Ephemeral Media Workshop, 23-24 June

I was lucky to be invited to a seminar principally for academics about ephemeral media, at University of Nottingham. I’d never heard the term ‘ephemeral media’ before, which in this context was used to describe short-form, fleeting media often overlooked by academia – but which plays a key role in understanding how media is evolving particularly through immersion with social media. This event looked particularly at new forms of online video.

Rather than being full of (my worst fear) incomprehensible academic musings, the event was actually full of useful theoretical ideas and examples of how e-drama and media content is evolving, where it came from, and what it all means.  Here’s a taster of my highlights from two days worth of very informed and interesting papers from the workshops entitled: “Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera“

Barbara Klinger – fan re-enactment

Barbara Klinger (Indiana University) showed many examples of fan re-enactment in relation to fan fiction and film including ‘movieocke’, originating from the ‘Den of Cin’ bar in New York where people get together to re-enact favourite scenes from movies, a ‘re-play’ of movie culture.  This has been professionalised by some, e.g. Charles Ross – One Man Star Wars, where Ross, a professional actor, plays all characters and hums the music and FX in a show which is part parody, part homage, part spectacle.

Chris Strombolis and friends re-enacted the whole of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” over many years, originally bootlegging early screenings in the days before home video.  The film later gained many cult screenings.  Fan re-enactments often have comic and parodying effects through its low-tech bricolage.

Re-enactments often use their original locations e.g. The Blob at Phoenixville, an annual re-enactment as patrons flee the Colonial cinema in the 1950s horror flick, or Lebowskifest , a homage to a recent classic film celebrating the culture of the drop-out and misfit hero.  These couldn’t help to me bringing to mind Stewart Lee’s fantastic parody of Del Boy falling thorugh the bar in Only Fools and Horses translated into a folk fayre legend.  The re-enactment movement is led by men; female re-eanctment is usually associated with female led films (we can also see these trends in role play and gaming more widely).

Klinger views ephemeral media as fragments, fleeting, not treated seriously as academia but it de and re-contextualises media and is fundamental to an understanding of intertextuality which allows works to survive and develop outside of conventional releases.

Hugh Hancock, Strange Company – Machinima

The inimicable Hugh Hancock, one of the world’s leading machinima makers (indeed he even coined the name), who I enjoyed working with recently on the “Education for Leisure” machinima production, delivered his usual high-energy romp through machinima past, present and future.

Whilst the internet is primarily driven in innovation by porn, machinima is another innovation of pushing existing technology forward in new and unexpected ways.  Machinima began with Quake c.1999, the first game to incorporate a sandbox for, with difficulty, playing and editing scenes. It is defined as computer generated animation using existing virtual platforms e.g. console games or virtual worlds.

Theoretically using machinima it is possible to create film works with one person, or certainly a  small production team, which increases the artistic independence of the director. Academic theorist Michael Nietsche recognized two types of machinima:
‘Inside-out’ – fan movies made by gamers, often about the game
‘Outside-In’ – filmmakers use machinima as a new tool for animated drama

Machinima has since fragmented into many different sub-genres specific to different games e.g. Sims 1999 site – all use different editors, voice actors and production studios.  Rufus Cubed’s World of Warcraft inside-out games attract 10M viewers.  These are huge communities with economic power – but they quickly dissipate as the game ages.

In 2006 machinima got noticed by the industry: there was a rush from games producers to hire the best machinima makers.  Many went inside and produced segments for games but didn’t go back to making machinima.  Often their work can only be seen by playing hours of the game up to different levels of game, becoming ephemeral due to the limited audiences who can see it and replay ability reducing viewing access.

Machinima makers face a glass ceiling: they can’t break into traditional media due to big games makers e.g. EA denying permission to produce series and DVDs or negotiate royalty splits, e.g. 2006’s Male Restroom Etiquette by Phil Rice which never made it through to a series despite a commission offered. The big crux: machinima has yet to have a big court case determining rights and usage. Could machinima be covered under ‘fair use’ copyright?  Machinima is not ‘copying’ but photographing characters. But makers need to challenge and negotiation more with the industry. Hugh survives as a machinma maker because he doesn’t have an allergy to talking to lawyers.

Machinima, as a form of immediate animation, can, like other types of social media, be used as a force for community and political change. Stealth Legislation was made within 48 hours to show the effects of EU immiment internet legislation.

Microsoft’s Project Natal is a new Xbox motion capture suite under £500 which could revolutionise machinima, particiularly if it becomes linked to Second Life, plus a £100 facial recognition software could mean avatars represent people in real-time triggered by real-life actions.  This could have big effects for both social and business e.g. virtual conferencing, and also benefit indie film-makers by rapidly creating sophisticated graphics e.g. animated characters mapped onto real people’s movements. Machinima and performance capture are on a colition course to mesh into one media.

Tracy Harwood (De Montfort University)’s  machinima study discussed definitions of co-creation (participation) and co-production (collaboration on the project), describing the medium as about socialism and the social, concerned with collaboration and sharing within the community.

Daniel Ashton (Bath Spa University) believes machinima is in a transition form from amateur to professional, or “cresting the Horizon” (Hugh Hancock, 2007).  Limitations are often to do with the framing of its creators;  Lowood believes players should express their work as content developers rather than players, where hacking mixes technological mastery with subversion.

Quality machinima worth viewing:

‘The Stolen Child’ – a Second Life created film by Lainy Voom (aka Trace Henderson)
Bloodspell – Hugh Hancock’s fantasty machinima feature film
‘The Journey’ – Appears as a 2D animation through post-production effects
Red v Blue “Going Global” – commission of the original and most famous machinima serial for Machinma Europe festival as a  critique of European film genres

Rebekah Willett – camera phone, production and identity

A study of camera phone production – why people do it and what they film, which is an interesting but little studied area. Camera videos are ephemeral in the nature of what’s recorded – yet little is deleted from servers – but its symbolic value is more important than its legibility.  Statistically:

1/3 make personal documentary – e.g. family, friends
¼ make non-personal e.g. weather, landscape
¼ make public performance e.g. recording gigs

Sam Coley – online practices of david bowie fans

Coley, a radio documentary producer, discussed interactivity and fan culture from a producer’s perspective. He produced a documentary about the 25^th anniversary of Bowie’s 1983 concert, New Zealand’s biggest ever gig, which you can listen to here.  It includes a charming original recording of a short song Bowie wrote for his Maori hosts.

