quicklink | your 'third' place, fibrecamp

although we have been talking about the fibre studio a lot recently we have not really given potential clients any background how a web series would be put together for the user/client. so seeing as we are getting a lot of interest now of about 'how we can utilise the studio' and hearing comments like 'your not messing around are you' we thought it might be a good idea to give you a breakdown how a show would be recorded from a clients perspective and what kind of thought process you should be in to actually putting together a show.

identify your area of expertise

it seems an easy thing to say but really what is it about you that you feel most passionate about delivering information on. are you an expert in your field or do you have something to give back to a community about your area of expertise. maybe you have got so far with your passion and need additional input from people around the world, maybe your interested in just capturing feedback from a certain group of people in a certain location.

identifying what your trying to achieve early on will help you cultivate your programming for your show. have you been working behind the scenes on your project and are just finding you need to be connecting with others in your social grid to spark ideas and push you forward. people are waiting for your expertise, it does not have to be popular to be needed, maybe people are waiting for you to just start that conversation online.

storyboard your shows

it is a good idea to storyboard your content output ahead of time. i normally have the plans and layout for 6 shows ahead of time of what i'm going to talk about regardless of what is current or trending. i see so many shows that want to tell you about the latest and greatest yet there are still lots of extremely cool and relevant things out there for the everyday person that seems to get overlooked.

i tend to try and factor those important news events into the shows as a last minute thing rather than wait for lots of cool things to be trending or talked about - anybody can do that and too be honest too many of those shows exist, it's just duplication to copy that. i keep a list of links and services that i have fell upon in evernote and build out shows around it. trying to provide answers to possible situations to the viewers before i put my opinions on it.

build out your content ahead of time

every moment in the day is media time, it's worth keeping a clip farm together of moments and interviews you had with people. get that content from your cameras, your mobiles, start building up a catalog of content that is tagged and indexed and grouped - this gives you the ability to dip into when you need later on. i like to think months ahead as to video blogs i'm going to shoot and potential video to make to keep me in tune with my tools and keeping me fresh with the tools that i use to edit. you find it keeps you in rhythm and starts to make you fine tune the process of creating media and pipelining it to fit into your day to day.

one of the biggest things i hear from people is that they do not have the time to make their own media, i personally think you just need to adjust the way you perceive creating it. part of the process of making content can be the time it takes to pull all the elements together - the intro, the main part, the complimentary drop in clips and audio layer in the background - that does take time to find and merge together into a production. build your library personal to you and that is on par with your brand. a digital brand library of assets and elements that become your signature to your content output.

feedback from your potential viewers

getting feedback from your potential viewer base is valuable in getting your programming fine tuned for your audience. as well as collecting stats for your programming and seeing how well certain posts are doing in your content management system getting video and audio feedback from you viewers helps feed into the general organising of your web series or content output. getting people to give you feedback regarding each show or your general progress is relatively easy to do. it's good to add a frame at the end of your video and have regular lower thirds show up in your programming as it is running along.

i use posterous to post my videos and this has great auto posting features to send to additional targets that supports video hosting. newsletters are extremely important things to keep as well and are good for viewership retention - i would suggest using a combination of wufoo, mailchimp and flowtown for maintaining this kind of auto response system and collecting of email addresses. having a user base of people who want your content is extremely important to get the message out about your show.

notification, subscriptions and regular programming

having a way of updating/notifying your user base in real time using tools like posterous which auto post to other locations (especially facebook and twitter) are extremely useful social media pr tools to alert people about your program. program titles and structure are very important as is a constant hashtag for your programming timetable so people can search on it and find that tag around the web. subscriptions via email subscription links are hugely valuable and should be something you are cultivating on a weekly basis.

a facebook fan page can be very useful here as well because a lot of eyeballs check in on facebook. i believe the rough time that is thrown about is every 30 minutes or so - this means that if your content is regular you can build up a regular amount of attendees. using services like bambuser as well that intergrate really well with facebook helps because the embed can actually be displayed in the actually feed with the rest of peoples other updates.

