The keen-eyed of you will have noticed that I haven’t posted anything here at 14sandwiches in over a week. What’s happened? Have I lost my blogging ‘bug’? Well, the even more keen-eyed of you will have noticed that that’s not the case at all.

I’ve recently started writing for The Next Web. It’s fantastic to be working for one of Europe’s biggest tech blogs but it does mean that most of the things I’d normally write here will be going there instead.

If you’re not already subscribed to The Next Web, do it - we’re putting up great tech content every day and if you enjoy what I write here it’ll mainly be there from now on. Of course, I’ll still be writing here too - just not as often.

[Image credit: Eggrollstan on Flickr]

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I’ve written more about this over at TheNextWeb but I just thought I’d share this video with you here. I shot it last Friday when I went to visit the University of Salford’s Acoustic Research Labs to see the work they’re doing on building a ‘Global Sound Map’ in a project called Sound Around You.

I’ll let Charlie Mydlarz, the man behind the project explain how it works in the video below.

Introduction to Sound Around You from Martin Bryant on Vimeo.

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On Wednesday evening I attended a talk in Manchester that was part of the DMEX (Digital Media Exchange) programme. This is a training course for television freelancers who want to diversify into digital media work. With a slump in new TV commissions, this is definitely a smart move for many of them.

The main reason I went along was to hear a presentation from one of Britain’s most prolific social media content creators, Christian Payne AKA Documentally.

Although much of what he discussed would be nothing new to the ears of most 14sandwiches readers, he had lots of advice for those just starting out on their adventures on the social web. It was the anecdotes about how he made the transition from professional photographer to social media ‘guru’ that were fascinating to my ears.

In 2005 Christian set out to make a name for himself by doing photo-journalism in northern Iraq. Flying to eastern Turkey and getting a taxi to the Iraqi border he found the Kurdish people in the war-torn country to be welcoming and keen to show him their lives. Despite uncovering newsworthy stories, upon his return to England he found no news outlets were interested in his work. Not to be beaten, he created a Youtube video of his photos accompanied by an audio commentary and suddenly people took notice.

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. Inspired by the iconic Che Guevara image (”I’m not a Communist!”, he insists), it has stood him in good stead over the past few years. By sticking to the same bright red avatar on every social network and web service he’s created a personal brand that few online have matched.

Christian sees work as a “side effect” of the continuous online communications he’s involved in. Just by networking and sharing his life via services like Twitter, AudioBoo and 12seconds he’s managed to build a reputation that’s seen him get work promoting Bletchley Park, theatres and films, not to mention covering political events from a new social angle. Just last week he was interviewing Conservative leader David Cameron via his AudioBoo account which has a special 30 minute limit (the normal limit is 5 minutes).

The future of social media, Christian believes, will be an emphasis on what he calls “The gaps between the apps”. Portable IDs to use across multiple services and increasingly powerful filtering of all the content out there are what he sees as the most important developments currently emerging.

When it came to the Q&A session at the end of the talk I asked him for his views on the problems I discussed in this post recently - isn’t it worrying that the next generation of semantic search engines will be able to collate all the information about us online into a detailed personal profile?

Christian said that he’s disciplined in never geotagging his house and locations relating to his family but aside from that he sees no problem in throwing out information about himself. He argued that his online network is so large and strong that it is ’self-policing’. You could hardly impersonate Documentally successfully when his profile online is so high.

So, maybe the solution to the problem of personal information online is simply to embrace The Naked 21st Century and tell your life’s stories without fear. After all, it’s certainly not done Christian Payne any harm.

On a side note, one of the DMEX programme participants has produced a brilliant video diary of his experiences. If you want to see what happens when a video editor with years of broadcast TV experience turns his hand to online media take a look at Gordon Howe’s Vimeo account.

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Chi-chi Ekweozor

Do you reckon it’s possible to visit the UK, Italy, India, China, Brazil and Mexico in one week? How about if you stop off at a world-class landmark in each country on the way? You’d have to be mad to try, right? Well Chi-chi Ekweozor is obviously insane. The Manchester-based Social Media Consultant is taking the skills she uses in her day job to help her crowdsource help with her epic voyage.

Taking her cue from Paul Smith’s Twitchhiker project in which he traveled around the world relying solely on the goodwill of Twitter users, Chi-chi aims to travel to see The 7 New Wonders of the World in 7 days in September, raising £777,000 for 7 charities.

