i keep seeing these beasts popping up.

sooner or later one of these will be used for festivals/events doing some kind of social media live streaming i'm sure - not sure how it would work out. maybe a nice shotgun mic facing downwards with a nice windscreen on and a basic mobile phone with qik/bambuser installed to start with - mic used as a line in. either way i would love to play with one of these. they look a lot of fun.

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Click here to download:

so_antenna_has_a_dolby_5.1_stu.zip (3989 KB)

i thought they had just a little studio. i had no idea what is actually in the basement. epic kit - looking forward to exploring more in the coming weeks and months what happens down there and maybe do some video streaming shows from down there for 'thegravity' and our weekly pcmprojects catchup shows.

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i've been dabbling around with groups on ping.fm so i do not create duplication of status updates when autoposting out of posterous. In the process i have created additional targets to send to thou that posterous currently does not support and this works well to update the services i do not frequent regular but still have eyeballs looking at them.

i put together a simple screencast of the grouping feature of ping.fm but also talked about using su.pr and hootsuite regarding scheduling tweets. i created this screencast so that karen and jason from @buddhistpodcast could get used to the idea of using su.pr, ping.fm and hootsuite as part of their twitter annoucement release cycle for the fortnightly audio podcast show from http://abuddhistpodcast.com and to raise some viewer traffic for the bambuser livestream 'behind the scenes' show they started doing recently.

what is covered in the screencast

- using su.pr to create shortlinks
- using su.pr to distribute to multiple twitter accounts
- click through tracking on su.pr and stumpleupon
- using ping.fm to send to a dedicated group
- hootsuite and scheduled twitter posting
- using time scheduled tweets for use at events

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simple answer, they are too obsessed with themselves and the myriad of choices on offer to them with the entry point to the definition of quality changing hourly. when your world is a swipe away how do you create yourself an entry point into that world?

you can get coffee blended and shaped and nurtured to the taste you want, you can have your fishes smoked a million ways and you can cook your own steak and vegetables on a granite block on your own table. why then, would the average bloke or lady on the street with their latest and greatest whiz bang media device want it more than to just consume something else that someone else has done somewhere in the world. apple know this, that is why they removed elements from our initial ideas of what a tablet should be and left us with what the majority needs - a consumption device. a very smart move to get people use to the idea of digital asset and remote media snacking with a lightweight relaxed frontend, a coming of age of the cloud when you have this flat like device where you can gorge on the video and music and books of this world in a comfortable format not ever seen before.

and it will not be the first. google with android is gathering pace and you only have to look at the latest and greatest mobile phones to see that the computer really is portable now. we are mobile computing users. we are moving at speed towards that 'suggestive computing' platform that we all expected as kids would happen but we might never see in our lifetime. and it happened in about twenty years. devices are getting smaller, networks are getting faster and we are learning to optimise not only the world but our experience within it.

then i ask myself, would i want everyone producing anyway, would we have enough room in the virtual world to store our 'brainfarts' - our ideas that we consider worthy of a blog post, retweet or like. are we not rapidly imploding in on ourselves if we had everyone producing? - the filters would have to be smarter, the energy requirements for the global cloud farm would increase. we are gorging our way through our self obsessed universe of things. i find the human condition, more than anything else in this world the most interesting thing - the minds expanding and exploding to the possibly that each single humanon this planet has got. the ability now to transmit those thoughts, empathise those digital feelings and rediscover ourselves is really the real story here.

what is mainstream anymore anyway. i'm seeing the barriers to information coming down, i'm seeing business discover that they did not have to be the way they are with the general public plus i'm seeing the general public using social networks to finally unload those years of private issues and use it as a venting spot. the data out there these days is vast. will we soon hit the wall of noise over discovery. in cyberspace can people hear anyone scream anymore?

p.s - this was written on the last 0.76 pence of electric that this house has got. i go dark within twelve hours. bank holiday is gonna suck. again. looking forward to getting back to normality.

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a posterous/buddhistpodcast screencast series [pt1]

i'm currently in the process of taking abuddhistpodcast.com from a wordpress installation to a posterous blog because it is easier for jason and family to manage/post with their busy day to day lives - it has the added benefit of all the social media features you could shake a stick at and a regular release cycle of really useful features for content producers on the go. it has become my de-facto recommended blogging/cms/socialmedia toolset for someone putting 'information' on the internet - it hooks up to everything!

In episode one i discuss moving over from wordpress and talk about importing your existing blog. I'll be posting all the links to every episode on each post. I have done the first three episodes so far.

other episodes can be found below. . .

'the admin features, web blogging and bookmarklet'
- a posterous/buddhistpodcast screencast series [pt2]
http://su.pr/3CrUBb 

'closer look at advanced features of posterous'
- a posterous/buddhistpodcast screencast series [pt3]
http://su.pr/2v260Q

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i think the media say it all really.

                                                                                       

Click here to download:

Fantastic_Social_Media_in_Busi.zip (6458 KB)

also managed to record some vimeo clips outside of the work that i was doing.

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firstly, I have to say that richmond is stunning. it was the most perfect day by the river yesterday and lots of people were out by the river in the hot sunshine.

We (@pcmcreative and moi) had been drafted down on to different missions. Caron was to do chat engagement of the event on Twitter and I was with the ammobox and the video equipment.

I used the wonderful telestream from wirecast to archive each speaker and although our audio input was not direct I was quite pleased at the way wirecast could save a local copy. I would like to see more ways of compression thou instead of .flv and .mp4 - also I really would have liked to have recorded in 720p but my aging MacBook Pro could not cope with that. I tried, the frame rate was too low.

No streaming was required on the day and the videos will probably be released online after all the attendees have recieved the videos on DVD or I guess download link.

