Happy Birthday George Orwell

Once again it’s June the 25th. I spent most of the day doing the same thing I did this time last year and this time the year before last..  I had a picnic at the Grave of Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell. Today is his birthday and for the last couple of years I’ve met with Dr John Perivolaris to pay our respects to the great writer and talk about the years events around surveillance and civil liberties.

We had a drink, munched on some food and made some media.

Last years post can be found at www.SocialMediaPicnic.com We hope to do the same thing next year so please put it in your diary and come along. There’s always some passers by who are also making a pilgrimage. This year it was some German folk, a lady on a bike and @Hedgewytch.

Throughout the year if you come across any relevant links or content around surveillance or civil liberties, please tag it with the #1984 hash tag.

Jeff Pulver – 140 Conference New York

Jeff Pulver, the chairman and founder of Pulver.com was the main man behind the 140 characters conference in New York that brought together Twitter users from all over the world.

New york was the first of the 140 Characters conference and others are planned in both London and Los Angeles. Originally the event was to explore the effects of twitter on: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising and Politics”. These topics were covered, as well as many more. As ever many of the conversations happened outside the main auditoriums..

I was asked by The Open University in England to grab some interviews with the assistance of Matt (@Barnstormed) and in the corridor we caught up with Jeff and asked how the conference had come about..

This interview is also on the Open University’s You Tube Channel.

Station X

StationX in its modern incarnation was born on the 16th of February 2009. The intention was to create a social media geek-meet, offering access to Bletchley Park for bloggers, tech lovers and social media types, in return for helping amplify Bletchley Park’s online campaign.

With this common cause in mind, approximately once a month a date is announced through the twitter account @StationX and the entry fee of £10 is wavered to those attending the geek meet.

StationX meet-ups are not restricted to only once a month, some meets happen under the radar. For example, we recently gave @StephenFry a tour that helped raise awareness of the park considerably.

If you find yourself at Bletchley Park with another person on twitter then feel free to announce that you are having a Station X meet up… we’ve had several bloggers of note and the BBC roll up so you never know who might attend.

If you have the tools in your pocket to blog about your experience please do. Every conversation helps to keep the Bletchley Park campaign in peoples minds. Using the twitter hash tag #bpark helps those interested to keep track of the conversation.

On a pre-planned day everyone meets in Hut 4 (the Cafe) at about 10am for coffee before taking the chance of a personal tour around the exhibits. Some StationX regulars hang back to network and catch up.

Because of Bletchley Park’s location you find yourself in the company of many new faces you would not normally see in the Manchester, Birmingham and London events.

The actual StationX takes it’s name from Bletchley Park’s wireless room manned by Mi6 in 1939. It was the 10th station of it’s kind to be opened hence the roman numeral in Station ‘X’.

The park is packed with history and attractions. To date, I have been on five tours of the park and on every occasion I have found something new and inspirational. Please make sure you click on the links embedded within this post for more history and information.

Besides being the birthplace of the computer, the critical importance of Bletchley Park in world history cannot be denied. More needs to be done to ensure future generations can visit, learn and understand.

Follow Kelsey Griffin @BletchleyPark and @Dr_Black to know more about the campaign @StationX for the geek meet and me, @Documentally just because..

More resources below:

Main Site: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Sue Black’s site: http://www.savingbletchleypark.org/

National Museum Of Computing: http://www.tnmoc.org//

Lloyd Davis Blog: http://perfectpath.co.uk/2009/05/20/to-bletchley-park/

Photos from me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christianpayne/sets/72157612582384354/

Photos from @Sizemore: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sizemore/sets/72157612568699509/

Rory Cellan-Jones http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/05/bletchley_park_the_fry_effect.html

Please feel free to comment below including links to your content..

Multi-Multimedia

The other week while on assignment at Reuters with @sizemore, I was talking to @ilicco about how the more kit i try to juggle the more diluted the content can become.

I was sat at the front of an almost exciting talk from the FSA with laptop, iPhone, N95, Kodak Zi6 and a pocket camera. Back in my bag was a pro Nikon SLR, an audio recorder and yet another laptop.

This is the burden of the blogger. We tend to move faster than the tech can keep up and the convergence of our various gadgets still only gives us one device that does lots of things in a mediocre fashion.. and then only for as long as it’s over stretched battery holds out.

I joked about buying Shiva Media. I thought a multi-armed kit wielding blogger would make a great logo. Apart from the fact this may be insulting the top Hindu God of Gods.. the name has already been taken anyway.

Then I saw @ilicco link to a blog post from Adam Westbrook

Here’s a guy who looks like he has found a happy medium. Adam is a radio journalist dabbling in video. Using a compact camera, a HD video camera and an audio recorder he may have to juggle a little but by not choosing to live update through twitter, ping gps, and live stream he still has time to script his interviews and get the job done.

