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.

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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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.

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!

Over two days a wide range of big names in Social Media thinking and practice will be speaking. It really is exciting to have such a big event on my doorstep as people involved in some of my favourite initiatives are going to be there. Ewan McIntosh of 4IP (Channel 4’s innovation fund that helped launch AudioBoo), Alfie Dennen (who organised the Britglyph project) and Selene Kolman of Latitude-beating (in execution, if not user numbers) geolocation network Bliin are all going to be giving presentations.

Normally, with a full time job, I can’t get to this kind of thing. This time I’m lucky enough to actually be involved in the event. Over the past few weeks I’ve been training a group of young people aged 18 to 25 in Social Media reporting skills. I’ll write a post about this process soon but the Futuresonic Festival Rangers, as we’ve called them, are now ready. Armed with Nokia N85 phones they’ll be tweeting, photographing and video streaming their way around the festival.

Given my ever-growing love of FriendFeed, all their output is being aggregated into their FriendFeed account which you can find here: http://friendfeed.com/futr09rangers

Beyond the Festival Rangers’ work, I’ll be liveblogging many of the Social Technologies Summit’s events using FriendFeed. Using Twitter for a live blog just creates annoyance for anyone who doesn’t want to know about the event. With FriendFeed, interaction is so much easier and others can join in in a structured way.  So, if you are interested in the speakers at the Summit subscribe to the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit FriendFeed Group. There’s a small group of subscribers at present but they’re interacting, which bodes well for the next few days.

I’ll post a retrospective of the event next week here at 14sandwiches.

Those are the words I closed this post with in September last year. I’d visited the offices of my local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, and been impressed by their multimedia approach in the face of a grim future for printed newspapers. Through integrating local television, web video, microblogging and mobile technology they were facing declining sales head-on. By embracing the very technologies that were threatening its existence, MEN Media was showing it was better placed than many other local media outlets around the country to weather the storm of the current financial climate.

Now, just eight months later, they’ve thrown that all away. In a series of cost cutting excercises over the past month they have:

• Cut the budget of the local TV station, Channel M, to even more of a shoestring than it was before. Most of the entertainment content has been axed, including all their excellent coverage of the local music scene. The staff of the station has been halved.
• Significantly cut back on journalists and shut down all the satellite offices around the region that provided local contact points for people with stories to share.
• Following the (voluntary) departure last week of the Manchester Evening News’ head of online editorial, Sarah Hartley, the future is unclear for the paper’s pioneering online offerings. These include a variety of blogs, experiments in microblogging and live video streaming of important events, not to mention the strong links Sarah had built up with the local digital creative community. The blog that covered the city’s digital scene, The Mancunian Way, has today relaunched as an “It’s a funny old world”/”Have your say”-type offering with a much broader remit.

As local writer Craig McGinty put it “The MEN seems determined to cut its journalism costs yet at the same time it is distancing itself from local communities, be they geographical or interest based, eventually though it will be swamped as these groups gather and power forward”.

The management at MEN Media seem determined to pilot their company into a death spiral. Channel M is due to expand on to digital terrestrial television this year, bringing it to a much wider audience than it currently gets. That audience just won’t bother to tune into their local station if it doesn’t offer a good variety of relevant and interesting content. Likewise, any fool can see that without investing in journalism people will stop reading the paper and find their news elsewhere.

It seems that financial constraints forced the management’s hand before the investments that had so impressed me last autumn could pay off. The Manchester Evening News is an important part of daily life in Greater Manchester and to see all its strides forward in recent times lead to nothing is hugely saddening.

When times are hard you need to cut back but to reduce the local TV station to a news and sport service with a skeleton staff and risk the quality of your news by cutting journalists is like a greengrocer dealing with hard times by selling nothing but the cheapest apples. One of you most popular products might be still there but the lack of variety and quality is hardly going to make you popular with customers..

The only positive outcome of these cutbacks is that they leave huge gaps in the market that can be filled by enterprising groups with much lower overheads than MEN Media. If there’s one place these people can thrive, it’s the hive of creativity that is Manchester. I cant wait to see what they come up with.

MYVP's 'Spring Trinity' of films defy conventional 'youth film' wisdom by actually being worth watching

Think “youth film project” and what probably springs to mind is images of kids from the poor part of town being coerced into making ‘gritty’, poorly acted dramas about knife crime. It doesn’t have to be that way though. That was demonstrated today at the premiere of three short films produced by young people involved in Manchester Youth Volunteering Project (MYVP).