another thing to keep in mind is making sure your covering other timezones with your output - this can be crucial as well to drive international audience for your content. using scheduling tools like hootsuite for time releasing tweets is useful here. once you get into a flow/pipeline in setting these things running it become a mere task of maintaining the tasks you have setup.

finding sponsors and the right software

we are very lucky to have some great people behind us for this initial period as we scale up the fibre studio - both boinxtv, cradlepoint and telestream have helped us out massively to get our project off the ground. scaling our kind of studio that works in a very organic manner having people who believe in what you can achieve with 'a studio from scratch' is crucial to pushing things forward and raising awareness to the project.

wirecast has proven to be a great single solution for camera switching, hd inputs and a really nicely integrated streaming solution to output to a remote rtmp flash server (it can do others but we mainly use it for streaming in hq/hd to a bambuser flash server endpoint which works really sweet) if we were to recommend a system to get up and running quickly it would have to be wirecast from telestream - they have been really good to us in this trial phase.

another great solution we are looking to phase into the pipeline of the studio is boinxtv - although it does not have a solution for streaming out of the box the ability to hotkey switch layers on and off is very useful for assigning to our bluetooth numpad solution for remote controlling the studio while we are recording or streaming. we are looking at combining both boinxtv, camtwist and wirecast together to give us a broad range of features that will complete the package for the most adventurous client.

of course, you run into problems when building out a studio from scratch. .. i'll do my best to pad this out as we progress. ..

things we want

- another location to be able to do streaming from.
- aircon (hot as hell in summer unusable)
- ability to set other functions in boinxtv for recording
- a full license for wirecast and also for boinxtv
- sound proofing to be able to remove the room noise
- additional lapel mic so we can record without the rode shotgun mic
- mac mini so we can do remote setup with cameras and use the hdmi out to feed a 32" screen for graphics
- a 32" screen mounted on a stand behind the shot
- a pretend bar of sorts
- additional camera tripods for the secondary cameras

things we put together already

- we got donated a sofa (epic)
- we bought a gazebo and adapted it to our needs with black curtains to deadened the sound
- sponsoring for a community package by cradlepoint for recording independent local voices.
- the bluetooth keyboard remote controller for layer switching

uber wishlist for the studio

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini
- either the 4gb model or the snow leopard server version (new mac mini looks well nice)

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity
- new intensity shuttle freestanding unit but usb 3.0

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/h264prorecorder
blackmagic h264 realtime pro recorder

http://www.aja.com/products/io/io-hd.php
10bit HD over firewire

http://www.amazon.com/Novation-Intelligent-Controller-Universal-Technology/dp...
Novation Nocturn Compact Intelligent Plug-In Desktop Controller with
Automap Universal Technology
the matrox mxo2 - allows us to have all sorts of inputs into the SDI
signal as an input.

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quicklink | this post also posted to hubpages.

after having a conversation with a number of people over the last few weeks i forget that i'm quite cutting edge in that i live online and in the 'cloud' when it comes to the applications that allow me to move away from a home computer or desktop - i can literally do my work wherever i have an internet connection. in nottingham at the @lacemarkethouse and @antenna_uk both have great high speed internet connections which allow me as a mobile media creative to get my 'message out' quickly. the upload speed at both of these venues upload my content in a very speedy manner. the ability to produce, edit and upload at pace allow me to move onto the next task - part of my media pipeline of fitting in ambient context to my social media work throughout a day, before i even start my business day in some regards.

I have been putting together a list of websites and services i use that help me through that day to day - i'll keep adding to this list and will put a link on the new version of the site so that new social media creators and creatives find some great web tools to help them live in the cloud - what do you use?

social network maintenance and building.

http://www.flowtown.com
campaign management based on criteria to send out time delayed messages 

http://www.wufoo.com
my forms management for feedback or signup so people can follow what i'm working on

http://www.mailchimp.com
really nice forms for sending out to groups of people special offers or training

http://twollow.com
find and follow people on twitter. good follow suggestions system

making media and creation

http://www.audioboo.fm
recording audio live podcasts on my iphone or android based phone.

