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As I write this I'm sitting in my new house, which, thus far, has nearly bare walls, so I was excited to notice that a new community site [ArtFlock][1] -- devoted to buying and selling art online -- just launched. Actually, after a bit of reading on the [site's blog][3], I discovered that ArtFlock is the new name for Artists Online which has been around for a while.
The new site (on a new domain) is designed to help both artist looking to sell their work and bare-walled consumers like myself by connecting the two and something the transaction process.
Using ArtFlock, artists can display and sell their art, and visitors can browse through collections and artists, as well as search for specific artists or types of art. Since ArtFlock is not just a marketplace but also a gallery of sorts there's a handy button at the top of the page that can limit results to show only works that are for sale.
ArtFlock has most of the interactions you'd expect from a social networking site in this day and age including user ratings, tag browsing, favorites (called My Gallery) and more. Interestingly the site doesn't have a "similar artists" features, something the site's blog says is a deliberate choice.
Though at first a lack of find similar artist feature might seem an oversight, I rather like the absence if for no other reason than I'm a bit tired of always being pointed to similar items. Perhaps ArtFlock should [take a tip from LibraryThing][2] and build a "find dissimilar" feature.
I haven't yet bought anything off ArtFlock, but there were a couple of artists that caught my eye and thanks to the My Gallery feature they're bookmarked and saved for future reference. Regrettably none of the artwork I liked was actually for sale, but that's not ArtFlock's fault.
(Note to the ArtFlock team, there's some kind of bug in the zoom image feature that causes the image to disappear shortly after it's loaded in Safari).
[via [Mashable][4]]
[1]: http://www.artflock.com/ "ArtFlock"
[2]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/librarythings_u.html "LibraryThing's UnSuggest: Discover Your Dislikes"
[3]: http://blog.artflock.com/ "ArtFlock Blog"
[4]: http://mashable.com/2007/04/22/artflock/ "Mashable: ArtFlock"
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