Sent from my iPhone

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i find it weird that my old show 'thegravity' title name seems to have such an affinity at the moment with the way the laws of gravity/attraction are bringing certain people into my life that are positive, upbeat and that have a calming influence on my life.

'thegravity'
show was a very low budget, poorly put together greenscreen tech, ideas and naval gazing idea i put together about tech, services and general catchup that always had delusions of grandeur about being a useful 'british' tech show.

now i have the access to a super fast internet fibre connection at the @lacemarkethouse over in nottingham i want to take 'thegravity' to the next level. I'm in the process today therefore with @pcmcreative (CJ) of putting together a production schedule for recording weekly shows and wrapping that together with screencasts regarding the process of how we get that show 'out there' on the internet, what we will be using for distribution of the video and 'behind the scenes' of what goes on in the studio to give potential clients the 'backstory' of how this stuff works and 'why' you should be paying to use the studio. i think it is a process that needs to be talked about.

Anyway, going to crack on with that. An interesting phase has begun.

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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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i sat down briefly today with @pcmcreative and we had a chat about the full schedule this weekend for the mediacamp and all that it will offer to a cross section of people wanting to explore this wonderful space.

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This monday i was once again speeding over to nottingham to spend the morning with the nottingham h.o.u.s.e project team to see how progress was going with the build. i was expecting to see at least one of the smaller modules taking shape and was duly impressed with the cladding on the smaller unit that was in the main old broadcast space area. time is precious for the rest of the modules so i'm sure people will be pulling out all the stops over the coming weeks to make this eco house a reality. I'm really looking forward to the progress made when i head into the university again on friday afternoon.

they have really managed to pull together and claw back some of the time lost waiting on supplies. last sunday they had a great turnout so they could crack on and get back on track. i wonder how many of the other universities that are currently taking part around the world are using students instead of skilled workers to build up the units?  It really is fresh new territory for some of the students involved.  one thing i want to chase in the next couple of weeks is quick interviews with the project managers of the other projects using a system called wetoku.com which allows one to one interviews - we will post these on the blog.

Some of the social media skills i'll be hoping to feed into the 10 person strong media making team over the coming weeks to help with the 'media' component of the project.

starting the conversation around a piece of media
posting updates and links to bits of media is not really the point of social media. yes it has some value to notify people/fans/followers of things you are doing but really you need to be creating a conversation around those bits of media, know what to capture next time, feed back information from outside the project into it from other people not connected but interested in what your doing. you have the ability to have a realtime editor crowd sourced from a potential workforce of eyeballs all sitting around the globe looking at the things your making. that's a powerful thing.

tagging your content
for people to be finding your content anywhere on the internet it is valuable to give the blog post, video or audio media the correct tagging. we are also using the hashtag of #solardec on twitter so that we can combine all the feeds together from around the web when people are talking about the project. a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to bring together as much of this information as possible so you can get a real time feel for the build.

remember your audience
they have already made strong headway in this area but utilising a number of different twitter accounts to cover a good cross section of people from different backgrounds. i really like the idea of different identity twitter accounts that may offer more relevant information to you about the things your interested in. i can see multiple twitter accounts for businesses taking on an additional layer of context around conversations this year. 'one size does not fit all' for twitter accounts.

keep it snappy, do it regular
not the script for a 'carry on film' but more about keeping the conversation alive. people are busy, lots of people are mobile. a lot of people are snacking on updates and then checking in later based on the density of your posts and progress on topics that are of interest to people. i always try to think of what it must be like for the remote viewer. i make sure that the updates are released regular for those that are searching or waiting for the next block of media to appears. always check if you have any conversation points to pick on between posting media. put yourself in the seat of the remote viewer. it's a lot of work often but the viral part of the conversation often comes from providing a regular stream of context and content.

using webtools to find existing conversations
i use http://search.twitter.com, friendfeed, tweetdeck and backtype quite a lot. i also use google alerts for certain keywords. i guess i could do a complete blog post on conversation tracking alone but that is coming as part of my social media side project that i have been working on the textual content for the last three months behind the scenes. The quick answer is to track the people you know that are going to the event, find out the hashtag for the event and look for common tags and themes that are happening based on the tweets that are coming out of the venue. look out for the rezpondr system and theme for the ecobuild day! - it's going to be awesome. ;)

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After conversations with the rest of the team - @zerocredit_uk and @subwolf (and robs mum!) we are approaching the Economic Development Officers at South Derbyshire District Council after looking through the Cooperatives UK site and have setup an appointment in regards to setting up a cooperative which handles digital and social media projects. We signed all the documents yesterday evening in the pub at our weekly meeting. We like progress.

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So there goes january and time is now getting short!

With four weeks or less to get sponsoring sorted for the roadcamp behind the scenes @subwolf has been working on a mashup of our mashup regarding all the destinations on the roadcamp so we can track our media output from the trip. it's quite difficult because we have no media coming in at the moment to be able to see what it looks like as markers on the map. Hoping to build in support for bambuser and youtube via the api to grab geo referenced media for the map and looking to moving the prototype codebase over to the rackspacecloud (or maybe ec2) for some low latency goodness.

It's going to be a busy month! :)

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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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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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Click here to download:

Im_hotdesking_this_morning_in_.zip (1741 KB)

So i'm over this morning in nottingham at my first morning in the lace market house for hotdesking.  I'm here once a week to fully utilize this internet connection and do some live video streaming and do some social media advice and create content around nottingham.  i want to doing some geotagging of the surrounding area next time i'm over - i might actually come over on the friday and do some then for our mapping system that we are working on.  reminds me i need to touch base with @subwolf today at some point.   actually, i have tons of work to be done today! :)

Back Shortly! :)

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