links for 2009-05-31
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This is also a great platform to get some good speakers and industry people to jaw with. It could be paywalls, micropayments, new technologies; whatever takes your fancy.
So these are early stages but I’m going to keep asking- who and what would you like to see at a conference on journalism and its future in the NW?
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For a man who carries two mobile phones, a laptop, a handheld HD video camera, an audio recorder and a digital SLR camera with him, one of the most important tools for his career has been his avatar.
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Cue those WAN statistics one more time and find that 81% of American online users also say they read a printed paper at least once a week. In sum, for the moment, it’s not one or the other: it’s both. And transition from one to the other, where it’s happening, comes unpredictably and patchily from city to city and country to country.
Getting offline to make sense of online
Cupcakes? Model train sets? Pizza, sushi, juggling and even unicycling?
What’s all this to do with geekery? Well at Barcamp Leeds, the digital business of the day came with its own brand of entertaining diversions.
Plenty of sessions in the now expected unconference format to delight those with an interest in coding, communication and collaboration in the digital world, but also the chance to meet up, catch up and cook up some plots and plans!
It was the first Leeds-based event I’ve attended, and the first Barcamp at which I’ve given a talk, so all new experiences here.
In brief some of the highlights in the sessions I attended;
* Check out www.tagwalk.com. Finding it hard to describe but think a delicious type service for Twitter. Journalistic uses which occurred to me during Tim Hastings’ session include collecting information about one particular person or subject and maybe a tool which could help when training journos on the usefulness of Twitter. Seemed a no-brainer for PR people concerned with brand reputation management too.
* Exciting new entertainments offering which will surely break out of Yorkshire in a bid for world domination – or at least beat a path down the M60 corridor. The lovely ladies behind this bribed us all with some baking too, and it worked! www.theculturevulture.co.uk is in part a recommendations site but also offers some experiences the average person is unlikely to get the opportunity to discover elsewhere. They are re-thinking what “culture” is in a landscape currently dominated by listings offerings. Fresh!
* I got a bit overheated thinking about all the possibilities of this experiment, www.ourcityourmusic.com. geo-locative music experiences. About to launch out of a university bunker somewhere, this is a competition winner which should prove a hit further afield. Atm, this is Leeds based for emerging artists and requires special handsets to explore – fun enough and worthwhile in itself, but it also got me thinking more about Adam Greenfield’s work on networking cities, archives of artists past explored by geo-tag, perhaps not just music, why not accessed through phones rather than a specific gadget?…..
And that’s what’s so great about events like Barcamps – they expose things that wouldn’t otherwise cross the radar. Whether it’s a student project being incubated within the safety of an academic institution or a seasoned business pro sharing some experience, these offline events give a quick adrenaline shot to the online practitioner.
Yes, there were sessions which quite honestly might as well have been delivered in Greek for all the understanding I could get, but perhaps that’s also got value in its own way. A reminder that there’s plenty going on which isn’t easily understood, that requires expertise and encouragement.
Outside of the formal sessions I had plenty of conversations about new ways of looking at news online, the inevitable moderation issue, the best way to organise these events, possibilities of collaborations down the M60 corridor or Yorkshire-wide or northern-wide – the world awaits!
In fact the only disappointing thing about the day for me was the complete lack of fellow news professionals attending, participating, engaging, or even reporting the event. If the search for new online models really is the holy grail, perhaps it would be worth following some of the pathfinders?
During my own talk about my recent work on blogs within a mainstream newspaper organisation, I made reference to the importance of participation in offline events in cementing community relationships – something confirmed for me by yesterday’s event.
All that remains is to say thanks to everyone for making me feel so welcome – I’m certainly looking forward to whatever happens next!
* There’s more Flickr pix
and a Qik from me tagged #bcleeds09 as well as plenty from everyone else. I’m looking for blog links and slideshares too so feel free to point me in the right direction via the comments below.
links for 2009-05-26
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Well we want to know if hyperlocal people in the UK are up for some sort of ‘UK Hyperlocal Alliance’ (working title) dedicated to a positive future for hyperlocal content in the UK. This isn’t an attempt to form a trade body or a union or a lobby group, just a simple web resource where we can sign up to a simple statement of intent, get in touch with each other and tell our stories.
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Perhaps some of the reporting done up to now by for-profit papers will in future be funded by foundations or trusts. But the industry should not lose faith in the free market. When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.
links for 2009-05-22
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The BBC is still working on its editorial policy towards personal social media use by journalists (and after all ’social media’ is not some fixed, homogenous lump) – it has set out some guidelines at this link – the corporation must consider its relationship with its audience and to what extent personal content is seen as representing the BBC.
