What s Tailcast?Tailcast http://www.tailcast.com is an online community in which artists in all disciplines share their work with one another. Tailcast is for, by and about artists. Members can upload videos and still photographs, as well as post articles, short stories and poems. Multimedia presentations (poems read aloud with musical soundtracks, time-lapse videos of artists at work painting or sculpting, etc.) are also popular. To date, there are nearly 900 members on tailcast, with numbers growing steadily.
Tailcast is pluralistic, democratic and generally accepting of everyone. Academy- trained artists, art students, self-taught outsider artists, and absolute beginners in all media and genres interact. There is great diversity in culture, nationality, and age. People in their seventies and eighties interact with teens, middle-aged people and undergraduates share ideas. Artists give one another feedback, in the form of comments on specific works, or on the creator's "comment wall".
Each member has her/his own individually created page. This page can be customized to serve as an online portfolio, in addition to serving to familiarize other tailcast members with one's work, artistic philosophy and personality. Artists have a wide variety of templates from which to choose, each of which can be modified with header body and background photos from an individual's computer, as well as various fonts and colors. Music can be uploaded to add sound to individual pages. There are also gadgets available, as well as a feature which runs a slideshow of the artist's stills.
There is a tailcast presence on third-party websites as well. A new Youtube channel, also called tailcast, was recently launched. This features videos such as "tailcast spotlight" subjects and the "$1000 give-away--introduce yourself on tailcast" competition, among others. This serves to widen exposure for tailcast artists and to encourage more traffic to tailcast, and increase membership. Videos of particular note from tailcast members are saved on favorites. In addition, several tailcast staffers have individual channels, as well as many regular members.
Contests and competitions, some for cash prizes, reward artists for their efforts (they are notoriously poor after all :)). A recent addition is "Tailspin", a monthly online magazine which features articles on specific artists, updates on community activities, plans for the future and more. "Tailspin" is a resource for members who have been on tailcast for some time, and a primer for those new to the website.