Proving Ourselves In A Field – Mashed Festivals At Shambala
Since October last year I’ve been researching and developing my idea of bringing Mobile Journalism to Music Festivals. As festival season kicked off the website started to take shape. With help from Caroline Beavon, a few early experiments in uploading and curating content took place at Glastonbury, Sudoeste in Portugal and Off The Cuff in Birmingham but the main target was a full blown operation at Shambala Festival which took place on August Bank Holiday weekend 2010.
I’ve spent a lot of time developing the site and defining the brand over the summer, it’s still very much in development. In fact, one of the main advantages of working with Shambala was that they were open to new ideas and willing to help us develop, but naturally there was a degree of reciprocation with this relationship.
Shambala suggested Mashed Festivals (MF) offered media training to teenagers and taught them how to produce online content using mobile techniques. I wasn’t too keen to do this in the beginning as I wanted content on the MF site to be professionally captured from a team of journalists with different expertise. The best stuff for the site would be produced by my core team which would set the bench mark for the quality of the user generated content (UGC) - I was concerned the teenage training element would devalue this.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. With the cooperation of Shambala we sent out an invitation to all teen ticket members and cherry picked a small team of six girls and boys who were enthusiastic and talented to boot who became the MF Press Gang. Their final output which comprised 40 stories on the mobile optimised microsite is of such a high standard that I’m now moving away from the idea of curating unfocussed UGC altogether.
I still kept my professional core team who had a breadth of experience but were able to specialise and train in certain areas. I offered advice and assistance in photography, Juliet Spare advised on audio and Jon Kennard’s expertise lie in film and video. Caroline Beavon was in control of the process of collation and uploading.
Jon Kennard details his experience training for video with Hannah Lepper and Kyle Douglas here.
Both Iona Berry and Holly Game were studying photography at college. Iona brought her own camera and was pretty self-sufficient. We provided Holly with a camera and she needed a little more encouragement and guidance. I offered advice on what looked good online and stressed the importance of speed rather than spending days filtering and treating photos.
None of the teenagers had any experience in audio but wanted to learn so Juliet trained two members of the press gang. Josephine Gilbert learnt very quickly delivering perceptive interviews.
Piers Baker experimented with different media and with contributions from his girlfriend Phoebe and other members, delivered some excellent self contained packages.
Some of the best material came when the gang teamed up to combine skills. My favourite examples being the slideshows. Which included contributions from all the group.
My favourite experience was taking the Press Gang backstage for the first time, showing them how to gain access, secure interviews and find the person in charge! This resulted in a wealth of material and a superb interview.
I was very pleased the Press Gang didn’t just stick to one skill. Being competent in a few different fields is important for journalism overall these days and vital for Online Journalism.
Making Our Presence Known #intheroom
According to Paul Murphy from The Destroyers one of the reasons why we missed out on the European Capital Of Culture award was that when the judges visited the city no-one on the ground cared about either the award or the cultural ongoings.
The traditional perception with Birmingham is that we do plenty of creative and cultural things but we don't like to shout about it. Cllr Martin Mullaney has pointed out several times during this City Of Culture bid that as a city we have very low levels of cultural engagement per head of population. I was determined in my role as Social Media Manager to increase engagement and prove that, given the right platform, we would shout about it.
My first day on the job involved working on the 24hour Blog run by Jon Bounds. We received a phenomenal amount of contribution to the Posterous site in a 24 hour period. Since then our engagement was spread across Facebook, Twitter and the main website.
When monitoring other shortlisted cities social media activities it was interesting to discover their bids were mainly limited to Facebook. We on the other hand had a much larger amount of Twitter followers. Today it passed the 1000 mark.
Only eight people were allowed to present the Birmingham's case to the judging panel in Liverpool, we wanted to increase our presence. Birmingham had plans to take a Battle Bus which would stage cultural flashmobs around Liverpool on the day.