Fans communities are reshaping documentary production, offering feedback mechanisms to benefit the producer in pre-production but also give a life to the documentary extending far beyond broadcast. YouTube Insight is a fine-grained analytics tool which allows producers to analyse how users are interacting with the video or audio content and who the audience is.  Audio clip shows, taking advantage of the screen for radio on platforms like digital TV and YouTube, is a new way of re-imaging what radio looks like and placing audio within a multimedia context.

Jon Dovey (University of West of England) – Archeologies, Economies and Ecologies

We’re in the grip of a second dotcom boom: plenty of hype and money thrown at unknown entities. But what is the value of user-generated content: Democratic?  Economic?  Political?

Echoing my own views that social media et al is nothing new: the 1970s Bay Area ‘radical computing’ movement predicted the power of information over land. Today Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Fake and Butterfield (Flickr) and Matt Mulanwey (WordPress) all emphasise the  importance of allowing users to create without technical skills, so creating and accessing media becomes something normal than eventually everyone can do.

The utopia of access for all through the internet is perhaps a Victorian, elitist world view: globally only 17.4% of people can access the web (70% in the developed world). Barabasi looks at the topology of the web, like an aerial view of the rainforest we only see the tops of trees, or a snapshot of all the billions of pieces of information available. Relationships are critical to navigate this forest: comunity management is the starting point of online marketing.

Henry Jenkins believes fan fiction developed into YouTube, though the platform will lose $470M in 2009 – parallel with loss-leading web 1.0 (1999-2001) hype and speculation which leads to the hollow speculative incomes for developer-entrepreneurs.  KateModern, a new form of interactive drama content, only attracted 25M views, 150K per webisode, and that resulted from involuntary pop-ups on users profiles. Bebo sold for £850M and immediately its user-base declined.

Bauwens, a web1.0 entrepreneur who went on to establish the Peer-To-Peer Foundation,proposed three types of P2P networks:

1) Capitalist- e.g. crowd-sourcing around a commercial product
2) Sharing economy – expression, e.g. YouTube
3) Peer production proper – collaboration to create social artifacts, though business may profit (e.g. advertising)

William Merrin – Understanding Me-dia

In the first reformation, the printing press liberating text from purely spreading the word of god.  Today is the second reformation, liberating producers from established publishers and markets. This presents challenges: volume, dispersal, ephemerality (devices, meaning) and access (e.g. network owner control) and needs a new form of analysis – a ‘Media Studies 2.0′: traditional media studies focus on broadcast era, we now need to look at post-broadcast ecologies as a new entity, not just as a continuation of fan culture.

Elizabeth Evans: Kate Modern

Kate Modern, the social media online soap,  is actually anti-ephermal content – 14hrs of content, continually available as a permanent, virtual object. Participation from engagement in the content is only truly possible within a few days of broadcast before the story moves on.

Various interactive exhibition structures were use like marathons (12 films distributed in 12 hours), quizzes (like ‘where is Kate?’) and live events – a live filming which took place on Carnaby St 10am, encouraging audience to participate which leads to deeper engagement and more viral activity.  This was a great analysis, and extends the article I wrote about Kate Modern while it was original broadcast.

Rik Lander – www.u-soap.com

Lander, as a producer of seminal e-drama, offered an interesting practitioner and historic perspective on the form. There are various funding methods for e-drama:

DIY parody
Showreels – to gain professional work
Corporations
Sponsored
Un-funded pure creativity

And many forms of e-drama:

Tv on the web
Linear webby
Interactive
Participatory

It requires many different questions of production like, who is holding the camera? Not a concern of TV but its imperative to internet drama

Lander’s first production was Magic Tree (2001) using text and web (HTML/Flash) as the options available for bandwidth. Viewers were sent a box with chocolate twigs and a magical growing tree, mixing the personal with the consumable. Video is now the currency of e-drama, although potentially e-drama becomes an extension of film and TV rather than a mixed media production.

Lander went on to produce Wannabes for BBC, a teen drama which works on creating friendship ratings and giving advice from characters using video within an interactive database.

Together Alone is a pilot project using actors, crowd-sourced from a talent show format, all over world directly virtually by Skype and montaged together in edit, which gives an endearing inconsistency as settings differ and objects interface from one ’set’ to another.

For e-drama, production viability for acquiring funders is 250,000 viewers, though Bebo et al will claim to sponsors that 20M or more will view it.  Only a fraction of users are likely to be participatory but  they are critical for the development of the production. The web is platform for something ground-breaking and innovative, but not necessarily for producing the highest quality or longevity in film works.

Claire Wardle (Cardiff University)– UGC at the BBC

As part of an AHRC extensive study into user generated content across several BBC departments, Wardle’s study look at its use in news (download the report here).  Its a small minority who submit UGC who are not representative of the whole audience. 90% of contents is thought to originate from 1% of users.

There are many barriers to participation: technological, impetus (why do it?), perception of those who contribute – plus the digital divide. UGC works best with specific calls to action –  say what news gatherers want to know about rather than just asking people to have their say (as this parody website testifies, the results of user’s views can be absurd to the extreme). UGC has the benefits of networked journalism: audiences knows more on subject as ‘lay experts’.

72% of people have never contributed material to a news organisation, though interestingly the most popular contributory media is newspapers (17%), radio (9%), tv (7%) and finally websites (4%).

Moderation of UGC is still valuable: Sky i-News allowed people to upload whatever news they want, assuming the community would extract false news but after eroneous news of Steve Jobs’s death caused shares to drop they realised the need for curating/policing.