In a project that has lasted several months, MYVP volunteers have worked with local production company Littlestar to research, plan and create three issue-led films that don’t just resort to the usual cliches of bad drama and apalling raps. Instead the issues of domestic violence, mental illness and antisocial behaviour have been explored in creative and original ways.

I was at the premiere of the three films at The Cornerhouse in Manchester this morning where a surprisingly high number of people for a Sunday morning turned up to witness the first screening of the films. I managed to grab interviews with some of the people involved in the project. If you’re reading this in a feed reader the embedded audio might not appear, so follow the links to the individual Audioboo pages.

First, Lance Bell of MYVP explained the background the project (link)

Phil, a 22 year-old MYVP volunteer talked about his starring role in one of the films (link)

Alice is another of the young filmmakers, and a bit of a film buff too (link)

Maria from Littlestar talks about the production process behind the films (link)

Steve Balshaw, organiser of Salford Film Festival was in attendance and had strong views on youth film projects (link)

Finally, Sasha from MYVP who was closely involved in the project and is very pleased with the film (link)

And now the films themselves.
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Kate Feld interviews Chris Killen at the Manchester Blog Awards

The Manchester Blog Awards took place this week and it led me to have to lift a veil of anonymity I’ve enjoyed for a year.

Of course, if any city in the UK was going to have an awards ceremony for blogs it would be Manchester.  As the pioneering city that gave birth to the modern computer and many groundbreaking bands, it’s never been a city to shy away from embracing the new.  Now in its third year, the awards are run as part of Manchester Literature Festival.

With an obvious interest in the local social media scene, I was keen to be there.  There was also the small matter of my two blogs being shortlisted for prizes.  This blog was on the Best New Blog list, while Manchester Buses was up for the Best Neighbourhood Blog prize.  I don’t mention Manchester Buses to many people.  Let’s face it, when compared to to the technology and the internet that I write about here it sounds incredibly sad.  I enjoy writing it and it’s certainly found its niche with lots of regular readers.  I decided that if I did win I’d just have to forget the anonymity and go public.

The night began with readings from all the nominees for the Best Writing prize and a DJ set from local music bloggers.  Then it was on to the prizes.  14sandwiches didn’t win (Best New Blog went to Follow The Yellowbrick Road) but Manchester Buses did win its category!  Having won I found myself having to come out as a bus blogger.  While most people were surprisingly accepting of my odd hobby, my sister did have a look of amused shame on her face when I told her.

On a side note, I decided to use my new Nokia N82 to capture the event. So how did it fare?  Arriving with a full battery at 7pm, I probably took about ten photos and streamed live video via Qik for about 25 minutes. Within two hours the battery was completely flat.  The moral of this story?  Get a spare Nokia battery!

You can find the full winners’ list from the awards over at The Manchizzle.

The programmes are produced by Let’s Go Global, a Trafford-based organisation (part funded by the council) who do great things to train young people in media skills so I’m not going to criticise them. The thing is though, they could be doing these programmes soooo much better for very little extra investment. That investment isn’t even necessarily money – just a little time.

1. They should stick to a few, good, presenters

If you’re going to get a council worker each week to present the show you’re going to get mixed results. Some are better than others but they’re all quite ‘flat’ in their presentation style – engage us, why don’t ya! Why not stick to a core team of three or four good presenters instead of working your way round everyone in the office who’s not too shy to appear on camera.

2. They should make it more visual

How about some pictures of what you’re talking about? All Windows and Mac computers in the last five years have shipped with free video editing software. Even if you can’t get video of the new Broomwood Centre opening, for example, you could get some photos to show while you’re talking about it! Funnily enough some of the early programmes did feature an occasional cutaway or two but recent programmes have lost that. A five minute locked-off shot just isn’t that fun to watch – you might as well be doing an audio podcast!

3. They should be using Flash video as default

Click on a video at present and you go through to separate page related to something called ‘Planet eStream’ which seems to be geared toward use in schools. The page has spaces for information such as ‘Teacher’, ‘Department’ and ‘Key Stages’. Not a very professional look for a council! Then there’s the embedded Windows Media Player for watching the video itself. It can take a frustrating amount of time to load. In the age of Youtube, everyone uses Flash video to instantly load and watch videos. why not default to that? On my connection at least, it worked a lot more smoothly.

So, Trafford are doing something good here, but with a little spit and polish it could be something great.

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