Maybe Multi Media does not have to be Multi-multi-media..

In an ideal world, if I were going back into a warzone, or tackling something I only had one shot at, I’d want to work in a team. Much as I prefer traveling alone, I do find a more superior batch of content comes from using a team, who like super heroes, all have their own individual strengths.

Along with Stills, HD video and audio, I also like to (where possible) live stream, micro blog (Twitter, Audioboo) and gps tag as i go. I find so much more value in logging the live progress as ‘news’ which preempts the final edit. This not only raises awareness of the project as it is happening but opens up all sorts of real time resources & conversations, as connections are made as you document.

At the moment to do a multimedia job well you’d need a snapper and a videographer, perhaps an audio guy too but you may be able to manage this between two at a stretch. Both people must also be able to live blog, capture, edit, archive and back up their own content and on top of this, write and do stuff to camera.

When I mean ‘do it well’, I mean suck up and absorb as much of the surrounding content/story/information in high quality for the later edit and lo-fi for live blogging.

As I have never been embedded, a team also offers a certain amount of safety and security. Depending on where you are, sometimes it can just draw attention. Although mainly traveling alone for ease, I’ve often worked with a friend. Someone I would trust with my life.

In Iraq I didn’t really know what I was going to do. There was little planning. I just went to see for myself and apart from moving fast and laying low, I was just taking photos and logging my GPS position, either pinging it back via sat phone or texting when there was GSM. The photos I took went to accompany a couple of news stories my friend was writing and finally to make my first real video podcast.

Not long after my good friend was kidnapped and later released.

On assignment in Jordan for the UNHCR I had more experience but limited time. I decided against video and just worked with stills and audio. Much of what I was going to do was arranged in advance by a friend who knew the area well and acted as a fixer. With a simple hand held Zoom H2 on the floor i could record the stories of the refugees and use my Nikon D300 to take pictures in the pauses, editing out the shutter sound later. During the live video blogging of the project I was contacted by Bill Cammack who ended up editing the final stills and interviews into a film.
I guess when there is less at stake.. Back in the UK, either covering a geek conference or on a job for a corporate client, you can experiment and test new methods of data capture and transmission. This is when we can get silly with our tech. Finding out what works and what is a waste of time and resources. What medium has the greatest reach for the least amount of effort.

If I had a tech lab at my disposal, something similar to what Ironman or Batman had in their gargantuan basements.. I would not hesitate to create the ultimate journalists tool. Some single device that once and for all did everything a blogger/journalist needed.

It only exists in my head right now but would have the video capture qualities of RED.. A 15-200mm f1.4 lens with an integral Binaural auto zooming microphone. High definition stills could be extracted from the film and edited in camera. All the GPS and audio to text tagged footage could be separated into audio, video and stills onto solid state cards or streamed via wifi, wimax, or compressed for GSM, or satellite enabling it to be sent all over the world but also to a sister pod situated within the same city retrieving the footage and archiving live.

Oh.. and it tweets.

Failing that.. I’d be happy for the iPhone to have a decent battery, shoot 5 mega pixel photos even in low light and shoot reasonable video from two decent front and back cameras.

This I feel would be far easier to achieve and may even be with us next year. In the meantime I, along with many bloggers and tech lovers will be carting around small to medium backpacks clanking with lensed gadgets. Always on the look out for an unused plug socket so we can recharge and ultimately.. reconnect.

You can add me as a friend on twitter here.. Twitter.com/Documentally

Were Secret Societies The First Social Networks?

I am not a Freemason but i have been asked more than once to don the apron and swear the oaths..

I have also been told that Freemasonry is not a secret society, It is a society with secrets.

Never-the-less, it was the thought of being admitted to a secret society that attracted me to the idea of joining the Freemasons. I have an unhealthy fascination with the unknown.

Freemasonry has a mysterious history going back hundreds of years and it’s symbolism and iconography is embedded within our language, architecture and history.

One thing I didn’t quite understand when visiting a Masonic Lodge during a recruitment meeting was the rule asking you not talk about work, politics or religion.

Now, arguments often accompany political and religious discussion, so i could understand why those topics may be frowned upon. But I thought this would be just the place for movers and shakers, the people in positions of power to ‘Get Things Done’.. Where deals were made and projects started. How can this happen if all you have is small talk?

Now I think I get it.

Perhaps In one way Freemasonry is one of the Wests first social networks. Albeit a little more exclusive than the ones we have today. The small talk like the kind we see in our online social media networks was and is vital to build trust.

I imagine the Lodge meetings to be formal in some ways. Packed with ceremony and learning and the bar/social time afterward, the place where I’ve been invited to sample the subsidised beer, is where you shoot the breeze and get a feel for those you are connecting with.

