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  1. Social Networking as used by a Social Media Enthusiast

    From: http://getambition.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/ambition-north-east-roadshow-%E2%80%93-tyneside-cinema-participation-workshop/

    This article is an excerpt of a live blog of the Participation Masterclass with OurManInside aka Christian Payne at the AmbITion North East Roadshow of 5th March.

    Just introduced him and we’re off!

    He’s just asked us to make sure mobile phones are on and Twitterers tweeting. Excellent!

    Did lots of media, travelled 65 countries but wanted to get into photography. Got to work on his local paper when photographer was injured.

    Chose an iconic image and chose the photograph of Che Guevera taken by Alberto Korda “to hide behind”.

    Pointed us to OurManInside.com and is talking about using WordPress as a platform for aggregating blogs, video and other social media. Mentioned using free Revolution Theme by Brian Gardner.

    Started out travelling to Iraq to cover the war as he didn’t believe the news.

    Now sharing about a ‘Crash!’, a blog post that started life when he twittered a video after a car crash.

    Within minutes of the crash, was approached with a crane to help remove car, offers for a fund to help replace car.

    Learnt from that about the importance of sharing about his life on life – there are people out there willing to help you.

    Now passing round a Kodak ZI6 camera which he uses to grab, engage and promote content. Also using the Nokia N95 as his main work tool. (yes he would like a free one please!)

    You can do everything from a mobile phone, you don’t need to edit…

    Top tip: Dabr.co.uk

    He doesn’t do Facebook though. “Not Google-searchable and you need to go on a course to learn how to use the Privacy controls!”

    @Documentally’s Tool Kit: Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, 12 seconds, Qik, Viddler, YouTube, Phreadz, Bambuser.

    Really likes Twitter because you can check out people’s credibility – eg he can check out a plumber and find out how good he is.

    Quite happy to put stuff on Flickr, it grows his network and he can use a tool to find out wherever his pictures are being used in the world. Not concerned about people ’stealing his pictures’, uses Creative Commons licences.

    Was able to invoice a newspaper when he discover that they were using his picture!

    Talking about Qik and Bambuser whilst interviewing the Prime Minster.

    Costs =

    £20 for WordPress theme because he wanted to give credit to the theme designer

    £20/year for Flickr

    Seesmic, so many different applications, sign up and try them…

    Question from the floor: What about Vimeo? Likes Viddler because he met the founders, agrees Vimeo is very nice too.

    Is able to get jobs like going out to the Middle East to do work on refugee crisis just from “throwing stuff online”.

    Phreadz – drag videos from the web and have conversations around it. Link to, have discussions around, embed…

    Universities now using it to allow students and lecturers to share video, incredibly popular. Still in private beta however.

    12 seconds.tv – ‘record a 12 second update’

    ‘How to do a 12’ lesson – Don’t ever speak over 12 seconds!

    If you want to talk about what you’re doing… try to get involved in conversations.

    Restaurant in London using 12 seconds to film their special of the day. Also film the making of it, really doing well from it!

    Discovered that if he spent life with a hood over his head he wouldn’t be able to make as much out of his life.

    Now has two monitors, one for work and one for friends. Can communicate with friends and switch on and off when he wants to (and they want to). Has a vastly improved social life from becoming a video blogger.

    Read the rest here: Christian Payne’s Participation workshop at the AmbITion North East Roadshow.

  2. Social Media - your audiences are aggregating and syndicating their content

    Wave4Wave 4 is the latest in a series of reports from Universal McCann (ummm… the fourth one… see what they did there?) about how people are using social networks, especially in relation to aggregating digital content together that they’ve created - like vids and pics, newsfeeds and chats, etc. This reflects my experience - all my specialist online storage facilities (flickr, blip.tv) send feeds of my stuff to my Facebook profile, which in turn updates my Friendfeed, which in turn updates my blog. As far as Twitter and my delicious bookmarks go, those feeds update everything!! Sometimes I read my Tweets on Facebook before I’ve even tweeted them! [Joke].
    Anyway - the report indicates:
    nearly two-thirds of internet users around the globe have managed their personal profiles.