Social Media is at the heart of Chi-chi’s project. So far she’s been getting help with her itinerary and planning from the followers of her dedicated Twitter account. The next stage is to get an official T-shirt designed. Aspiring designers upload their idea to Flickr and there’s money in it for the winner. Chi-chi will also be setting up a number of gigs with lineups crowdsourced through Myspace. A number of Youtube video diaries will chart the project’s progress.

Chi-chi sets off on her brief but epic journey on the 9th of September this year. She’s very much open to suggestions to improve the project so get in touch with her through the project’s website if you want to help. I just hope she’s using social media on the trip - I want a live video stream from each Wonder or I’m not donating!

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3.ly offers the shortest URLs yet

When you’ve only got 140 characters to work with, having a good URL shortening service is essential on Twitter. The default Bit.ly service is actually pretty long compared to some of the alternatives. I rounded up some of the best last year and concluded that is.gd was the best if brevity was important to you.

Now a new service has launched that takes things probably as short as they can possibly get. 3.ly URLs are just 14 characters long compared to is.gd’s 17. It’s all a bit bare-bones at the moment, it has URL customisation as an option but there’s no click-tracking, a feature offered by some of its rivals. The website promises advanced features coming soon, though.

Can URLs get even shorter? I’m not sure they can but given the popularity of Twitter I’m sure someone’s working on it.

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Twitter has become such a success in part because it offers an insight into its users lives in a uniquely intimate way. Reading someone’s tweets is often like lifting the top off their head and peering directly into their thoughts. If that person suddenly dies though, those tweets suddenly take on a whole new dimension.

The Twitter account of rapper Dolla got attention this week after he was killed hours after his first tweet. Despite the hype around this story, as a new user Dolla had only posted two tweets before his death. To read the tweets of someone who had actively been using the service for a long time is a lot more distressing.

I never followed Roberta Frazier (AKA @lilyhill) on Twitter. In fact, I only became aware of her after Christian Payne (AKA @Documentally) posted a message about her death yesterday. In amongst her automated Feedly imports, it’s clear from her tweets that she was a tech-savvy tweeter who was supportive when her followers needed help. She was also a sporadic but talented blogger. I never knew her but my condolences go to her family and friends.

The last tweet on her account reads: “This is lilyhills daughter. She passed away on wednesday due to a stroke”. It’s a reminder of just how fragile life is and how we will be remembered in part by the things we create and the way we treat people. If you interact with social media on a daily basis, it’s worth remembering that every tweet, every blog post could be your last. Make it a good one.

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If you’re a web user outside the USA you may well have been in the following situation. You find a site that has an embedded video clip. “Watch this clip - it’s brilliant!” says the page author, so you click ‘Play’ and instead of a video you’re greeted by a message that says something like “Sorry, this content isn’t available in your country”.

It’s a frustrating experience. The content you want to watch is online and right in front of you. The only thing stopping you watching it is an artificial block on IP numbers from your country. You can see why it gets people angry and you can see why tech bloggers have ended up calling this region-blocking of web content ‘Georetarding’ (or sometimes ‘Geotarding‘).

I’ve certainly felt frustrated when I’ve tried to view something and I’ve been blocked because of where I live. The thing is, while using sentences like “Hulu’s content is all georetarded” might be mildly cathartic for bloggers, it’s a flawed accusation.

Calling sites like Hulu ‘Georetarded’ implies that they are just holding out on an international launch and that they could just flip a switch right now and everyone would be happy. The fact is that TV rights licensing is far more complex than most people realise. It’s not just a case of saying to TV networks “Can we show your programmes online and we’ll give you some money?”.

Having worked on several TV programmes myself I know just how complicated it is having to get clearance for every piece of music in the programme and every archive clip from another show or a film. Sometimes rights to this music and footage is controlled by different people in different countries. The issue of who you pay when a programme’s being shown globally online must be a nightmare.

Then there’s actors. Actors get paid ‘repeat fees’ every time a show they’re in is reshown. This can make reshowing old programmes a deceptively expensive business.

Then there’s the networks in individual countries who have paid for exclusive rights to show a programme in their territory. Deals have to be struck with each of those networks. While I’m sure that online streaming of programmes is factored into new TV licensing agreements these days, there is undoubtedly a maze of problems that must be negotiated before programmes can be shown globally.

If Hulu, or any other ‘georetarded’ service, flipped a switch right now to allow global access to their content a lot of viewers would be ecstatic. They just can’t do that though unless they have a deathwish - the lawsuits would be flying in within minutes.