Public Relations Manager Geoff Coleman mentioned doing something similar to 24hour blog and I pitched the idea of using Cover It Live as a scrolling commentary which could be displayed 'in the room'. It was important to gather all the different threads across multiple platforms. I also thought it was an ideal opportunity to make a virtual event out of our final submission. I passionately stated at the time,
"Can I just say that Birmingham's strength as a digital city is one of our greatest assets and it would be doing ourselves a great disservice not to do something really innovative."
I'm pleased to say that it was a success, there were around 900 messages of support over the period, and the Council Site where Cover It Live was embedded reported a spike of over 1000 unique users.
@Katchoo has blogged about what it was like to be involved in the event. A point well made was that it wasn't just the usual people mentioning the same things. The real success of the event came from the variety of comments, the amount of people involved and the many cultural things Birmingham offers. We're a culturally rich city that deserves recognition. And for once we really shouted about it.
Starting Spaghetti Junctions
Since last semester I’ve been thinking about designing a game called Spaghetti Junctions.
Following a few experiments in other areas, including trying to wrangle with Ruby On Rails, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and attempted to get a prototype running on Wordpress.
I’ve adapted the platform for my needs, without much technical knowledge. Credit for using Wordpress must be given to Jon Bounds who suggested the idea. I had been concerned that I might be giving away too much by letting people ‘behind the scenes’ but I didn’t realise how much control I could have over what I can display and what options are available to users.
I’ve installed various plugins which have allowed me to enhance the experience. Firstly I’ve put Ultimate Google Analytics in place so that the back end doesn’t get bogged down in the built in stats. Secondly, I’ve installed a Countdown Timer so that I can create round times and therefore maintain interest through levelling (for the purposes of this test period this isn’t set). And I’ve installed WP-Tables Reloaded to create a scoreboard.
At the moment this score board is a manually updated CSV, Excel sheet with the calculation boxes deselected. It’s uploaded but I don’t think it will take too much trouble to make this more ‘live’ by running this through a more automated Google Doc. At the moment I’m having some issues with it being able to correctly parse this data. If anyone has some tips it’d be much appreciated.
I’ve also tried a lot of mapping plugins. The easiest for users to use in a post is WP-Geo however although I can activate polylines I want to be able to use them to display specific Spaghetti Junctions. This is one of the main points of the game. I’ve got a feeling I might need to delve into JQuery. One alternative solution I thought of was exporting the everything into my own Google Map and then manually adding. Is this possible?
I'm now using a very versatile plugin called Geo Mashup which allows me to add polylines it by marking it in the categories. I can also download the KML. However it still fairly manual.
"Manual" is a keyword here. And this is my main obstacle to overcome if I was to make this in anyway scalable. If there was some way of automating the review process so that the facts or myths could be approved via rating might be some solution to having an all seeing ‘Chinnmaster’. Also I need to work out a way of further automating the score process. I suspect the answer might lie in Ruby On Rails. At least I've made a start!
So here is Spaghetti Junctions. Please play it and let me know what you think so far.
Village Underground Residency
As mentioned in previous blogs I've been doing a consultancy placement at Village Underground. I spent Monday and Tuesday in residence and two very different events were covered. On Monday we had a gig featuring TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone Rain Machine project, with Marques Toliver in support. On Tuesday I was able to catch the ‘get in’ for Collaborative Dance Experience’s debut production Out Of Time.
I took with me 2 Kodak Zi8s and a Flip, my Dictaphone and an SLR camera. I was very happy with the material I shot. My first catch was Marques Toliver performing In The Cab. We were able to grab him between soundchecks and take him to the drivers cab of one of the tube trains on the roof. After his interview he performed an exclusive song. I shot this on all three cameras but put a quick rush on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xJxgFuL2SQ
Village Underground’s Social Life
Following a meeting with Auro and Clément at the beginning of April, I managed to sort some dates to come down and cover activities at Village Underground. Before I came down it was important to have some social media networks more sorted.