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Shows you how you can use Google spreadsheets to interrogate data as if it was a database; and because it demonstrates the importance of news organisations releasing data to their users.
links for 2009-05-20
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Finding the rights means to create and protect value will require collaboration throughout news enterprises. It is not something that journalists can leave to management. Journalists and managers alike will need to develop collaboration skills and create social relations that make it possible. Journalists will also need to acquire entrepreneurial and innovation skills that makes it possible for them to lead change rather than merely respond to it.
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It is the first of small, halting steps of the military joining the stream, which is important if they’re to adapt to the Web as it evolves.
There is, however, always that nasty lag. While putting out a daily tweet is an enormous step in the right direction, they’re lagging a few years behind reaching out to the opinion-making set in the West, which is already familiar (and in many cases already bored) with rote social networking technologies.
Bloggers in demand from brands
Whatever you blog about, chances are you’ve been approached recently by a big brand looking for coverage.
And although I’ve heard about this happening across the city, it isn’t just a Manchester thing – witness the Midlands based mom blogger Linda Jones’ recent Disney-funded trip exclusively for bloggers.
Such a non-press press trip for a major holiday company would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and is a clear example of a shift in marketing strategy that I’ve a feeling we will see more of going forward – afterall what better way to engage with a well-defined target audience than through niche publications such as blogs?
(I have contacted the Disney press office to ask what made them decide to handle the trip in this way and to see how they will gauge its success. Hopefully a comment will be forthcoming.)
It’s an issue that has promoted some interesting conversations in recent weeks about the ethics of taking freebies in return for words. It’s an issue which journalists previously had to deal with – a fine line between product trial and advertorial. (Although, as I’ve posted on here previously, for some reason press trips to exotic locations often seem to skip happily under the radar!)
As there’s no guidelines on these sort of issues (and long may that remain the case), it’s a matter for each individual blogger to develop their own ‘code of conduct’ . I’m regularly asked to try out food products and have developed these rules of engagement;
1. The relationship is fully disclosed in the blog post – the company that has provided the product named plus the fact the product was supplied for free.
2. If I don’t like, think it’s poor, over-priced or whatever – I say so. Just because it’s free, doesn’t buy support or favour.
I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on these, or from any other blogger who has attempted to draw up their own personal code of conduct in these matters.
It’s a topic that’s currently under discussion within the Manchester Bloggers group – join us on Facebook here.
A PR company is hoping to sponsor a future meet up in return for being able to engage directly with bloggers who have a music based audience – isn’t that what used to happen with press briefings for entertainment journos? Changing world indeed!
But proving the tried and trusted inducmenets are still the best in the new world, free alcohol is the offer for bloggers at what is being billed as a “blog launch” for the Cutting Room Experiment happening on Thursday evening at 6-7:30 at the Bay Horse, Manchester. Read more about that inititiative on The Manchizzle blog here.
links for 2009-05-18
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The hyperlocal upstarts who would replace their hometown newspapers do well to remember the lessons associated with WaPo’s failure: namely, using outside reporters who were unable to integrate themselves into the neighborhood; lack of major promotion; inability to tie coverage to the print daily.
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Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.
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New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some—like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with interactive maps of the protagonists’ networks of influence, and NightJack, the revealing and depressing blog of an anonymous British policeman, which won the Orwell prize last month—enhance society’s understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.
Links from Futuresonic
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All the pictures from all those at Futuresonic using the tag Futr09 on Flickr.
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This years conference was really well organised and brought a great collection of speakers together. The ranging insight and expertise they brought to the conference felt relevant and the mix of practicing artists and ‘tech-industry’ representatives generated some interesting debates on the platform.
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It’s the last place you’d expect to hear John Lennon’s anti-religion anthem Imagine, but the tune rang out yesterday from the bells of an Anglican cathedral.
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Stream from Tim Difford which inlcudes links providing more information to Adam Greenfield’s resentation about networked city environments.
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Hearing their lucid presentations, it was hard not to wonder where Digital Britain took their advice, and how they could miss so much. And, then again it was possible to wonder if Digital Britain matters. The kids are already there. And the semantic web’s killer services will likely spring up from nowhere and go pandemic before…
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Liveblogging in FriendFeed was a cynch. Having set up a dedicated FriendFeed Group for people to discuss the summit, I created a new discussion thread within that Group for each talk that I attended. The title of the thread was sent automatically to Twitter to help draw people into the discussion. I then spent the duration of each talk typing a short paragraph about each point that the speaker made. People following the liveblog saw these appear in realtime without the need to refresh their browser.
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Coverage via FriendFeed made up a lot of the ongoing commentary and you can access this here thanks to Martin Bryant who worked tirelessly to create this throughout the summit.
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Some very artistic shots by SamScam. Considering the festival essentially took place in a couple of fixed locations. Sam’s eye for the different has really paid off to produce such a stunnimg array of pictures.
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