Some of us do the same online. Twitter is a good example of people getting involved in small talk before contacts and connections are formally cemented. It may be at a conference or a social media get together where things move on to the next level. A quiet corner is found and business is done.

Here is the five minute chat with A Knights Templar Priest that started me thinking about how we ultimately use small talk to feel around for those we feel we can trust. In business, in play, in life..

I am sure much of this is human nature, but there still seems to be practised rules of engagement and now, more than ever, we see a blurring of those lines of when we should and shouldn’t open up to strangers. How speaking your mind in a public place can get you noticed by many but only the few who share their thoughts, no matter how trivial, get to play the game.

We all may appear to be ‘open and transparent’ but I’ll wager many of us keep the finer details of our business transactions behind closed doors.

AudioBoo

AudioBoo has me excited. It fills a gap, it’s a missing link, and while we wait for a good quality audio/video (maybe VideoBoo) on an non-jailbroken iPhone.. This is going to keep me more than occupied.

Audioboo is an audio blogging platform in the shape of an iPhone app that was in private beta in January but is now available free of charge right now in the app store.

I first got wind of it through @Sizemore via @Bash. Weirdly I had just been listening to @Loudmouthman and @doctorpod on the podcast Social Media White Noise as they talked about something i had said in an old podcast of mine about wanting a one touch podcasting solution. I have never really got into Utterli. Sometimes it takes the simple interface of an iPhone app to really grab my imagination.

I think Audioboo could be it. It was a free download on the App Store created by Best Before Media with funding from 4iP.

In a nut.. it lets you create and tag recordings and upload them to a timeline with your GPS coordinates and a photo. The app and site are very much a work in progress and I’m very excited to see how it will develop.

I have already submitted my Atom feed (http://audioboo.fm/users/124/boos.atom) to the iTunes store and recorded a couple of interviews at @StationX The RSS could do with some work and there are some UI ideas i would like to pass onto @mattwaring and the team but with plugins and access to an API on the horizon I really feel a serious journalistic tool, as well as a fun social media toy has arrived on our iPhones.

I imagine it’s only a matter of time before Audioboo is available for other phones, either as apps or within their mobile browsers.

In the meantime, while i experiment, I have fallen back in love with audio. It makes you think more about how you describe your surroundings. It makes me want my surroundings to explain themselves. Either by getting close to a person and their opinion or close to environmental sounds. Combined with a photo attached to act as a catalyst for the imagination, the listener is not being force fed the story. they have to take a moment to let their imagination get involved in the media.

If you are not keen on recording straight away, Take a trip through the timeline.. With every sound bite you are taken from one place to the next.. from one life to the next. Last night I lay in bed and visited countless places illustrated in sound. It reminded me of when I first found podcasting.

There is no hiding behind the production here though.. these sound bites, (at the moment anyway) are limited to 5 minutes of raw recording. If you make a mistake, your humanity shines through. The intro and outro do not get in the way of the content, as they are the content.

At the moment I’m playing with adding a windshield to the iPhone for cleaner outdoor interviews but to be honest, I’m amazed at the audio quality as it is.

Perhaps the words would flip round with the assistance of the iPhones accelerometer when the phone is held upside down. The button to start and stop the recording is already in a great place for this.

Here is a link to my feed.. http://www.audioboo.fm/profile/Documentally

If you have one of your own please drop me a link in the comments below. Lets experiment with this cool new tool so we grow with it and shape it into an even better app than it is today.

My Gran is on Twitter

My Grandmother is on twitter. Not in the conventional sense.. kicking back with a Macbook Pro, tweetdeck running on a separate screen.

No, my Nonna only really geeks out on her sewing machine. It’s the only tech she can really operate with confidence. With everything else it’s “Computer says no..” She can’t really operate the home phone if she has to use more than one button. Yet through me.. whenever I’m visiting and occasionally over the phone, She tweets.

It started during the inauguration of Obama. I twitter-quoted a couple of her comments as we were watching the TV and someone said.. “your Gran needs her own account.”

Why not I thought. She is always saying what she thinks and I wish people were sometimes there to hear it. Then there are the times She gives me tidbits of her past that I’m desperate to remember but never write down. Twitter would be perfect for these times.. Not only to live blog her thoughts and past when I’m visiting, but also to give her that window to the world.

She is now answering questions and asking me about the people behind the avatars. She doesn’t know what an avatar is, and I know the technology baffles her. It just makes me happy that as She is engaged in this new adventure, she forgets she is an 85 year old lady living alone, waiting to die.

When she lost her daughter, my Mother, last year I noticed a rapid decline in her will to do anything. She blamed herself, God, anything for the hand she felt she was dealt, forgetting all that was good about her life, her family. She started to give up.