http://www.heywatch.com
conversion between different formats (bambuser flv > convert to mp4)

http://www.fiverr.com
graphics, logos and other cheap less than $5 jobs (pay via paypal)

http://www.evernote.com
distributed note taking application for keeping notes and drafts for blogs. 

distribution, broadcasting services.

http://www.posterous.com
fantastic fast blogging via email with great autoposting

http://mailplaneapp.com
great drag and drop and iphoto integration rapid distribution of media.

http://www.blip.tv
spread to multiple targets

http://www.tidyhosts.com
64kps 50 person listener mp3 stream audio streaming/events/etc

http://www.heyspread.com
over 18 different video hosting sites at once.

http://ping.fm
spread message to dedicated group that other services do not cover

http://su.pr
send message out to multiple twitter accounts

http://hootsuite.com
time delayed tweets slow release (sometimes multiple accounts)

tracking and monitoring tools.

http://klout.com
a once a week/month check to see how your presence is doing.

http://backtype.com
track your keyword mentions around the internet

http://basecamphq.com
day to day client monitoring of jobs and timescale tracking

http://www.cloudkick.com
for monitoring my ec2/s3 instance and other clouds we are using.

http://www.silentale.com
bind all your social services together as a backup and search them

media and social awareness collection

http://www.boxee.com
download regular show updates to main machine for viewing content at home

http://www.tokbox.com
video chat for interactive weekly catchups

http://www.vemedio.com/products/snowtape_phone
great for listening to internet radio but also 'recording!'

webhosts and hosting providers

http://www.dreamhost.com
low cost good uptime provider with awesome control panel

http://www.mediatemple.com
scalable on demand cloud with great control panel

http://www.servage.com
uk dedicated provider for long term standalone clients

http://aws.amazon.com
dashboard to my ec2 instances and s3 storage

http://www.backblaze.com
offsite backing up of macbook pro and macpro for $10 a month

http://www.dropbox.com
cloud hosting up to a 100gb of files between your machines

http://www.lastpass.com
cloud password storage system for login to websites $12 a year (bargain)

http://www.soundcloud.com
audio storage for podcasts, interviews

invoicing my clients

http://www.blinksale.com
automated invoicing and billing with recurring billing.

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Click here to download:

a_posterous_iphone_app_idea_fo.zip (6235 KB)

If your anything like me you tend to take a lot of photos on your mobile phone and then never actually put them anywhere, or the moment you feel has gone.

I would love to see a posterous app that has a number of sections to it to be able to do various functions as a media maker and introduce a few other new features that I think would be excellent and make posterous stand put from the crowd (I'll leave that idea -an audioboo api/picture/fading/gallery/pausingthing) to another entry.

Anyway, first feature is 'my past days' -I'd like to be given a random selection of images/videos I shot over the past week/month and post them as a gallery - I think this would be good for the lazy poster. maybe a DM or facebook message as a call to action to load up the app to do it even? ;)

It's about time someone gave posterous some iphone/ipad love!

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HeliCam sample clips from Chris Wilkinson on Vimeo.

hmm. conkers + helicam + ecohome. ideas forming.

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a few weeks ago i was concentrating on the house - hoping that maybe a secure base would make me feel like i had some kind of security, appears not.

bits of furniture and deep cleaning from room to room started to become morbid again when i was presented with each room needing *something* for it to be sorted. during the last week or so i have been just 'living' here - my motivation has dropped off - due in part from a variety of 'life' things. sods law thou (all of a sudden) my projects seem to be heading at full tilt again, trying to have the funds to get to places has been a bit of a restriction however this week. I thought i would put a list of projects that i will be working (or hoping to work on) in the coming month(s)

the nottingham and birmingham hubs
i've become very attached to both places, probably nottingham more so because of the faster connection (i'm a sucker for bandwidth) - nottingham is great to get to the lacemarket house for the fibre studio within ten minutes and birmingham with aquilatv in broad street is great when i want a change of scenery over in brum - they always have a really energetic vibe going on in the office with lots of things getting edited or talked about. i like that a lot. falling face first into both places and scrambling to my feet on both as been an experience so far - i'm really hoping to tap into some of the local nonprofits in nottingham and see what fantastic things we can get started with them in the fibre web streaming studio. i need to structure out some flyers and start really actively promoting that around the city. so much of the city i have not seen yet. would like to make some of the places nearby aware of what is possible from our little room.

