If there is one common factor between the 3 finalists for the Manchester Beacon’s “Mapping Creativity” competition, it’s how all three of them define community in a slightly different way. It’s easy to forget that our vast “social networks” are road systems, not villages – allowing easy commute, but not providing much in the way of local knowledge.
With £25,000 to the winner, to be announced in November, there’s definitely a pot at the end of the rainbow, but neither easy money or smart technology will really be the arbiter of which one or all three succeeds. For “Community as Curator” there’s a keen recognition that we become a community through interest as much as proximity. So by enabling a group of, say, boxing fans, to follow an exhibition curated by, say, Ricky Hatton around his interests, people who might not normally explore our museums and galleries might do so, both on and off line.
For “Arc Space” a community is definitely locational. Hulme sits bang next to the city’s knowledge corridor, but there’s limited crossover between the university and the diverse population of the area. Through development of a local search engine and social network, they believe that you can create a co-operative of shared knowledge, interests and learning.
Simplest of the ideas, and you feel sure to come to a cooking channel near you soon, was “The Great Manchester Cultural Cookoff” where food – and our memories of food – are used as the glue that binds. Not sharing recipes so much as sharing the stories behind the recipes, it’s not – like Heston Blumenthal – trying to discover what makes the perfect recipe, but wanting to use a virtual space to recreate the familial spaces where food used to be so central. Here “community” is plural, and our differences can be explored via what we share.
We all know that good ideas have many fathers, and bad ideas are orphans; but what struck me about all three of these was how ideas are like children, in that they need to be nurtured in order to grow and reach their potential. All 3 of these seemed worthy of pursuing, but all of them had a gap – either in terms of their community involvement, their innovation, or their sustainability. Being given the time and support to develop is what will fill those gaps.
I was sat near the front as they did a “ten slide” pitch at the Whitworth so I couldn’t see which ideas gained most support from the audience. The pitches were being filmed however, and there will be time to have your say online in the next couple of weeks.
Archive for October, 2008
When Networks Become Communities
Content is King
For the arts content is always king, so it was great to see a wide range of the North West’s arts organisations revelling in a day of cutting edge digital content on Monday. I was the organiser, so I’m not pretending to be an impartial witness, but the day seemed to go down well with everyone.
First up was Vito Rocco, who’s forthcoming movie, a low budget British rom-com called “Faintheart” is out early next year. A traditional film in many ways, what was unusual was the support that came from Myspace in both the production process and the marketing. Before the movie was made, some of the casting was done via homemade videos; whilst during the filming the “making of” rushes were uploaded to Myspace. Perhaps even more interesting, the launch of the movie will see a “heart map” where free premieres will take place where the most fans of the movie congregate. Vito said that he’d be interested in using the internet more collaboratively in the future, perhaps through development of a portmanteau movie or similar.
Complementing Vito was Marcus Romer who is artistic director at Pilot Theatre in York. Their Second Life presence allows them to do set design in a virtual space, cheaply and easily as well as allowing streaming.
Because the arts sometimes doesn’t get to see the cutting edge, two “mavericks” had been invited along: Hugh Hancock author of “Machinima for Dummies” showed us how to make a short animation in “World of Warcraft” – the popular online RPG, and finally Christian Payne uber-blogger and social-media maven inspired everyone with his can-do approach to social media, wherever his in the world.
By the afternoon workshops we were all ready to have a go for ourselves. CJ Lyon showed us how to create a mobile phone “swarm” using “swarmteams”, an easy way of connecting a group of people via SMS and the web, and Old Trafford’s Lets Go Global helped us make a short film in an hour. Ok it was more Granada Reports than Citizen Kane, but, still!
In true social media stylee, we twittered, flickrd and live streamed the video. So you can relive some of the excitement here, here and here!
Manchester blog of the week is back!
Now that the superb Manchester Blog awards are over and all those deserving winners are back to their PCs we’re back with our weekly look at what’s top in the city.
This week’s pick of the posts is the excellent 14sandwiches.
From the keyboard of the award-winning Manchester Bus blogger Martin Bryant, this mix of geekery, gadgetry and musings is a slick production indeed.
Self-described as “a technology-media-music party for your brain” this blog details everything from the latest social networking site launches to the hot stuff in phone gadgetry.
In recent postings for example, Martin has been taking a look at the new network for dads, odadeo.com , and detailing the thinking behind always carrying two phones ( a geeky habit I fully endorse!).
The page design is clean and well executed, Martin’s writing style makes even techie jargon approachable (Check out his post on Dongles for proof) and there’s a good mix of video and audio to boot.
But what’s all this got to do with our favourite lunchtime meal? Too much time munching a mountain of sarnies in front of the keyboard perhaps?
Martin explains: “It was the name of a music review site I wrote when I was a student. I can’t remember why I named it that, although people assumed I was fat due to eating 14 sandwiches. I’m neither fat nor have I eaten 14 sandwiches in one sitting. It just seemed like a good name to resurrect!”
So there you have it – strange name maybe but a cool must-have Manchester bookmark all the same.
Myself and Paul will be hunting around for blogs or websites to feature here, add to our blogroll and include in the e-view page of the M.E.N on Saturday so, if you’ve got one to nominate, contact me here or submit a link below. The only criteria is that they have some connection with Manchester.
Further Twitter terror threat blogged
Following the weekend’s report from Wired magazine which revealed how military intelligence had identified three possible scenarios for terrorists employing the micro-blogging platform Twitter, the CounterTerrorism blog has come up with a fourth threat.