Conclusions

Overall this was a fascinating and insightful event, thanks to Paul Grainge from University of Nottingham for organising it and letting me observe it. What was key to me was that online media is far from ephemeral – prolific and difficult to decipher with new rules of symbolism and engagement which defies the usual structures of broadcasting and intrepretation typical of academic media studies.

MediaCamp and Digital Britain Unconference Nottingham 9th May 2009: Collective Memory

Saturday was Nottingham’s first MediaCamp (and certainly the first media-related Unconference I’ve known in the city), and I only feel like I’ve just recovered!

This post attempts to pool together everyone’s impressions and online experiences I can gather into a Collective Memory, taking the model suggested by Chris Unitt from Birmingham who attended to talk about the phenomenal success (and jealously, in the case of The Spectator’s Melanie Phillips) of Created in Birmingham.

It’s a work in progress – if you want to add more thoughts or links please do so on the MediaCampNottingham wiki collective memory page or in the comments below and I’ll update this post in a few weeks.

What was MediaCampNottingham?

A semi-structured unconference that lets disparate people from the business and community come together to talk about using media for commercial or social gain.  Spanning the themes of Technology, Media, and Culture – we saw in total about 40 people attend throughout the day from a happy mix of backgrounds – a city councillor, a lecturers, theatre practitioners, an Arts Council rep mixed with video bloggers, web developers, brand consultants and a whole range of geek – and non-geek – from the city’s diggerati, plus a few out-of-town guest blogging celebs like Jo Geary from The Times and legendary citizen journalistic Documentally.  Georgian micro-complex Lace Market House provided a lovely atmosphere for the, ususally, productive exchanges and a good atmosphere that wasn’t too ‘tech-brow’, where people could share a lively debate.

Anyone could sign up for a session – some were carefully structured presentation of research (like my session on online music for independent music entrepreneurs based on 6 months of academic research.  Presentation here, though doesn’t make too much sense with the text!), others more a spontaneous round table coffee and a chat.

Digital Britain Unconference

We were also lucky enough to time our event with the Digital Britain Unconference week, where a whole load of citizen groups from around the UK got together to (largely) challenge and re-shape Lord Carter’s Interim Report.  I ran this epic 3 hour session, which ranged from absurd and lively debate (like @documentally’s vision of no longer needing the BBC for Wimbledon as in the future we will install micro-cameras in the tennis balls to direct your own coverage), to some serious gauntlet laying in terms of what we could do to make Nottingham a better city for digital connectivity, and the digital industries.

Interestingly, Nottingham raised many of the same issues as West Midlands Unconference – namely the report should be addressing needs of smaller business and the community, not just corporates, and we need a more ambitious target for both up and download speed connectivity nationally for Britain to stay competitiive.

Here’s a PDF of the response submitted: digital britain unconference mediacamp nottingham
And you can view it online on the Digital Britain Unconference wiki.

Your responses to MediaCampNottingham:

The Twitter Stream for the day was of course lively, from both attendees and virtual onlookers, my favs: @NeilRostance is euphoric, and @Gillogs fears the ‘Geeklter’

Plenty of video responses – here Caron wraps up the day with everyone’s verbal ‘Tweet’ summarising the day, then Drew Davies’ Fear of Projection in complete – a fatanstic one man theatre piece where a junior lecturer realises his projector is talking back to him, before all manner of strangeness ensues…definitely CHECK.THIS. OUT.  @documentally and @philcampbell meet the lady of the church for lunch.

Blogs write-ups:

Camilla from Green Light Copywriting writes about Applied Creativity – finding some inspiration surrounded by a strange and interesting collection of techno fanatics.

Jed from Rock Star PR blogs mid-morning on the day (but doh! we need to re-do that Kubla Khan-esque video interview!)

Final thoughts

The day got me seriously thinking again about the power of collaborative innovation to get things moving – particularly in these times with cash shrinking everywhere.  We were able to get everyone here and do the event on the basis of goodwill, and keep it free.  And, thanks to the debate stemming form Chris Unitt’s session on Created in Birmingham, I’ve now found other collaborators to revive an old idea of setting up some kind of blog based network for creative Nottingham – more on this in a month or so.

Do we need cash to change things in Nottingham?  It helps, but not necessarily.  Do we need to connect more?  Definitely yes, but a face-to-face is better than a social networked way sometimes. Structure and purpose are good.  The challenge for me, particularly post Digital Britain, will be seeing how our ideas can filter up to the relevant big businesses and public bodies and get them to listen and talk with us, not TO us, a little more.

Thanks to:

Nick from Lace Market House for the free loan of the beautiful bulding, great serviced office (with exciting co-work space plans afoot I eagerly look forward to hearing more about), Excell Solutions for providing sponsorship for creche and other stuff,  Caron from PCM Creative for setting it in motion, and pretty much organising everything!  BIG thanks! Lucy, Ged, Babu, Edward and anyone else I’m forgetting on the steering group and volunteers on the day. THAAANKs.

What have I missed?

Add your blogs/links/thought in comments or MediaCampNottingham wiki collective memory page- I will update this post in a few weeks.

What next?

Who’s game for MediaCamp 10 or possibly late 2009?  What should we do differently?  How can we get more people (and more diverse people) along (to speak and attend?)   How can we raise some sponsorship cash (if we need it?)
Questions/answers in comments please!

Nottingham gets interactive at Media Camp, May 9th 2009

MediaCampNottingham logo

I’m very excited to announce that we’re at an advance stage in planning of Media Camp Nottingham, the first (as far as I know) ‘unconference’ for media and those wanting to know more about going web 2.0 that’s been held in Nottingham.  The brainchild of the wonderful Caron from PCM Creative, a veteran of the MediaCamp scene, she’s managed to secure us the rather atmospheric use of Lace Market House for nowt, and even a few sponsors to boot to allow us to do the whole thing for free.