a buddist podcast
a good friend who i have known for a long time (time flys with online friendships) jason jarrett and his lovely family has been producing the buddist podcast for five years now. it has a massive following in a large number of countries and recently we caught up in austin, texas at south by southwest (sxsw) - it seems weird to only see your friends outside of the country at conferences but it was a great surprise and a much needed chat and catchup. i'll be working with jason raising the social media profile of the buddist podcast and making sure that the distribution of the podcast is spread across as many platforms and formats as possible. it actually goes hand in hand with an idea i have had for years which needs a simple transcoding engine to take a format and encode into a variety of formats. i'm looking forward to see what open source code is now out there for conversion. be nice to get back into that side of things. i'll be working on his facebook fan page to start. Looking forward to seeing him this week to talk about the projects.

little old me is giving a lecture of sorts at nottingham university
how strange. feels like a weird paradox, to be presenting to a BA multimedia course about the 'things i do' - the social media work and how i got myself started with my personal brand - in fact why, i got started with it is probably more order of the day - i'm hoping it will go well, not really sure what to expect and i have no idea how many people will attend. i really need to start working on something punchy for this tomorrow. i need to find a stack of graphics and totally redo parts of my presentations. I was hoping to get a few other of my social media friends in attendance so they could tell the story of their 'entry'

an entrepreneur with a suite of businesses & services
not really keen to let this one out of the bag just yet until we have had our first meeting next week but if things 'click' and we feel like we could have a good working partnership together i think this suite of businesses and projects could be the cornerstone to my social media output (for nottingham to start) with a clear connection with the fibre studio at lacemarket house we are building out. this businessman (all to be revealed!) has a number of businesses in and around nottingham and is expanding into other areas of the uk as we speak. the crossover could be fantastic.

an old client reappears in walsall
not really sure what went wrong here, break down in communications or just issues that never got resolved in the right way but i do know that the website that we wrote from the ground up never truly got used and since then a lot has changed in the website world. i no longer enjoy or find the time to spec out website builds when the majority of people are using the transport of social networking websites to get to content - the times of the static website are gone. it has to be easy to post to and realtime. i'm hoping that if the client goes ahead that again we will go with a custom, themed version of posterous and spend a few days onsite with the team training them up in using the social media tools. i'm hoping this time they will be able to have someone spend at least once a week publishing content out to the website. doing things by email and using gadgets like the iphone make things so much easier these days.

a meeting in london with a master of a card
i recently picked up and blogged about the prepaid mastercard from mygocard.co.uk that can be topped up at any paypoint or be loaded up by bacs (social, wages, etc) - one of the features that really jumped off the page to me was the ability to send funds to another card. this started me thinking about the homeless and the fact that your not required to have this card 'tied' to an address - you have a method of banking that requires no address - something very difficult to do if your homeless with no fixed abode. The first idea was to simply have those workers that you have problems employing because of such a situation utilise the sms sending ability from a master company card.

The second idea was based around the idea of crowd-sourcing money via sms/twitter gateways to fund projects in a style similar to the way that kickstarter works in america. but this would be realtime and people could sponsor a variety of projects. i believe you can only have £3000 on the card at one time and you can only load £10000 onto it in one year. I think the idea for crowd-sourcing social media projects, creative arts and 'let's just build it' ideas could be massive with mygocard at the helm being the main sponsor. After all, they get commission from all transactions. I'm hoping we can talk about those charges too! :)

developing closer ties with hardware vendors for social media makers
already planted the seed with this some time ago and have a few hardware companies onboard with carrying on the conversation with a client and the use of the product after the sale. some of the content that is being produced by social media people 'ontheground' can directly feed back into promotion of the products and in turn the development cycle of future products that everyone needs rather than what everyone wants. i'll be starting an unofficial cradlepoint users website for all the prize winners that we had the chance to meet in austin and other users and communities that i have met recently in nottingham.