Noting that the LA Fire Department is making good use of Twitter as a real-time incident information platform, Roderick Jones refers to an Islamist forum when he posts: ”Perhaps the terrorist use of Twitter will be the revival of alhesbah as a micro-blog sending ideological updates to followers as well as including LAFD style incident updates – I would add this as, potential use scenario 4.”
Twitter back under military microscope
Wired magazine reports that US army inteligence has been studying how the micro-blogging tool Twitter could be used for possible militant purposes.
Quoting a recent presentation (put together on the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists website) it says a recent report focuses on some of the newer applications for mobile phones: digital maps, GPS locators, photo swappers, and Twitter mash-ups of it all.
Noah Shachtman’s article says the presentation lays out three possible scenarios in which Twitter could become a militant’s friend:
Scenario 1: Terrorist operative “A” uses Twitter with… a cell phone camera/video function to send back messages, and to receive messages, from the rest of his [group]… Other members of his [group] receive near real time updates (similar to the movement updates that were sent by activists at the RNC) on how, where, and the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush.
Scenario 2: Terrorist operative “A” has a mobile phone for Tweet messaging and for taking images. Operative “A” also has a separate mobile phone that is actually an explosive device and/or a suicide vest for remote detonation. Terrorist operative “B” has the detonator and a mobile to view “A’s” Tweets and images. This may allow ”B” to select the precise moment of remote detonation based on near real time movement and imagery that is being sent by “A.”
Scenario 3: Cyber Terrorist operative “A” finds U.S. [soldier] Smith’s Twitter account. Operative “A” joins Smith’s Tweets and begins to elicit information from Smith. This information is then used for… identity theft, hacking, and/or physical [attacks]. This scenario… has already been discussed for other social networking sites, such as My Space and/or Facebook.
Interesting to see that the expert analyst quoted goes on to dismiss these “Twitter threats” as something to keep a sense of propertion about.
But this report (even with the ”what are you doing? death to America” graphic) adds further weight to the growing reports on how the military is harnessing social media tools – a topic which I shall endeavour to keep track of through this blog.
Social Media Cafe venue selected
The venue for the city’s first ever Social Media Cafe event has been decided – it’s The Northern at 56 Tib Street, Manchester, M4 1LW. Tel: 0161 835 2548.
The trendy Northern Quarter (those three words are always put together by us journo types!) pub is opening up the bar especially for the newly formed collection of participatory media users, creators, evangelists et al, who have it from 6-9pm on November 11th.
Discussions on the choice of the night’s speaker are still going on at the dedicated Google group where you can register your interest, post a discussion and otherwise keep up with developments.
Looking forward to meeting up with plenty of you there.
Manclopedia rumbled! City’s own Wikipedia forced into the open
Exciting news reaches this blog – Manchester now has its very own version of the multi-edited online encyclopedia wikipedia!
Called Manclopedia it aims to: ” to collect and summarize every single aspect of Greater Manchester (including it’s history, culture, politics, people and places) with the aim of becoming the most comprehensive collection of information regarding Manchester and the surrounding areas.”
So what’s happened so far? Well the people behind the initiative have been forced to go public with the site rather earlier than expected due to naughty bloggers letting the cat out of the bag.
Kenan Bailey explains: “This has been pushed forward by four weeks due to us being rumbled by various online blogs and community websites who discovered the site without instruction. Our initial intention was to spend the first month filling the site with starter-content, but since we’ve been rumbled and people are already linking to the site we’d like to announce Manclopedias official release in to the public domain.”
The site will operate as a wiki with anyone able to publish content on Manclopedia under the 4-point precondition that the articles published are educational, substantial, credible, and likely to be of interest to the reader.
Sadly since its premature launch there have been about 50 of what the site’s organisers describe as “shameless” publicity attempts by various people and projects to publish articles about themselves containing little more than a brief description and links to their web pages.
I wish this project all the luck in the world – if they can pull it off it will be a fantastic digital resource for the city but, as with all such community projects, it remains to be seen whether Manchester’s digerati will be sufficiently protective of the fledgling site in order to ward off the inevitable vandal attacks.
I certainly hope so..
There’s also a Facebook group for the project you can see here.
When Bloggers Became Writers
At last night’s Manchester Blog Awards what was noticeable was how the “blog” is transforming, from personal experience to a genuine platform for new writing.
Even a year or so ago, the blogs that people sent you were almost always anecdotal – quirky tales of working in a call centre or even, memorably, travels on the “43″ bus. What was noticeable last night is that there’s hardly a hair’s breadth anymore between the blog writer and the writer. Follow the Yellow Brick Road or Chicken and Pies could easily be the first chapter of an autobiographical novel – and with readings from two forthcoming novels, by Chris Killen and Maria Roberts, the journey from blog to page has never seemed shorter.
I think what is interesting is how a format that began as a semi-public “diary” now has almost no pretence about its pretension – the blogger is now craving an audience, and all last night’s readers were more accomplished than some more literary types I’ve seen over the years. In some ways, I’m wondering if this now, paradoxically, takes it away from “social media” into another realm. At its worst this type of writing is an ephemeral chick-lit for the noughties, at it’s best, a return to the ongoing episodic narratives of Richardson and Defoe. Either way, of course, the aim is to entertain; to make us laugh – to get us to return.
It’s always a hostage to fortune to say a format has “come of age”, but as someone who began blogging in HTML before I’d even heard of Blogger, I’d be surprised to find a young writer who now wasn’t putting out some of their work via a blog.
In the flurry of events that fills the calendar in Manchester at this time of year, one can see that the Blog Awards feels like a necessary piece of the city’s cultural furniture.
