what’s one more? But I’m not sure that I want to start ending each week with pronouncements that will leave people angry over the weekend. We’ll see how this one goes. For now, here it is: “I think that we might have too many economic development organizations in the four-county region.” Let’s discuss.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time Of the Year (in Ideas): Big Ideas of 2010

I can’t wait for this Sunday. It’s literally my favorite day of the year. Why? Because the New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas issue is going to arrive at my doorstep! (I know, that’s a very nerdy reason for a day to be one’s favorite, but what can I say…I love ideas!) The NYT issue is apparently the 10th annual, but it also serves another important annual role: inspiring the creation of the Prosperity Blog’s 2nd annual “Big Ideas” post!

To quote from last year’s, we here at the Prosperity Blog have also had a good year of ideas, generating all sorts of practical proposals for improving our region’s business climate and competitiveness. But, of course, we have also had lots of impractical, sky’s-the-limit ideas that we hope someone is going to take and run with and make all our dreams come true. So, for all you good-idea-awaiting folks out there, here’s a summary…presented in Top Ten format:

The Arts’ Worst Nightmare

I’ve been involved with the arts for a long time, as both a practitioner as well as a passionate defender of their importance. The phrase I like to use is “the educational and inspirational benefits of arts & culture.” And plenty of folks, from Richard Florida to the RAND Corporation, have tried to link the arts to everything from economic development to educational attainment.

But the problem always comes when, particularly in bad economic times, you’re forced to defend arts funding in the face of other potential cuts to things like human services and health care. Someone always says, “I mean, the arts are great and all, but what about all the homeless people?” Which is exactly what just happened in Boston.

Arts and STEM!

C’mon…this is like catnip for a cat. You know that Prosperity Partnership is involved in economic development initiatives to support both cultural access and STEM education. So how could I NOT blog about a major new initiative that combines the two!?!

Is 520 Tolling Good for the Bellevue Arts Community?

I was in a focus group the other day about the future of the “east King County arts community.” And someone was talking about how the major problem is that too many eastside residents look to Seattle for their cultural activities…but that it might change when tolling starts on 520. It took me a second, but I quickly understood that what she was saying is that the extra cost of crossing the bridge would be a disincentive to travel which creates an incentive to spend your Saturday night locally. Furthermore, because there isn’t a fully vital arts community yet on the eastside, economic theory would tell us that folks would be willing to invest in the short term to build that infrastructure if it saves them money in the long term.

I love the concept, and not only because I’m a nerdy economics guy. It has a great parallel to something I was talking about way back in the good old days of $4 gas about shrinking the global supply chain.

Blast From the Past

I know a lot of you out there are busy and – like me – violate the “inbox rule.” You know, the one that says that you should only touch a piece of paper twice (once to put it into the proper “to be dealt with” file and then once to actually deal with it), or else it’ll get buried in your inbox. Well, I was on a plane to DC on Sunday, January 24 (for a meeting on the Metropolitan Business Plan) and I ripped out this lovely article from the New York Times about our hometown arts organization, On the Boards. And, of course, I just found it in my inbox this week, but goll darn it, I’m going to blog about it anyway.

Make Art About the Recession in Spaces That are Empty Because of the Recession!

As a theater major in college and someone who did a musical dramedy about Genghis Khan in an abandoned warehouse at the Sand Point Naval Base, there is nothing I don’t love about this idea:

Seattle may allow entrepreneurs and artists to temporarily set up shop and installations on some sites where development projects have stalled due to the recession. The goal is “to bring some level of activity back to those sites,” says DPD spokesman Bryan Stevens.

Yes!  If it were my theater company, I’d do performance art in which I sold clothes to people in a former clothing store.  The genius would be that people wouldn’t know that it was art, and they’d buy a lot of clothes there and I’d become a successful small business owner (shining the brutal eye of art onto the role that consumerism plays in our society)…um, or something like that.

Anyway, all kidding aside, this is great and I hope both the arts community and the tech start-up community take advantage of it!

Raising Arts Ticket Prices Vs. Raising Higher Ed Tuition

So this guy thinks that arts organizations should lower ticket prices and rely more on fundraising:

If we want to keep, not to mention rebuild, our audiences, we need to rethink our ticket prices and to find other ways to balance our budgets. ..we need to work actively and aggressively to increase fund raising revenue (by producing exciting work and marketing that work well) and use a portion of this revenue to lower ticket prices.

I’m not actually sure that lower fundraising revenue is due to not producing exciting enough work or marketing it well enough, but let’s put that aside for a moment, because there’s an interesting analogy to what’s going on in higher education in our state (and others). 

Seattle = Detroit + Southern California

I have two friends getting married to each other next summer. One is from Michigan, the other from Southern California. And I suggested that they get married in the venue that is a combination of those two places: the Tesla Motors showroom in South Lake Union!

Let’s Build New Museums/Let’s Stop Building New Museums

Two stories, two approaches. Atlanta wants to build three new museums in the next five years. Others want you to wake up and smell the recession. Discuss.