If you want to come all you have to do is add your name and email to the sign up list here, or just turn up on the day.  An interesting collection of folks signed up so far – from students to marketing pros to IT folks to theatre people coming from all around the Midlands and other parts of UK.  There are still a few more speaker sessions left, to speak (or just offer to lead a discussion) all you do is decide on a time slot and add your details here.   There’s some interesting topics already listed like Adam Sargent and John Sargant (no relation!) on applications of social media for political activitism, Jennifer Jones on making Leicester un-rubbish (a worthy task!) and I’ll be talking about Music, Free Like Water? the findings of my research studying into online independent music.

If you can’t make it to Nottingham (shame on you!) video blogging gurus Christian Payne (aka Documentally) and Phil Campbell will be on hand to video the whole shebang and live stream it all to the web, linked from here.  And of course we’ll all be encouraging the attendees and watchers to Twitter it, the Twitter account is mc_notts and the hash-tag for Twittering is #MCN1.

I’m really excited about Media Camp Nottingham as it does seem to be the cumulation of a number of related and interesting digital activities kicking off in Nottingham that I’ve blogged about before happening as a result, not from a stack load of public money, but of the altruism and commitment of a number of enthusiastic individuals, most notably:

Martin Wright and the Web 2.0 Surgery – which has helped a number of startup and businesses learn more about web 2.0 through free advice with experts, which will be back in June (we’re also in desperate need of a new venue – if you know somewhere in town quite central with good free wifi that can offer an informal and quiet  environment for talking late afternoon/early evening please drop me a line).

Adam Bird from Essendex’s Nott Tuesday, which will have its fourth meeting on May 12th with a competition between Nottingham’s most promising tech start-ups, judged by none other than the legendary Mike Butcher from TechCrunch.

You can find out more about the pertinent details of what an unconference is, the key themes and where/when on the Media Camp Nottingham wiki website here.  See you there!

New events for Nottingham: Web 2.0 Surgery and MediaCampNottingham

This week I took part in two events which proves what I’ve posted previously that Nottingham is starting to come to the table as a serious centre for all things digital.

Web 2.0 Surgery

Wednesday 25th March was the inaugural Web 2.0 surgery, which just by coincidence was the same date as the one in Birmingham which  has been running for a year or so, although the organisers are unaware of their co-existance – great ideas happening in syncronicity.

Eight experts including myself gathered in the Cape Bar, and around a dozen people seeking expertise.  Despite the slightly intermitant wifi, we were able to impart a bit of knowledge and learn ourselves.  I spoke to everyone from new-starts setting up a web optimisation business, to a lawyer trying to blog without being contentious, to a guy trying to social networking the virtues of drain clearage, to an affiliate site owner looking for a change in direction.

I enjoyed the surgery, I hope I helped a little bit in addressing those little problems in e-marketing strategy and blogging.  I’ll be at the next one on:

Thursday April 23rd, 6.30pm, Cape Bar, Victoria St Nottingham.

Please let us know what you think of the events – is the location good for you?  Would working hours time be better?  How could we promote the event to the wider business community?  Advice in the comments please!

MediaCampNottingham, May 9th and 10th 2009

I’m really excited about this one.  The first ever event of its kind, MediaCampNottingham will land in town On Sat May 9th and I’m helping organise it. It’s based on the MediaCamp model that’s been running for a while now in London.  It’s an innovative UnConference exploring the latest digital trends in:

• Web design and development
• Communications, branding, advertising and PR
• Arts, media and culture
• Games and virtual worlds
• Digital media, blogging and social media.

It’s FREE and anyone can get involved.

It’s an UnConference for knowledge-sharing and collaboration where you set the agenda.  MediaCampNottingham is for digital media professionals wanting to share and expand their knowledge, or businesses or social enterprises who are curious about the digital phenomenon and want to learn more.  This event is for you to share, explore, challenge and grow your abilities in digital media.   Learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, web marketing, graphics, email campaigns, Second Life, Twitter and other social media tools. Whether you’re a veteran or just getting started, MediaCamp is for YOU.

For more info and to sign-up, visit the MediaCampNottingham wiki.  We are also looking for sponsors who could contribute towards the cost of lunch and refreshments in exchange for promotion on the website and at the event, or could contribute relevant promotional goodies for our giveaway bags.  If you can help, please contact Caron from PCM Creative.

Ada Lovelace Day

And while I’m here…

I totally missed blogging about Ada Lovelace Day as I didn’t find out until the day was upon us!   It’s an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. There’s a brilliant interview with Ada herself (in a Doctor Who style time machine style) here.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was actually a local Nottingham woman, the daughter of wild 19th century poet Lord Byron, whose mother drew her into an opposite path, and she became a great scientist and technologist of her day, a rare achievement for a woman.  She worked on Charles Babbage’s analytical engine - the predecessor of the computer.

There are many great women in technology now, but probably not enough (apparently only 2% of Physics professors at universities are women) – and the lack of women in the games industry is well-catalogue.  Helen Whitehead thinks women are now excelling the field in communication technologies – particularly social media.  I think we’ve a way to come but it’s great when women are able to celebrate our achievements and spur each other on.

The revival of Girl Geeks Dinners in Nottingham is another example of both how Nottingham is getting more digital and humanistically connected and I’m looking forward to going along to meet some other girls working in the web and technology sector.  Sure beats the usual women’s networking for too many arts & crafts, life coaches and reiki healing ladies…

Redefining innovation at iFestival and Nott Tuesday

Innovation has been the big buzzword of this decade – apparently, start-ups to international corporations will thrive or fail based on how much they innovate – yet in another decade this activity might just have been called ‘enterprise’, ‘doing stuff’ or ‘trial and error’.   However, from my own research into disruptive innovation in the creative industries (due to be published by NESTA in May), I uncovered a wealth of people doing and thinking differently about how they framed – and later reframed – their business offer in the market through new business or production models. Perhaps this is what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” and reinvention rather than innovation – which is perhaps a too broad and yet too narrow term.

iFestival

Yet Regional Development Agencies love their innovation – with whole teams and programmes dedicated to the intangible verb.  Yesterday I went to East Midlands Development Agency (EMDA)’s iFestival – a celebration of ideas and inspiration from the region and a few bigger ideas too.

