This five part mini series of Audioboo’s were compiled, edited and enhanced with music by Mark Cotton aka @MCFontaine You can find out more about Mark here: http://about.me/mcfontaine
Firstly I have to thank the soundsmith @MCFontaine for sending me this mashup created from a few of my audio recordings on Audioboo. I love what he has done and am inspired to one day.. perhaps.. trawl through the (aprox) 83 hours of Audioboo’s I’ve done in the last two years.
Prior to finding the Audioboo iPhone app I would edit my podcasts long hand. Sometimes I could spend up to 8 hours trying to get an edit ‘perfect’ before it would finally make it online. In 2 years I uploaded about 45 podcasts. I have uploaded a thousand Audioboo’s in the 2 years since they started.
There is certainly something to say for always having your recording device in your back pocket. Not to mention the app’s ease of use.
From personal thoughts, soundscapes, to interviews, I find myself prefering the ease and simplicity of audio over the sometimes longwinded and hard to upload (on my bandwidth) video. There have been many times when an interview on video was either not allowed or asking for one made the subject uncomfortable. This is when Audio once again comes into it’s own.
I could go on about how I have all but cancelled my subscriptions to the 1hr ‘pro’ podcasts in favour of the shorter more engaging and personal soundbites.. And the value I have gained from investing my time in recording on the fly. But I have said it all before.. and no doubt it was in audio.
Seriously, I have no idea what my digital footprint would look like it there wasn’t easy audio blogging like this. Thanks to @MarkRock and the Audioboo team for creating such a great platform/app and for putting up with all my suggestions over the years.. (Please can I have the tweet on/off button.. the random boo button.. a streaming audioboo radio channel.. and so on..)
And I also need to thank @Sizemore who a little over 2 years ago sent me a link saying something like..”Check this out, I think you will like this… http://Audioboo.fm”
We may never know the Impact social media had in shaping our new rather bewildering government.
Maybe it reached a lethargic non-voting population and changed their minds. Perhaps it taught the party campaigners to engage with more mobile tools in order to rally their troops. Maybe all it did was introduce other channels of communication to the mix.
All I know is it certainly played a part.
@CraigElder sources David Cameron questions on Twitter to answer at The Open University
Perhaps now with new Natural Language Processing tools for measuring our online sentiment we will finally get an idea of how much of an impact these new media tools are having in the mindset of the general voting public. This is both amazing and scary to me. We seem so desperate to know yet many of us are just having fun. Playing with tech as tools.
It was @Ilicco and Reuters that though it was OK to let the geeks loose with tech in close proximity to the leaders of our parties. And as the security perimeters thinned with each encounter, Brown to Cameron to Clegg.. we would try out more tools and techniques experimenting ways to bring the outside conversations in and to share the conversations we had with everyone. There were times when Ilicco wondered how much trouble we may or may not get into. That said.. I don’t think he ever stopped having fun.
Some of these groundbreaking platforms championed by @Sleepydog lived only during this extreme period of change. His coders would use zero’s and one’s like lego. All the bits are now back in the box. Till next playtime.
We were not too hung up on the quality of anything, be it the video stream or the questions I would slip into whatever conversations we were having. I do remember feeling excited and sharing way too much coffee with friends who’d been given the opportunity to collaborate on projects that excited and inspired.
It was a social media playground like no other. Mobile phones verses the HD stream. Political pundits verses the twitter stream with in many ways the geeks given free rein.
I’m not sure if we will ever again see such a massive change in communication in such a short space of time. Not to the extent that Reuters championed. It was the beach on which the waves of old and new media crashed ..and we all got wet.
Now everyone and their dog is a ‘Social Media Expert’ the air is muggy with hot air and opinion claiming the right and wrong way to engage using real-time web tools.
In the words of Yoda, “Do or do not… There is no try.”
Participation is the key and feeling free enough to play allows you to subconsciously learn from your mistakes.
The people who were both in the rooms and working remotely in these projects are too many to mention. Perhaps they would like to link in or comment their experiences below.
The unquantifiable nature of all this will be just a memory next time round. The tools are coming and although I feel we are a long time away from totally understanding the impact from this kind of exchange, we are getting closer all the time.
If I’m honest it’s the metrics that excite me the least. Let the practitioners experiment, explore, dance around new ways. For every ten people willing to show the way, there will be ten thousand wanting to sell you the map.
“When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.” ~ Alan Watts
The dust has just about settled after the Vodafone 360 launch and after having no clue at all as to what I was going to see, I now have much more of an idea and am genuinely excited about what is in the pipeline for mobile users.
I’ve never really subscribed to the platforms spawned by the mobile giants, either from the carriers or the handset makers. I made a point of avoiding Vodafone Live as when I was ready for mobile web I wanted it to be on my terms. I didn’t want to be spoon fed sport and weather on a naff mobile browser. Wap or no Wap.
Then there was Nokia’s Ovi.. Well, being a Mac user there seemed little point.
Vodafone 360 may well change the way we look at mobile forever. (Or at least the foreseeable future). If you ever dabbled in ZYB you will have a rough idea of what’s in store.
I guess cloud mobile hints towards it too but this is way more than what you get with your dot mac account.
This is not just syncing this is a suite of internet services morphing your contacts, status updates and messaging all in ‘the cloud’. This will integrate all your social networks with your address book and provide a two way editable pipeline between you and your contacts.