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what a fantastic day. still rejoicing in the fact that lots of keen media makers turned up and wanted to learn a bunch of new stuff

With my head still in the clouds after southby (sxsw) the mediacamp had quickly rolled around and i found myself over in nottingham again at the @lacemarkethouse getting ready for the saturday morning. The web streaming studio had just taken delivery of a settee (which is wonderful btw) and i had just gotten my head around the wiring up of the single lapel mic that we had been donated by @aquilatv - i ended up using the rode ntg-2 microphone to do interviews however.

People started to arrive early and the main room soon filled up for the great starting session by @lesanto about ten years in the past and ten years into the future of all the wonderful technology and gadgets, gadgety we get to play with (you can see it on ustream) I got to do a session about posterous which i hoped was received well and some wordpress people seemed to like the simple approach to blogging and get the message i was trying to spread about it being so very simple. it was great to get people excited about a service that on the face of it looks too simple to be useful but actually under the hood is very powerful - i'm excited to get my friends and prizewinners on a collaboration blog about the cradlepoint products.

Not only to keep in the loop with them about how they are getting on with the devices but also to try and learn new stuff they are finding the device can do. i know for instance that it has some kind of gps tracking/location thing that it can do (updating or something) and i'm sure we can build some really interesting mashups around that! :)

Ben Walker was on usual fantastic form and that guy seems to have been born with that guitar attached to his fingers - he did a fantastic set and he still manages to surprise me with his delivery even when tired - he just goes into performance mode. you really should book him to enhance your social media style media events. honestly, you will not be disappointed. Some of the things i noticed that the web streaming studio now needs to start empowering/delivering on.

• weekly skype dial in or tokbox chats. i now have the moderator tools and can manage a chat session better (timed chats weekly) 
• get my greenscreen over to nottingham (if i can the darn thing in the bag!) and start playing with boinxtv again 
• the unofficial cradlepoint users posterous of the ground and some funding together for the layout, design and slice. 
• find a 'day' sponsor for the room and start to gather local nonprofits, charities - high quality video for their website or blog. 
• additional second and third camera - one for macro on products and one for variety - donation or cheap hdmi out devices that work
• need to speak to blackmagic or find funding to get additional cards for the mac pro
• weekly live 'gravity' shows where we actually step through a product and service to compliment the 'audiogravity' audio podcast series
• we need sponsoring for the 4/8 channel alesis usb mixer
• revisit the configuration of the studio, look at organising the camera layout, cabling should be covered or 'out of sight'
• address the boomy sound of the room - find acoustic people who might be interested in at least giving us a quote for the work
• noticed that the video at times was a little bit blocky/compression on bambuser
• need to research distribution to multiple targets at the same time. media process/pipeline to do that.

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Click here to download:

cradlepoint_southby_and_the_mo.zip (531 KB)

We were very blessed this year to have a fantastic hardware sponsor (for the second year running) in the form of cradlepoint. forget those tinpot mifi units you hear about - these bad boys have full web admin controls like a fully fledged enterprise quality class router and can support upto 32 wifi enabled devices. they should get more press than they do - so i aim to change that!

Cradlepoint Giveaway from Mr Nat Higginbottom on Vimeo.

At sxsw we were lucky to have been given 10 units to give away in a prize game and also to mobile media makers and companies that would get the most out of them. We got some fantastic video interviews with some of the winners and how they are going to fully utilise them in their day to day activities. I realised to tap into this new group of users who were now using the same wonderful device as me that making an unofficial cradlepoint mobile media makers collaboration blog was the order of the day - look out for that in the coming week. A place to share tips and tricks from the ten people who won. A resource globally however for new cradlepoint users everywhere maybe - let's see how it pans out! :)

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Call to Action! There will be a steering meeting (1 of a maximum of 3) to be held in the Boardroom of Lace Market House (also the venue of the event and with a delicious fibre connection) on Wednesday 3rd Feb from 6pm - 7.30pm. MediaCamp Nottingham, unless there are any major objections will be held on Saturday 27 March. People should keep an eye on @pcmcreative and @mc_notts twitter accounts for further details.