I tagged along to the second half and heard Luke Johnson, Chair of Channel 4, talk about his legacy as a food entrepreneur (Pizza Express, Strada and Giraffe to name but three) – and avoiding mentioned the inevitable  impending collapse and inter-broadcaster bunfights between C4 and others.  Johnson believed his success lay in taking the core roots of a succeeding entrepreneur and developing these into a corporate model of chains and franchises – entrepreneurs just got too bored after opening a few stores.

There was much talk from Johnson and the panel on the importance of youth and education – most innovators generated their great ideas in their 20s, when they will take risks (and have little to lose).  There was worry that too much reliance on age could see Britain like Japan – where conservative 50-somethings rule roost and resist change or new ideas.   Those who won’t take risks have low expectation and live in fear of the unexpected – and nowadays, the unexpected is almost to be expected.

What happened next almost defied belief; delegates were invited into a medieval street – resplete with musicians, a juggler (trading under the name ‘the Fluid Druid’, apparently) wenches and people dressed as giant emus (not sure why) – to enter the ‘Last Business Standing’ competition where businesses were encouraged to – over the din – compete to deliver the best pitch to the streets filled with regional business advisors.

From my own days working in the public sector, it’s easy to knock their efforts at doing something different (dare I say innovative) – but this event was odd, inducing smirks and giggles, but definitely memorable – though not necessarily for all the right reasons.  The discomfort from the black-suited middle age gents, mainly from traditional industries like manufacturing, and the incongrous medieval fayre to me ranks alongside the very bizarre snake dancers entertainment at Creative Clusters 2007 as one of those moments of unadulterated perplexion.

Nott Tuesday

Head somewhat fried, it was reassuring to head over in the evening to the second meeting of Nott Tuesday, the new network of high-tech and digital businesses, to hear two interesting speakers, Doug Ashby, IT business entrepreneur discussed “retirement at 45, heaven or hell?”.  If you were a small business owner into the number crunching of boom, bust, boom, boom zero to hero startup his account of the trials and errors of IT startup was no doubt interesting.

Ian Lockwood then gave a quick introduction to the Nottingham Fibre project, as a call to arms for Lace Market tech co’s to unite in the fight for faster broadband.  I’ve blogged about this project recently under its previous name, Ultraband.

The quality of chat this evening was undoubtedly higher and more innovative than at iFestival where I seemed to get emeshed in a very boring gentlemen’s musings on innovation in hole digging technologies for fibre optics companies.  Great chat with the ever idea-ful CJ from PCM Creative who intends to set up Nottingham’s first Media Camp in the spring – I hope to get on board with making that happen.

And Martin Wright who is hosting Nottingham’s first web 2.0 surgery on March 26th – a way of getting businesses and organisation to get some hands on help on “getting” all this complex web stuff (something the great social media tribe in Birmingham have been pioneering for a while) – and ditto I’ve signed up as an expert for that so hope to see some Notts folk there.

I was revived by the energy and ideas in the room and willingness to get on and do and make change;  it really seems tha now is the hour  for Nottingham businesses to get connected, linked in, and use social media to change the business and community landscape for the better – and now its needed more than ever.

So all this innovation seemed to be happily happening of its own accord, without a label, or if it did have one, it would probably read “people talking about interesting stuff and getting on and doing it” – which is the closed definition of innovation you’re likely to find.

Networking bonanza: NottTuesday, Nottingham Twestival, TigerSpike and Nottingham Creative Business Awards

This week I’ve been networking more in the physical rather than online world, though with some interesting dalliances in-between where online networks facilitate “third city” interaction in the real world. With three networking events in one week in Nottingham, it really does seem like the digital and creative scene in Nottingham is starting to emerge splenderous from its slumbering cocoon – these are exciting times!

Nott Tuesday 10-02-09

Tuesday saw the inaugural launch of Nott Tuesday, a new network for Nottingham’s high tech professionals which saw a packed room of about 50 IT and digital types (90 percent male) descend on The Cape bar for a structured evening of presentation and networking. I think I tracked this down from looking at new groups my LinkedIn contacts had joined that week.

Enthusiastically established and curated by Adam from Essendex, the speaker was Ewan McLeod from Mobile Industry Review who gave a fascinating talk on how blogging and social network grew his business. From his frustration trying to promote a previous business offering SMS to screen display to New Media Age, the main press of the time, Ewan started a blog on SMS news using the simple and classic blogging technique of signing up to Google Alerts and a £5 month Typepad account, aggregating content in a simple 10-minute-a-day round-up.

Within weeks he was the top ranking site for the search term ‘SMS news’ and soon he had an audience, which with hundreds of thousands of page views rapidly exceeded the 10,000 readership of New Media Age. When he started excerting his extreme opinion on Vodafone (in a hand shaking ‘dare I press publish?’ move) he realised he had an opinion people wanted to here, which echoes my own blogging experiences of gaining more reaction to opinion than reportage. With web 2.0 forms of publishing, you can become the press as easily as you can try and chase the tails of them.

Today, Ewan dam used the example of attracting the attention of the Government’s Minister for Information through using Twitter Search to find tweets relevant to his expertise, and responding in Twitter’s unique 140 character format to the Minister’s “Google, good or evil?’ post. Soon they were in dialogue, in a way unimaginable in either a traditional offline, longer-form (like letters or even email) or more formal style of conversion. Adam responded with knowledge and ideas to the Information Minister’s specific need to information right then.

Ewan’s talk was inspiring and made me realise I should utilise Twitter search more for potential sourcing of clients and like-minded.

The crowd at Nott Tuesday was a nice mix of digital start-ups, academics, games people, IT consultants and more and I feel really inspired by the possibilities of the new networks and events self-initiating within Nottingham at the moment (which makes my job many times easier!)