    • 71.1% have visited a friend’s social network page.
    • In the U.S. 60% have managed their profiles in the last six months, up nearly 50% from 43.2% the previous year.
    • 76% of social network members upload photos, up from 45% the previous year.
    • 33% of social network members upload videos, up from 16.9% the previous year.
    • In the Philippines, more than 98% of active internet users* have watched video online; in Korea, Spain, and the U.S., the figure is more than 8 out of 10.
    • The number of people reading blogs has started to stagnate, with 71% of active internet users reading blogs, up from only 70% the previous year.
    • 17% of active internet users access online content through mobile devices as well as home, work, or school computers.
    • 83% of active internet users view video online.

    So that leaves cultural organisations with some decent evidence that investing in social media is worthwhile, particularly if you can be up-to-the-minute with your news and offers, and porous in your attitude to sharing content with users who are increasingly acting like online digital content experts. If they’re free and easy about letting it all hang out, you should too. It all started here, remember :-)

  3. Community crucial to theatre’s future says Guardian’s Lyn Gardner

    Lyn Gardner in the Guardian blog today talks about how online audiences (the crowd in the cloud) are crucial to the future of theatre’s sustainable ability. The debate rages with the comment stream after the blog highlighting exactly Lyn’s point: that despite half the commentators not being at the Shift Happens event, they’re still engaging passionately and intelligently with the issues. She picked up The Bush Theatre’s new online initiative, bushgreen.org (in beta: to be launched soon, I’ll review it when it goes live) for crowd sourcing and disseminating new scripts, and there was a mention of pilot-theatre.tv : a simple webcast of a rehearsed reading of Catcher in their Eye, but a very cheap way of showing agents and producers globally what the new play will be like, and enticing them to engage with the process of booking it. Before, either producers would have needed to travel to York to see the rehearsed reading, or Pilot Theatre would have sent off the script and photos to a number of producers and then had to endure waiting times based on “don’t call us: we’ll call you”…
    Business models are changing.

    At Shift Happens, the National Theatre also talked about NTLive, which amassed cinema audiences of 30,000 for Phaedre in a single weekend (you can’t squeeze that many people into all of the NT auditoria and its labyrinthine corridors together). But a significant shift in the landscape was recognised by Micheal Billington in his Guardian review of NTLive’s production, at a cinema in Chelsea. It starts:

    The National Theatre made history last night. Its live transmission of Racine’s Phèdre was broadcast to 73 cinemas in the UK and 200 more around the world. It was a big risk but it paid off brilliantly. Indeed, watching it with a rapt, packed house in London’s Chelsea Cinema, I came to a startling conclusion: the production worked even better in the cinema than it did in the Lyttelton. And the implications of that are enormous.

    MB says a theatre production worked even better in the cinema?? I never thought I’d see the day. Cultural behaviours are changing too.

    P.S. Lyn also namechecks my other company Envirodigital - I talked about how the internet’s communities of audiences/customers/fans is an opportunity for theatres and other live art forms to begin the consideration of how to make the cultural sector more environmentally sustainable. An organisation’s crowd in the cloud can be their envirodigital community - check my slides here.

  4. Rise of the Edgelings

    Manchester was buzzing last week with a range of events, from the preview of Videogame Nation at Urbis, the Digital Britain Unconference at MDDA, and particularly Futuresonic 2009. This year’s conference, to which myself, and a number of colleagues from AmbITion related arts organisations attended, had a range of themes, from Environment 2.0 to the Digital Economy.  What stayed with me throughout the 2-day conference were the thoughts of main speaker Stowe Boyd from the opening session. He framed the debate in terms of the “edgelings” - individuals who are not necessarily part of one or other corporate structure. The destruction of traditional business models like local newspapers, record companies is resisted, but inevitable.  The new business models, (and for that matter political and organisational models), will be more “connected,” more “social.” Making them pay might be the problem.

  5. Digital Content Re:Connected

    This  is a summary of the Amb:IT:ion project’s Digital Content Re:Connected event, which took place here at MDDA on 27 October 2008.

    The one-day seminar explored how creating art is changing around us, featuring insights from arts organisations and mavericks that are leading the way in developing new content using the latest technologies.

    Adrian Slatcher introducing Digital Content Re:connected
    Adrian Slatcher introducing Digital Content Re:connected

    The event provided an inspirational insight into just some of the possibilities that embracing technology can bring. Around 50 arts professionals from AmbITion organisations and other North West arts organisations attended, receiving a mix of case studies and workshops around the very best in digital content.

Scottish Arts Council Culture Sparks Rudman Consulting Arts Council England