So, bloggers! Stop moaning about things you can’t have yet and realise that there are people working behind the scenes to make the ‘access it all, anywhere’ online media utopia a reality. The first steps to that reality are getting closer. Hulu is rumoured to be launching in the UK later this year so other countries can’t be far behind.

Besides, if you are going to moan can’t you pick a less ugly word than ‘Georetarded’?

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Over the past week the concept of ‘The Semantic Web‘ has made the jump from academic theory to fledgling reality. The launch on Friday of the first semantic search engine Wolfram Alpha has generated a lot of hype in the tech sphere. In addition to that big news, Google’s forthcoming semantic search solution, Google Squared, and Sir Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data project have been getting press as the excitement for this brave new world of search grows.

The idea that we will soon be able to take data from all over web and pull it into a form that’s useful to us is highly seductive. However, there’s a dark side to semantic search that leads me to hesitate in welcoming our new Web 3.0 overlords. While this new era will allow you to easily generate data about anything you care to research, someone else could just as easily be researching you.

I’ve never been particularly worried about the data I put online about myself. I always hold something back and after all, it would take a lot of work for anyone to find and piece together that data into something that they could use in any harmful way against me. Now the semantic web is suddenly on our doorstep and it will suddenly be a whole lot easier for people to find all sorts of information about anyone within seconds.

Do you share your listening habits online? Maybe you occasionally publish your location to something like Brightkite or Google Latitude? Maybe you share your Amazon shopping list with the world? You almost certainly mention tiny details about your life on a regular basis online via services like Twitter. By pulling these tiny bits of information together, the semantic search engine of the future will be a stalker and conman’s dream. Suddenly it will be possible to ask: “Where does John Smith live and work and what are his hobbies? What are his children called?”

Imagine the ways that information could be used against you by someone that meant you harm. Suddenly information that used to take weeks to build up could be collated in seconds.

With issues like ID cards and Deep Packet Inspection in the news in the UK, the idea that ‘Big Brother is watching us’ is at the forefront of people’s minds. In the age of the Semantic Web, ‘Little Brother’ could be just as much of a threat.

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The view from the 'Bloggers Booth' at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit

As something of a blogging obsessive, the opportunity to spend two days writing about some of my favourite topics at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit was too good to pass up. On Thursday morning at the Contact Theatre, Sarah Hartley and I set up a ‘blogging booth’ at the back of Space One in the Theatre. A bit of sweet-talking to the technical staff even gained us a 4-way plug socket to charge our laptops.

Being the seasoned journalist, Sarah opted to cover the Summit in a considered, reflective way - picking out the key stories and serving them up in easy-to-digest packages. I, meanwhile, being a real-time web junkie with the attention span of a fly with ADD, decided to liveblog the sessions.

What is a liveblog?

For the uninitiated, liveblogging is the process of covering an event in bitesize pieces by frequently updating a blog post with new information as the event goes on. Probably the most popular liveblog posts in the world are the ones that the big gadget blogs, Engadget and Gizmodo, do when Apple unveil a new product. The Apple faithful around the world frantically refresh their browsers as a blogger at the launch event keeps them updated with breadcrumbs of information about what usually amounts to a not-terribly-exciting incremental product revision.

I felt a liveblog would be a good idea for Futuresonic as quite a lot people I know couldn’t come to the event, whether that be for financial or other reasons. With some big-name thinkers in the social technology sphere talking there was bound to be a high level of interest, so I decided to provide a running commentary and leave the considered reflection for Sarah’s posts.

Choosing the right tool

My first job was to decide what tool to use for liveblogging. My options were threefold. Firstly, there was Twitter. With a short message format and the ability for people to easily subscribe to your messages it’s no surprise that until recently Twitter was a popular tool for live coverage of conferences.

The problem is that not everyone you follow is going to be interested in the conference and if you’re sending a tweet every minute about something they don’t care about you’re going to be heamorrhaging followers in no time. You could set up a new Twitter account specifically for the job but if people start to comment on your coverage via replies, you end up with a fractured conversation in which only you get to see the full picture. No-one else will get to see all the comments you’re receiving.

My second option was a dedicate liveblogging app. CoverItLive is a good looking, easy to use and feature-packed tool designed specifically for the job of liveblogging. Importing it into your blog is a simple process that takes seconds. You can publish reader comments directly into the liveblog stream (once you approve them) which makes for a much easier to follow conversation. ScibbleLive is another service that offers a similar featureset.