AMC/ TigerSpike launch 11-02-09

Way down in that extreme weather beacon of London village, I was invited to an event which celebrated something almost heart-warming in the present financial apocalyptic gloom: the launch of a new London office for Sydney and New York based TigerSpike, whose business has grown exponentially at 1000% per year.

TigerSpike specialise in mobile technologies and commamunications, and have coined the term ‘Personal Media’ - their term to describe person-to-person communications which include talking, phone, social media and web – and a perfect way of defining for the mobile comms solution. Their vision is to become a ‘platform as a service’ like the IBM for Personal Media.

Great thinking and technological innovation come through TigerSpike’s internal Innovation Lab model using a process called RIGOUR (Research, Identify, Generate, Opportunistic, Utilisation, Re-invest) which seems like an exciting formal innovation process to bring to a UK digital technology company. Definitely ones to watch.

Thanks to Xavier Adam from the AMC group for organising a splendid lunch and a very interesting collection of the city’s mobile and digital types there too, and no thanks for a terrible picture of me at the lunch!

Twestival Nottingham 12-02-09

Back in Hood town, Nottingham Twestival was a very different affair; Nottingham came to the Twitter table with late notice to set up a Twestival to join the 200+ other global cities in one simultaneous evening event for charity celebrating those brought together through the social medium of Twitter.  The global reports were impressive – the 700 person artsfest of London Twestival looked mighty fun, I was sorry to miss the 200+ attendees of Brum Twestival where many of my Twitter comrades are.

Nottingham was a more modest collection of 20 or so social media freaks – I was suprised at our diversity and motives – several PR, digital media and social media professionals but also several politicians and a few early adopters from other walks of life – and a few virtual participants joining in via ‘Tweets’ on Twitter.  If you’re not already sold on the instant connectivity of Twitter, the idea of coming together over a web platform is probably more barking that tweeting , but if you like the serendipity of how communities share knowledge then you just might find it addictive, and if you do I’d urge you to follow me on Twitter here.

I had a range of very different conversations – from using social media for business, to the pitfalls of beer festivals, to Nottingham’s tawdry legacy of Robin Hood. There’s definitely a ‘vibe’ to the ’share and share alike’ Twitter community that allows conversations between people from different professional and backgrounds to intermingle.

I’ve been warmed lately by the sheer volume of ‘non geeks’ signing up and how conversation are shaping more widely to augment the community.  The number of novice Twitterers, even at the Nottingham Twestival, shows we have some way to come as a social media connecting business community to compete with the chaps in Birmingham and beyond – but now is the right time for us to get inter-connected.

In the bar we had a screen displaying Twitter feeds from our own event, alongside posts from the rest of the Twestivals.  The beauty of Twitter is that you can easily aggregate information by tagging your posts with terms like #nottstwestival.  Here’s a lowdown of most of our collective conversations via Twitter, and you can follow some recap on action at the NottsTwestival Twitter feed.  Thanks to Martin for splendidly organising it all – we did raise £210 for charity (and I won a very bizarre DVD in a raffle that I can only describe as a strange am-dram Biblical version of Alan Bennett which will certainly be making it’s way to a charity shop near you soon. Double donation

Nottingham Creative Business Awards Presentation 16-02-09

And finally, a more formal wine, canapes and presentation do c/o Nottingham Trent University where winners of their 2008 Creative Business Awards presented their wares, with some corporate vid style big-up for the 2009 awards.

Martin Knox talked about how the city is ready to come out of its cocoon and the economy means everything is up for grabs for creatives.  That may be true, but I wonder whether the cash-strapped City Council and other private business will fund the awards in 09.  I’ve never been one for expensive penguin-suited awards ceremonies being a thorough digital type (the mantra: you get more for less online) but I do see their place in the visual creative industries and anything that openly celebrates the creative scene of the city is good news.

Many award winners werethe successful and predictable – I’m curious about University of Nottingham winning the digital award (Nott’s digerati get it sorted!), although their mad scientist Periodic Table videos on YouTube is, admitedly, quite funky in a “Look around you” way.  And Hetain Patel’s business of the year was a brave step for a one-man performance art canvas.

So despite the financial apocalypse gloom, I do believe the future for Nottingham creative sector is looking pink, if not rosy.  And this paves the way for an announcement from me very soon on a new digital project to take Nottingham’s creatives to the next stage of connectivity.

Amplified 08 – connecting the dots in the social media maze

Yesterday I went along, like the rest of the Twiterrati, to Amplified 08 at the HQ of NESTA. Amplified is the new brain child of NESTA and Toby Moores (founder of Sony game Buzz whom I recently interviewed for a fascinating piece ‘in the mind of the serial disruptive innovator’ for a project for Creative Sheffield). It bills itself as a ‘network of networks’ that connects people from around the country who are developing leading-edge thinking in using social media technologies.

Around 200 people were there from a surprisingly broad range of disciplines – teachers, media producers, techno geeks, citizen journalists - a mix of ages and personalities but with a strong male bias. A fairly lose structure of discussions made for a somewhat chaotic space – having been to the OneMedia open space conference recently I found the sheer volume of people here a bit unwieldy to really have useful conversations – but in general the spirit and the ideas were full of vibrancy and excitement to connect and share ideas, and it was nice to put some names to faces and meet new folks outside of my usual digital media bubble.

The sessions were as diverse as the attendees, but tended to focus on changing the world a bit by changing a bit of the world, and what web tools can do to enable that. I popped into quite a few – some were really useful like Online Video, others a bit unstructured and meandering so I think it pays for session curators to be a bit better prepared to present their ideas to help focus the discussion. There’s probably a learning curve here and some delegate education needed on how to successful do open space or semi-curated events like this so people get the best out of it. We were all told to tweet after each session so there are heaps of tweets you can trawl through here.

On the whole I found it probably a bit too ahead-of-the-curve for my own more commercially focused practice (yes, me is un-cool consultant) – and sometimes I wonder if it’s best to go to ‘what you know’ where you can contribute and learn more or to throw yourself into the least relevant and known subject to see what you can learn. I did a bit of both – maybe at the next one I’ll throw myself into the deep end and go to more of the blogging-will-change-the-world instead of is-home-taping-killing-music sessions I usually choose.