For anyone unfamiliar with last year's event our Google legacy is here http://bit.ly/MCN2009

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So i get these weekly emails from freecycle regarding things that are wanted and available for free. It would be nice to write a small module so people could also add geo data (could be roughly i guess to the street if privacy issues) to the articles they want to giveaway/wanted separately and have these displayed on the doorstepr map. Just one of the many layers we are looking into for doorstepr. the ones that take the longest time to integrate api wise we intend to charge for but we think that is acceptable for what people will get from it.

Looking forward to see how all these pan out over the coming month! :)

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i'm very pleased to announce that I'll be training some pupils at a school in manchester starting on the 27th of January in using a nokia mobilephone. a small class to start with and i believe future sessions are planned at other schools. I'm quite excited to learn how they receive the device and the issues, features and uses they have found with the nokia n85 handset. having a two year old you certainly learn a lot from kids - trust me on that!

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just had a really good morning over in nottingham at lace market house hotdesking with @pcmcreative. a few weeks back we discussed about the potential of utilizing space and fibre resources and today was the first step towards making thegravity and HD streaming from a location possible - today was initial testing. turns out my laptop doesn't have the horsepower required to make it stream with an acceptable framerate but the actual picture quality was fantastic.

with the fibre currently throttled back on a port by port basis and with the ability to 'jack it up' I have every faith that the feed is perfect for the show and general social media making and aggregration for me to take my ideas and concepts to the next level and explore live in depth.

looking forward to my weekly trip over, need to find another sponsor for wirecast license, office space if I travel over more regular and some per show sponsors for rental of meeting rooms and such like.

... also need to flight case my future media making portable machine for broadcasting. expect this to happen quickly now I'm on it! ;)

Sent from my iPhone .. .
from a train towards home

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quicklink | i need sponsors/donations

*WE NEED DONATIONS * | kickstarter project link

roadcamp (www.roadcamp.org) will involve over two dozen online media professionals on a 3 day roadtrip from Montreal to Austin to attend the SXSW Festival. along the way, workshops on media and technology will be held, and all findings will be shared online. roadcamp is not officially associated with the SXSW festival.

the route
The bus will travel from Montreal > Boston > NYC > Washington DC >
Louisville > Nashville > Memphis > Austin over a three day period:

Day 1: Montreal > Boston > NYC > DC
Day 2: DC > Louisville > Nashville
Day 3: Nashville > Memphis > Austin

I've found a flight to toronto with air india (no really) for about £266 from heathrow airport (i wanted to go from brum but that was like £600) i'm looking around now for a sponsor/donations/sponsoring in general to cover the trip. I'll hoping to travel down with the rest of the crew from toronto down to austin and that spend three days or so covering as much as possible from a videoblogging, audio perspective. I'm hoping to link up with @aquilatv and maybe @lloyddavis while there (if i get there! - no wait, i will get there!) and also the irresistible, irreplaceable @orchid8 who i'm hoping i'll be able to get some floorspace in austin.

But, not only do i need to get over there we also need some sponsors for the trip to make it as epic as possible. I've copied this in below and i believe that some of these figures can be discounted - i've also attached the original pdf media kit.

Looking at the following deals for each sponsor.. you can see what each deal offers by looking in the media kit.

Platinum Sponsor : $8500 (-40% **)
Gold Sponsor : $5000  (-40% **)
Silver Sponsor : $2000  (-50% **)

** those prices are only discounted until the 15th of Feb however so gotta be quick!

You can find more information about the roadcamp below. Oh, and before i forget - a whole bunch of additional awesome people are onboard the media making bus, again check out the pdf and if you can assist in sponsoring that would be fantastic.

Blog: http://www.RoadCamp.org
Email: info@RoadCamp.org
Twitter: @RoadCamp
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/RoadCampOrg
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadcamp
Blip.fm: @RoadCamp

Click here to download:

RoadCamp Media Kit.pdf (372 KB)

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