Some people were advising me to try one of these dedicated apps but I had other ideas. I wanted my liveblog to be as social, sharable and as fast as possible. For me there was only one choice - FriendFeed.

Created by a team of former Google staff who had previously worked on projects like Gmail, FriendFeed is the perfect example of where the social web is in mid-2009. Originally developed as place to share your content from across a wide range of web services (blog entries, photos, Twitter messages and much more) it has developed into a real-time multimedia discussion platform with huge potential to replace Twitter as the digerati’s communications service of choice in the near future. You can read why I believe this will happen in a post from a couple of weeks ago here.

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.

Reader participation was easy - anyone with a point to make could add their comment directly into the comment stream. People not at the Summit could add questions which could be answered by me or others in the room. What’s more, because the liveblogs are permanently stored within FriendFeed they’re easily sharable and searchable and people can add to them at any time in the future.

Is it worth running a liveblog?

Being a liveblogger means you sacrifice a certain amount of your own enjoyment of the event you’re covering. I needed to keep my focus entirely on the speaker, channeling their words straight through my fingers and onto the internet. While my readers got an instant commentary on what was being said, I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to actually reflect on the contents of each talk. It was also a tiring experience. My liveblogs towards the end of each day were slower and little thinner on detail than the morning ones. I also worried that I may have over-simplified or misrepresented some of the more complex concepts discussed. I’ve had no complaints about this as of yet, though.

Was it worth it despite the downsides? Absolutely. The FriendFeed Group only attracted 13 subscribers but a few people contributed their own thoughts to the liveblog stream, making it an interactive experience. There were also a good few ‘lurkers’ following along who either talked to me afterwards or thanked me via Twitter. Some of the speakers even used Twitter to link to my liveblog of their talk, which was a nice validation of my efforts.

Will I liveblog again? If the opportunity arises I’ll jump at the chance. In the meantime, if I brush up on my old Media Law classes from university, I’ve probably developed the skills to be a court reporter!

You can read my liveblogs from the Futuresonic Social Technology Summit over at the Summit’s FriendFeed Group.

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A Ceramic Sound Sculpture at Cube Gallery

Day One of Futuresonic wasn’t really a day, rather an evening of events reflecting the vast scope of the festival.

First up was a short event at the Cube Gallery, where a wide range of art was on display. Sonic sculptures, such as plants that made noises when you touched them, shared gallery space with metal detectors and a screening of a film featuring an enactment of the battle between Red and Grey Squirrels, as enacted by wheelchair-bound basketball players(!)

AudioBoo: Cacophony of Plants at Cube Gallery

The Festival Rangers began their reporting duties by streaming live video from the gallery. Fiston in particular was Qiking for his life - interviewing

From there a classic Routemaster bus was supposed to take us on to the Contact Theatre for the night’s keynote speech. It ended up being delayed thanks to a smashed window (well, it is Manchester after all) so a much more conventional Magic Bus took us to our destination.

First on the menu at The Contact Theatre was a performance of ‘Touch the Stars’, a project curated by the Jodrell Bank radio telescope centre in Cheshire. Using a laptop, an astronomer remotely controlled the telescope, taking in the sounds of the cosmos which were fed to an electronic musician who twiddled with his synths to sculpt them into something rather special.

It made for multilayered, freeform music. It really was good stuff. Who knew the galaxy was a talented experimental musician?

Hacking the Earth - the keynote speech

I have to confess that ‘geohacking’ was an area I hadn’t heard of before tonight. Jamais Cascio discussed how it was imperative that we ‘buy ourselves some time’ in the battle to reduce our carbon emissions. His suggestion on how to do this? Artificially cooling the temperature using experimental methods. These included injecting sulphur into the sky in order to reflect heat away from the planet.

This would only be a temporary solution but it might allow us time to sort out our problem with carbon emissions. Jamais acknowledged that there will be many different views on this idea. Meddling with the environment may have unintended consequences in changing the weather in certain parts of the world. This could lead to political friction or worse, military conflict.

It was an interesting introduction to a complex topic from Jamais who was a brilliant speaker who’s obviously given this talk many times before. What he might not have had before was a drunken heckler.

Yes, the free wine available in the foyer may have gone to the head of one woman who kept interrupting Jamais, shouting “It’s all speculative!” while quoting out of date research to back up her claim. Unlike some people, I don’t liken global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers, but there was no doubt this woman had to be go and she was finally persuaded to leave.

It was a memorable start to what should be a fascinating conference. I’m liveblogging many of the talks over at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit FriendFeed Group. Feel free to come along and join in!

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