My website for Steem artists, Steemarket, has been online for some months but it is still just a beta version of what I meant to do.
Now @howo created for me an amazing plugin (thx!) to upgrade the website and I installed and tested it (Steempress)
What does that plugin do? It simply creates a post on Steem (in my alt account @makersunited) with the content of every new post added to Steemarket. This way every artwork and news added to Steemarket stays on the blockchain and the dedicated account, @makersunited, becomes a mirror of the showcase website.
Which is the purpose of it?
Steemarket has been created to be a showcase for Steem artists to offer for sale their original artworks, and sell them for Steem, SBD and other cryptocurrencies. But basically it is a place to show the Art created by Steem artist in one website. I have very poor tech skill, so Steemarket is still basically a wordpress blog - just a test beta version actually.
In these months of testing the showcase, I started to think of it as a proper interface for the Steem artists so to allow them:
- to give more visibility (and possibly more upvotes) to their artworks posted on Steem
- to share news about exhibitions and contests around the world
- to collaborate
In the meanwhile the Steem Marketing Team started to talk about the subcommunity feature as a priority to develope Steem as a social media. The following announcement about Smart Media Token made us think even more about the future subcommunities on Steem. So I started too to think of Steemarket as an app to help the Art subcommunity on Steem to work and grow.
The Utopian project showed to me also how a actual subcommunity can work: Utopian is basically the subcommunity of developers on Steem. It is somehow like the guild of developers, and it helps them and rewards them (by a large delegated voting power).
Shortly, I'm trying to create for Art and artists what Utopian is for developers.
I've not the tech skills to build a very structured interface for posting - like Utopian is - but I'm going to find a way to upgrade Steemarket so to become something like that.
The new plugin @howo did for me, and I installed, is a first step to encourage artists to add their artworks on Steemarket, so that each post they publish on Steem, not only can be offered for sale in a web showcase, but it will be also replicated on the @makersunited account and will have more visibility. And this can create a good starting group for the future Art subcommunity, when it will be launched by the Steem developers (in a future hardfork, I guess).
At the moment Steemarket works manually: artists can post their artworks in the Steemarket room on Steemit.chat, or in the Discord server I created for that, and then I manually post them artworks on Steemarket. In the next days this procedure will become automatic and each artist will be able to add their artworks to Steemarket (and to post also news, suggestion, projects and so on).
The next step will be to create a more structured website and have a group of people to help me to filter and moderate every new post added to Steemarket.
I know this goal is beyond my capacity. But I count on collaboration!
What do you think?