I bumped into Toby then next morning at Tuttle London – many of the Amplified Individuals were somewhat muted after a night of boozing. Whereas I went over to a church hall in Leytonstone to film a pop video dressed as a school mistress (I kid you not – coming soon!) til the wee hours instead. Toby says the next step is to hold regular networks across the country to start to connect the dots – with sessions in the Midlands, South Coast, London, the North and maybe other places too. Hopefully the Amplified network will somehow will feed into my own plans to improve the connectivity and networking of creative thinkers in my hometown of Nottingham.

Future of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Nov 20

De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies, lead by the rather wonderful Sue Thomas, a visionary digital narratives Professor, hosted another conference shindig this week focused – the Future of Creative Technologies.  Quite a few big name academic speakers here, like Lev Manovich and Howard Rheingold.

Sadly, I found the debate this time just too academic and too technology focused rather than focusing on the aspirations and business opportunities of new technologies, which was a shame as the IOCT seminar in June on the future of social media was really quite visionary.   Perhaps not for me – I was suprised that the delegates were almost entirely academics, and mainly from De Montfort itself thus not particularly great for networking.

A few take outs:

Content Workshop

Sue Thomas discussed her theories around ‘transliteracy’ – literacy across multiple channels, platforms and time scales beginning with Socrates who believed writing was an aid not to memory but to reminiscence.  Transliteracy looks at how networks and individuals connect using different forms of media, but is also concerned with the ‘gaps’ between the networks where people are not connected to any specific groups.   There is a role here perhaps for ‘amplified individuals’ (yeuch term…loudmouths perhaps?) to be allowed through the door to join the dots between groups, like old inter-tribe rituals.

Our attempts at drawing our own networks were hilariously messy and diverse – mine had arrows everywhere, linked by cities or ‘objects of interest’ as I believe all networks and groups of people are.  We discussed that information supply isn’t as much a ‘data overload’ as a filter failure – we need guidance from authorative and trusted sources in our network.

This was taken up by Jim Hendler’s talk on Web 3.0 – semantic search based around creating data sets and open APIs to allow collaboration, giving the example of a user-created wine recommendation list mixing up catalogues of wine with guidance.  Or DVPedia - a mashup of Napster data on song and artist titles in a wiki format.  In an era when more pictures are already uploaded to Flickr than all catalogued objects in all of the world’s museums, we are now creating an open archive of billions of cultural objects – but to be useful they need to be well catalogued (particularly through better meta-tagging) and openly available for re-use.

Howard Rheingold’s presentation on the Social Media Classroom I think deserve study for another day or at least a homework class.  He is developing an online classroom resource and teaching guide to enable teachers to teach participatory media literacy – which usually just happens after school.  The pictures of a huge hall full of kids on laptop is awe-inspiring; sadly I think the reality given limited ICT budgets in British state schools means that chalk and learn teaching is likely to continue for some decades to come.

EM Media Producers Forum 20th Nov – Uncovering Digital Distribution

It’s unusual that an event on cross-platform and digital distribution takes place on my doorstep, and more so in the very lovely surroundings of The Walk Cafe, Nottingham’s creative-friendly answer to The Ritz for tea and cake served with a knowing old fashioned charm.  And so to The Producers Forum, part of a series of events aimed at East Midlands film, tv and digital producers organised by screen agency EM Media.

A gathering of a few dozen producers – mainly film types but a few advertisers, games developers and consultants too – discussed the changing nature of distribution in the digital age.  Lisa Trnovski (2am Films) and David Shear (Revolver) discussed their new horror Brit Flick Mum and Dad – apparently the first film to be released simultaneously on all formats – cinema, TV, DVD, digital download and pay-per-view -(although I seem to remember the same claims levied about Road to Guantanamo) which has caused some consternation amongst indie cinemas who see digital as cannibalising their pay-to-see local business – including the present Chair of Nottingham’s Broadway cinema.

Shear claims the strategy makes sense for the indie distributor in allowing one ‘hit’ to promote the film in all formats to achieve significant scale from a small promotion budget – and allows the producer to get paid quicker.   Landmark deals from big studios like Harry Potter’s simultaneous cinema launch with Sky on pay-per-view (ONLY $50!) are closing the typical 16 week cinema to DVD/digital window.  Yet it’s small indies who are able, partly through necessity, to push the envelope in developing innovative and immediate forms of distribution – particularly for niche audience films.

Up next, Joel Kemp from Outso, a true success story of redundant ex-Climax studio developers making good by moving into outsourcing and recently the creation of virtual worlds, including Home for Sony Playstation.  MixM8 is their own in development virtual world for music, where artists can create fan zones, give live concerts, and even create unique MP3 tracks and virtual items for sale.  They’ve already got the ultra-hip Scroobius Pip and War Child on board. This is an exciting development and opens up genre and sector specific activities within virtual worlds (which are currently something of a scrum ground for unfocused selling of tit-tat and hard to target consumers) which is quite possibly the (long-term) future of social networking.

I was somewhat disappointed by the general discussion from the panel (which also included Michel Peters from Content Republic, Jason Burrows from Together Agency and Suzanne Alizart from EM Media) which took a somewhat narrow film-maker focus as to the limited possibilities of self-distribution.  It’s a subject I’m currently researching for my Masters, but Michel Peters in particularly adamantly believed there was little possibility in producers to self-distribute and aggregation was the way forward – believing that even all the major UK cinema chains working together would be unlikely to yield a profitable digital distribution business as a web-based model needs to have global scale and negotiate at least rights across a continent.

This certainly seems to have been the case so far with the music industry where major retailers have failed to launch viable digital businesses.  Yet I felt the panel failed to grasp that digital does mean direct contact with your customers, where aggregating data can be a long-play but can lead to greater independence and sustainability.  I certainly know from my days at an indie TV producer than we were able to sustain a seven figure e-commerce business through early investment in online through creating our own community.