Village Underground now has a Twitter Account, a YouTube channel, and a Flickr site. I’ve also been overhauling their Facebook and Myspace presence. At the simplest level this has meant using all the logos and backgrounds so branding is carried across all elements. It also means effectively pulling content from elsewhere and thinking about re-distribution.
More Audio Visual Mapping Possiblities
Following my audio map blog Woices contacted me and offered me the infospot for free for a year. You can download the iPhone app from here. I'd love to know how you get on with it. Hopefully they have plans to develop an Android version soon.
I was also talked through the early stages of Ruby and given a book on Rails by @budhhamagnet whilst at Ruby In The Pub. Although I know I've got a steep hill to climb I think I might be able to develop something even better.
In preparation for International Dance Festival frolics Chris Unitt has alerted me to the possibilities of playing around with augmented reality app Layar. Keep an eye and ear out for more developments...
In the mean time you may not have spotted the enhanced podcast, with pictures in iPod or iTunes or just a nice sound tour for everyone else. Download the enhanced podcast here. Or the normal MP3 here.
Why stay on the 'side?
Putting the Created In Birmingham shop in the Bullring in the centre of Birmingham means that we're proud of our art.
A bug bear I have about Birmingham is creativity occurs on the fringes of the city, and often this can make us appear self deprecating. It's almost as if were embarrassed by our artists so we push them to the outskirts. Don't get me wrong, I'm behind the redefined Eastside. In fact I wrote the brochure's main copy. But where I struggled was working out how to make art accessible and appealing in description, without appearing to trivialise or belittle 'the art.' A picture paints a thousand words, I just wanted people to visit Eastside and make up their own minds. Hopefully, many will this weekend.
The great thing about CiB shop's centrality is that people can check it out, with very little effort. If this shop was based in Digbeth, for example, they wouldn't have a fraction of the footfall. Take a look at this large and diverse mix of people in this 30 minute sample (recorded by me at 11am on a Thursday).
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/10347275[/vimeo]
Okay, Pete Ashton in particular acknowledges it's "in a shopping centre" so there are a few pieces that might be too leftfield for this consumer-centric audience. But its strong centre-stage presence is great exposure for all artists adorning the walls and shelves. And intrinsically Created In Birmingham features independent artists creating original pieces.
Besides wouldn't it be great if when the City Of Culture judges get off the train and the first place they pop into is this shop?
Home Of Metal audio and mapping
I'm fascinated by the capabilities of Geolocation so I decided as part of my multimedia portfolio I'd play around with some audio which was recorded on a Home Of Metal tour, hosted by Chris Phipps in March 2009.
To Vimeo Or Not To Vimeo
For my first Multimedia Assignment I'm experimenting with video. But even putting out short chunked segments takes a while to edit, and even longer to upload. In my Production Lab work there's been a lot of discussion about which platform is better, Vimeo or YouTube. Certainly from a time perspective, YouTube is much quicker to upload. It took me a few hours to get three three-minute clips up last night. With Vimeo I had to leave the first clip overnight, the second took two hours this morning to upload, and I've given up on the third after it kept on dropping out.
The thing is I know Vimeo is generally considered the better platform, especially for aesthetically sensitive designers but it appears my allocation only allows me to upload on HD package a week. And besides YouTube now offers unlimited HD. For standard Vimeo there's a cap at 500Mb. Here's the two clips together, see if you can really spot the difference. For extra fun play them together.
[vimeo width="720" height="300"]http://www.vimeo.com/10295461[/vimeo]
What Village Underground can learn from the Barbican
For my MA Online Journalism I'm conducting a Production Lab placement with Village Underground, London. Following the last group Skype meeting, I thought it would be useful to do a case study on a venue that already has its online presence sorted. I managed to arrange a face to face meeting with Maryam Ashgari from the Barbican, a 28 minute edit of the meeting can be listened to below.
[audio: http://dandavies23.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/barbicanedit.mp3]But if you don't have half an hour to spare here are my conclusions.