GetAmbITion

Get AmbITion! Communicate, collaborate, create and celebrate getting digital in the arts.

  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.

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  2. Watching it Online: mobile video, HD video

    {Article originally posted to AmbITion Extranet by Hannah Rudman}

    Christian Payne made this excellent video – on his mobile phone – of his day in Manchester, speaking at AmbITion’s latest networking/training event: Digital Content re:connected.

    Christian spent all day with his mobile in hand, capturing soundbytes and conversations. One of his observations about videoing with mobile is that people are far more natural and open when faced with a tiny phone camera than they are when a big lens and mic are presented, and this lovely personal and reflective video proves it!
    Also check out the live blog archive and Twitter stream from the day. Over 40 people enjoyed the event live, with over 200 tuning in via the web stream.

    Abandoning TV altogether, MSN and Endemol have launched Kirill, an interactive online sci-fi show. The Kirill series will run for ten episodes of three minutes each, following the stories of two characters living in a mysterious world. the content is free, bumpered with advertising – and as ever with online content, extremely context aware advertising – in this case, X-Box 360.

    Produced by Endemol and Pure Grass Films the show will screen in High Definition through Microsoft Silverlight technology (Mac users get the plug-in via Firefox).The HD quality may be the missing link that some arts organisations have been waiting for the web to deliver before they were prepared to show video and audio online.

    Kirill watchers will be invited to get involved with the show through character blogs, videos and audio films, which will be hidden across the web. Secret websites will also be created to help watchers decipher clues about the plot and characters. This looks like the mainstreaming of Alternative Reality Games – ARGs – into interactive and interesting popular content. Its a brilliant way to empower people to use the web creatively and fully.

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  3. Wikinomics at work: collaborative policies, economics and projects

    {Article originally posted to AmbITion Extranet by Hannah Rudman}

    Virtual collaboration tools, and their strength to make a difference to politics, economics and projects by enhancing knowledge transfer and innovation, are in the news.

    Collaborative politics

    Yesterday, The Observer reported Barack Obama’s internet strategy as being key to his winning of the election: I reported his own social network about 18 months ago, and since then, his campaign has used 3.1m “netroots” – people hooked into Obama’s facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube channels, who effectively pump his messages back out to their own networks and discuss them. Obama has given politics back to the people and invited them into a discussion directly with him: the media sit outside that relationship as they can’t control it. Promising a big investment in the US’s broadband infrastructure, and a YouTube broadcast each week, lets hope we’ve finally got a President who will practice 21st century politics.

    Collaborative economics

    Which brings me onto 21st century economics – Google’s quarterly profits have risen 26% over a period of economic meltdown. The Guardian’s Jeff Jarvis reflects on this today saying:
    “Google’s first advantage is being digital. Who wants to be in the business of stuff any more – building cars, printing newspapers, selling CDs, growing food? Owning and controlling stuff was the basis of most business. And the reflexive response to a collapse in finance and equities used to be to return to the real: buy property. No more. Now the best retreat is to the value of knowledge”..

    Google is based on creating an abundance of data about data, and a platform for countless businesses to be created using that information for niche markets. Similarly Facebook is based on sharing data – with friends and family, but also and more importantly, with a wider network of contacts you wouldn’t normally share so much with. Sharing more has led to more connections, more knowledge transfer and more innovation. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and this weekend interviewed in The Observer Magazine says: “Facebook [is] not such an amazing technological feat – it’s just a group of tools and platforms – an evolution of communication”.

    Collaborative Projects
    Ed Mitchell and Clare Reddington of Watershed’s iShed have just launched a really interesting report called “Which Widget For What?” that explores – through measuring a real and virtual project – the different strengths and weaknesses of virtual and physical working as well as the effectiveness of digital web 2.0 widgets to support the knowledge sharing and innovation. The headlines are that physical meetings work best for encouraging people to share ideas and make connections; blogs work well to follow the development and ongoing analysis of a project (its a narrative form); and tools like MindMeister (online, editable, collaborative mindmapping) work well as virtual collaborative tools, pulling together the wisdom of the crowd after the physical event.

    Collaboration and transparency – wikinomics – are clearly working as 21st C business tools for growth.

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  4. Five years of Facebook. How will it last five more?

    From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/04/facebook-socialnetworking

    Can you imagine life without Facebook? Probably. But you can’t deny the phenomenal growth of the site since it was opened beyond US colleges in September 2006. Even in internet years, those five years have proved remarkably successful.

    Facebook overtook MySpace as the UK’s most popular social network in the UK in autumn last year. The comparison between the two is not exactly equal, with MySpace attracting a younger, more music-orientated crowd and with a design that had started to look increasingly cluttered and disorganised next to Facebook’s clinical organisation.

    What Facebook was better at doing was firstly structuring social communication in a more efficient way, but also provided a format that proved more attractive and accessible to a more mainstream audience, hence the rapid ascent of the site.

    Why all the Facebook chatter?

    Its ubiquity among a particular class and demographic explains much of the attention it has had in the media; most of the people in the media are the right age and demographic to use it, rather than MySpace or Bebo. But go to any playground in the UK and those kids will only be talking about Bebo. They think Facebook is stuffy and boring, but it’s no bad thing for Facebook’s economics that it attracts a more lucrative userbase.

    Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the social graph, or mapping our relationships in digital form, is enticing, but not a vision that Facebook could ever wholly fulfill. Already, the notion of a single destination website that contains the bulk of our social interactions seems outdated. Would Facebook ever relinquish enough control over those social transactions to facilitate communication outside the site? It might have to, if it wants to stay relevant.

    Already the flexibility and openness of Twitter – despite its obvious lack of a business model so far – has shown that handing over control of interaction has huge advantages in building an audience of people that want to use your service in the way that works for them.

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  5. Hoipolloi’s Use of Video Diaries

    Simon Bedford of Hoipolloi shares how to use video to document Hoi Polloi’s recent tour to Sydney, taking in use of Twitter

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