Occasionally this now changes. When her failing mind reminds her, she will still ask me if ‘those people on the computer’ have asked her any questions. I get my laptop out and we sit there going through her replies. She is now even keeping her answers short and concise watching me as I type them in.. Aware that 140 characters is not long enough for a life story. Especially a life as crazy as hers has been. And she forgets all she is sad about. It’s as if I have suddenly invited a hundred people into her home and she is momentarily worried she does not have enough biscuits to go round.

One moment she is lost in a YouTube video showing her a place she has not seen for 60 years.. The next I’m explaining why these people she has never met are so interested in her life. And she smiles.

Twitter is becoming a micro diary of facts and figures, memories and moments in a woman’s life that I have known all of mine. Yet much of what she is talking about I have never heard. My Granddad was the story teller. My Nonna his obedient wife, helper and eventually nurse.

Now it’s her stories.. and they tell me of a strong independent lady who has experienced far more than I could ever have imagined.

She may not update regularly, but when she does, her straining short term memory takes a break as we smile our way through tales of times gone by, adventures and a childhood still fresh in her mind.

These are my favorite times with my Grandmother. Thank You to all those who have engaged with her. you make an Old lady, and her grandson, very happy.

My Gran is @Granumentally

I am @Documentally

I made this video back in may 2007 to send to my Brother @DannyPayne

UPDATE: Here is a segment with me and my Gran on the CBC programme ‘Spark’

Thirst For Rioja

I�m in Spain! In Rioja to be precise..

We landed here last night for a quick in-out social media commando mission to visit the Dinastia Vivanco winery and it’s wine culture museum.

I have never really explored this region and so far i am mightily impressed. I am here with Rob McIntosh (@thirstforwine) and he has explained out basic goals on his blog here.. http://thirstforrioja.co.uk/.

In a nut.. Dinastia Vivanco will be sponsoring the wine at the London Twestival, so we thought a quick media gathering mission out here to the Rioja region would be the best way to share the Dinastia Vivanco story with those soon to be enjoying their wines. Instead of every glass of wine glass or coaster plastered with ad’s, we figured creating a conversation around the wine prior to the event coupled with a steady trickle of wine related content (and you know how much i enjoy wine) could allow the Twestival event to concentrate or the important matter of the night.. raising money for Charity: Water

If i can be so bold as to quote myself off Robs site..

�Using social media to highlight a sponsors product in this way, enables the focus at the actual event (in this case Twestival) to be about the charity or cause that everybody is rallying around. By creating content around�Dinastia Vivanco�s wine, Twestival goers can know�it is Dinastia Vivanco who is supplying the London event with quality wine without the need for on-the-night plugging and publicity. The night should remain primarily�about raising money for Charity:Water�http://www.charitywater.org/ �

Last night I was taken round the narrow tapas laden streets of Logro�o and was fascinated by Rob’s wine and food knowledge. The food and drink culture here is second to none and I really hope to return here with others and share this Epicurian lifestyle.

Here is a couple of videos i compressed to the max and rushed out after much wine last night but today is when the work really starts..

The Future Of Social Media

Whilst at the first ever ‘Network of Networks’ entitled Amplified 08. I took the opportunity to question some of the social media practitioners that were there.

I asked.. “What is the future of social media?”

Thanks to NESTA for hosting such a great event and for all the people who took part.

I have embedded the film in Viddler so that if you see yourself you can tag tag your name or leave a comment.
Please pass the video on to those uncredited.

Follow me on twitter at� www.twitter.com/Documentally

Twestival

On the 25th of September 2008 myself and Matt (@Barnstormed) found ourselves at the first ever Twestival at the Doon Bar, Trafalger Square London.

Here is one of the videos we shot that night.

On the 12th of February 2009 Twestival really grows up, as cities all around the world will be hosting their own Twestivals bringing together Twitter communities not just to party but this time to raise money and awareness for charity: water projects.

These Twestivals will be organized by volunteers and 100% of the money raised will go directly to support charity: water projects.

Why should you care..?

We are in the perfect position being the communicators we are, to blog, tweet and disseminate this kind of information all around the world. Raising awareness, money and assistance for whatever we can.

Whatever you use twitter for you have built connections and every node in those connections can possible help in some way. They just need to know to care and knowing you care helps that message along at lightning speed.

Charity: Water is a non profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations by funding sustainable clean water solutions in areas of greatest need.

At this moment in time 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us.

Lets put our skills to good use and spread the word. I am sure we can all do good if we care to.

Even better than that.. donate some money..

More info at: http://www.charitywater.org/

Follow Documentally here: Twitter.com/Documentally

..and Matt (editor of the above video here) Twitter.com/Barnstormed

See you at @Twestival!!

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