• power of publishing by performers (it’s one aspect of the biz we can directly influence)
• how Google search results of a member’s name dramatically improves when on CastingNotes

Why publish non-production updates?
After taking Brian O’Neil’s excellent “Acting As a Business” course, where he suggests that regularly updating agents/CDs on recent auditions and callbacks can lend credibility to an performer’s work history and help build relationships in the industry, I decided to start that process for myself. But while IMDb has the “I’ve-already-been-cast” department covered, I realized there wasn’t really a central place to keep track of all the “before I got famous” work— all the auditions, call-backs, castings, readings, training, classmates, performance partners, and so on that actually build a performer’s career and shows who they worked with along the way. Since I needed a place to store, track, and publish my own updates, I thought it might be useful to give something back to the performing arts community and put together a public site where other others could also build on O’Neil’s suggestions— and my own interest in connections— by posting notes on their work histories as well.

Publishing for Performers
CastingNotes™ is designed to be that place— somewhere for performers to publish their work histories, share industry information, network with each other, and get noticed in their fields of work. It also gives full support to industry-related non-performers (e.g., directors, writers, agents, casting, PR, etc) to be used as a central, one-stop resource to automatically track any activity level, for any number of performers, as soon as it’s published. Standard RSS subscribe features let anyone automatically receive performers’ updates to their news reader, and full Yahoo!, Google, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Technorati, etc integration supports personal and public bookmarking. In addition, CastingNotes™ is an open platform, meaning that you do not need to be a member to view work histories (only to post) and we encourage our database to be used by other systems to increase your visibility.

Feedback Welcome
CastingNotes™ is still a work in progress, and not exactly a full-time project for me as I’m also a working performer, but please feel free to file suggestions over here and I’ll see what I can incorporate into future versions.

Keep busy,
KV