Jason Burrows believed the challenge is maintaining interest in the ‘information economy’ where the new buzz and product finds it harder than ever to get noticed – guerilla tactics are needed to reach the multi-tasking generations.

Andrew Cooper, chair of Broadway, believes we need to capitalise on the ‘zeitgeist’ Nottingham now has for film makers – where some producers claim they can noticed more becuase they are from Nottingham, in much the same way bands from Sheffield benefit from the ripple effect of The Arctic Monkeys et al.

I found the discussion high level and useful, but the network needs to start bringing together other senior media practitioners other than film people to move the discussion up a gear to get really interesting.

But of course, most importantly, cake…

Em Media cake

EM media cake going...

EM Media cake going..going...

Onemedia unconference Nov 13-14, London

Onemedia logo

This week I headed down to innovation quango NESTA’s space age HQ (resplete with break-out rooms with circular board tables) to join in the first Onemedia ‘unconference‘.  This was basically an open space workshop where the 50 or so participants from a range of media industries – including web, digital, music, film, education and TV – gathered together to set our own agenda and form break-out groups to discuss the hot topics of the day and form our own solutions.  The attendees were a jolly nice bunch, mainly indie producers and consultants with a few biggers orgs like ITV represented.

I’ve been to several open space conferences, particularly during my days in Bristol developing projects with Watershed Media Centre.  Although you don’t always feel like you get the ‘top down’ knowledge you would from a speaker-led symposium conference, it really allows you to contribute and benefit from the wealth of knowledge of others – paticularly those working in parallel or complimentary fields, and it’s a cheaper and more accessible ways of organising an industry event – particularly in a smaller town or city.

And the best thing about open space is that it works on the ‘law of two feet’:  it’s OK to walk away from a session if you’ve said enough or just want to move on.  It’s a great way to get live feedback to test the waters with radical ideas.  But I forgot how tiring it is – so much talking and even more listening!

We self-secretariat-ed all our session – Mel @ Media Sauce has the un-enviably task of gathering and sorting through all our disparate notes – but some of the key thoughts and ideas I heard in the sessions I attended:

Branded and advertiser-funded content
There was much discussion from the indie production community on the return, 1950s soap-style, to the advertiser leading the production of quality content, from interactive drama through to James Bond heavy rotation product placement.  Many discussed the difficult of getting air-time with the major brands; without the gatekeepers that were broadcasting commissioners, the environment to get commissioned direct is impossible to navigate for the micro-indie, and in the case of the telecos, we need them more than they need us.  Another example of the ‘flatter’ media landscape being easier to cross the terrain for big players than the many small, yet Magic Lantern played upon the creative vanity and budget crunches of brand managers to deliver interactive content direct to online audiences, cutting out the perplexing range of ‘middle men’ in the current advertising market including buyers, ad agencies and producers.   Those established in the ‘old media world’, like Buffy creator Joss Wheedon’s Doctor Horrible or Radiohead’s In Rainbows, mean reaching existing fans with the benefit of years of TV or major record label investment is that much easier to profit from digital-only distribution and to acquire the investment in the first place.

Taste makers
Conversely, there is a key role for ‘taste makers’ like Last.fm and Hype Machine to help users connect with the influencers – be it Nike bribing cool kids to wear their trainers in the playground, or user recommendation and aggreation technologies.

Narrative
Understanding narrative was a key theme in several sessions – web producers need to understand narrative in the user experience journey as much as the many types of narrative forms which can be applicable to everything from a traditional storytellers to a console game.  The digital world has much it can learn from those from the film and TV industries – be it how to tell compelling stories on a budget or lighting design.

Universities may be churning out graduates with interactive productions skills ten-to-the-dozen, but those with the intelligence to be trained in the ‘art’ of media production, or the work training to do it, are lacking, yet a lot of the old training from the film schools isn’t needed in the YouTube and digi-camera age where accessibility and story are more important than framing each shot.  Budding film-makers can just learn by doing, and start to engage with an audience from day 1.

New skills
Training and skills are paramount to allow people to compete in this shifting landscape – but the significant majority of freelancers in the industry don’t have access to professional development – or even know the question to ask they need the answers for.  The project I am working on with White Room for North West Vision is an interesting take – getting ‘traditional media’ freelancers and getting them placed into digital companies in a unique cross-industry experiment.

Writers, producers and directors still largely ‘don’t get it’ when it comes to creating the cross-platform worlds where audience expectations, aggregated by social media, are either enhanced or dumfounded by writers and the opportunities and limitations of each medium are best exploited.

Collaboration
Collaboration between different writers, producers and technical geeks is a necessity in the cross-platform world – and we just aren’t used to getting stuck in together or finding shared languages and commonalities.

Digital distribution
Overall, getting paid and finding the right business models from digital distribution is the crucial hurdle which inhibit development with the professional media community – although there is a necessity for new talent to ‘just f***ing do it’ – prototype your idea, get in online and start to build an audiences rather than chasing the golden commission.

I facilitated an interesting session on digital music distribution and what lessons other industries could learn from the bit-torrented collapse of the conventional music business.  Some key findings were that bands and artists have been successful when engaging with their audiences through making it very personal – using social media – like video, blogs and giving a bit of it away for free – were seen as winning tactics for musicians to build direct relationships and acquiring the data of fans which everyone from film-makers to indie games developer could benefit from.

We concluded the old structures – major labels, distributors and retailers – were largely redundant, but have been replaced with other corporate funded spaces like MySpace and Last.fm who act as gatekeepers and curators between content creators and audiences.

Overall, it was an enjoyable event if not a tad long – an intensive, bigger one-day event would I think have worked better.  It was a great way to meet people from different disciplines with granularity, but the wealth of indies/consultants compared to brand owners and major media players probably limited the impact of change the conference set out to make.  Sponsors NESTA and Pact are interested in the findings so let’s see what next.