The flexibility and configuration options are mind boggling and I haven’t even gone into the realtime location integration.
Of course there will be some people (normally me) screaming “What about our privacy?!” From what I could see this has been taken way more seriously than any other platform developer has bothered in the past. After a few wines were had this conversation on audioboo ended up on Kathryn Corrick’s blog and Terence Eden‘s comment on the bottom explains things better than I could.
I thought I was getting close to a cloud mobile experience with my Apple devices and some of the apps I use. But Apple is as Apple does and I’m fed up with the controls and restraints Apple put in place to guarantee ever increasing profits while it’s users are drip fed new tech. Always wanting and waiting for Apple to do the right thing. Jobs acting like a Wizard of Oz over his minions.
Vodafone is a massive faceless behemoth yes, but I’m thinking with this move so much is going to decide on the community making it happen. From macro to microcosm. From the coding community building the apps to the cross platform communities meeting in their hand held device.
360 is meant to work on all devices with all carriers. Obviously Vodafone are going to make sure they have the most suitable devices on offer and having got my hands on the Samsung H1 running the LiMo Platform, It’s feels like really decent handset.
Sturdy, well styled and feature packed. The camera really impressed me as did the fact that this wasn’t another phone trying to win the megapixel stakes. It’s not the number of pixels in a camera it’s how they are used and on a WVGA AMLED display it’s easy to see the quality of your image.
On first impressions low light images looked better than some of the compact cameras I use and the 720p video quality seemed good enough for me to leave my other devices at home.
The touch screen interface felt a little sluggish compared to the iPhone but I was assured this is still really early days and the interface with be honed and refined as the weeks go by.
With the €1,000,000 prize fund in place for coders to collect should they create new and innovative apps I feel we may see an app store that begins with quality over quantity and I really have to get my hands on the phone just to experiment with new apps as and when they begin appear.
The universal contact list called ‘Vodafone People’ clearly puts contacts and content at the forefront of the 360.com ethos a suite of services that apears to be dripping with social media potential.
If a beast like Vodafone has bitten the bullet and finally embraced social media this may be the confirmation all the early adopters have been waiting for. Why is it we have been hanging around this social media fad thing for so long.. Well maybe this is really it. With so much potential to expand and innovate with the mobile communication tools at our finger tips starting to do what we want them to do.. This is what we have been waiting for.
Of course in the not too distant future we will no doubt be excited about hardware breakthroughs as battery life, bandwidth and memory capacity going through the roof.. That doesn’t change what Vodafone may have done here right now for mobile communication. I would not have imagined them opening up elements of it’s network to third parties.. This is a different and hopefully leading a mindset. Once you let social networks and open source operating systems enhance your devices, you are placing an awful lot of power into the hands of the community. I am sure the control will stay with Vodafone. The lack of Google maps at this stage hints towards this and they seem to have invested a hell of a lot into this move to take too many risks.
Still, I am excited to see where this goes. And with this new level of connectivity bridging previously unconnected networks, I imagine it will be a magical mystery tour where everyone is on the bus.
For more interviews with the people in the know click on this atom feed
A single composition playing for 1000 years. It started in 1999 and on the 12th of September I was invited by Artangel to blog about it live.
It was a great day. It was a long day. 1000 minutes of 1000 years.
You can find some Audioboo’s by myself and others tagged with Longplayer here and some of my Flickr images here.
On the back of a bus in 1995 a guy called Jem Finer had an idea. Nearly five years later in 1999, on the verge of the third millennium that idea came to life as a thousand year long musical composition was set into motion. Longplayer is a piece of music that’s been playing since 31 December 1999 and will keep playing until 31 December 2999. The composer Jem Finer created it in such a way that it will never, ever repeat itself and an organisation called The Longplayer Trust was created to ensure the music continued to play through the coming centuries.
For the last five years there have been a handful of dedicated listening posts around the world – but on 12 September 2009 they’re attempting something completely new: a 1000 minute section performed live by a relay team of musicians in the aptly circular setting of the Roundhouse in North London. It will run from 8.20am that morning until 1am the next.
At the same time, elsewhere in the building a historic relay conversation will be taking place between 24 leading writers, filmmakers, scientists, academics and technology activists, inspired by the philosophical implications of long time. Participants include Jeanette Winterson, Cory Doctrow, Rachel Armstrong and Andrew Kotting.
Artangel, who initially commissioned Longplayer almost ten years ago, have asked me to use social media to document the day live. This to me is an amazing concept in itself. How will the 1000 minutes of the 1000 years be remembered. Assuming the data survives who will be around to review any captured content? What will they think of the technology involved? How could i say no?
I’ll be doing whatever I can to ensure plenty of live material is streamed on the day. Using Qik, Audioboo, 12Seconds, Twitter, Flickr and as many other platforms as I feel necessary to share the moments as they happen with those outside of the Roundhouse walls. I feel this will be one of the most extraordinary musical events I will ever get to see and am really excited about exploring some of the ideas, concepts and conversations that spring up around the day. This one day in 365,000.
Fancy coming along? Artangel have also kindly allowed me to give 20 tickets away to others willing to tweet, blog or just share the moment so please drop me a comment/email/tweet or call if you’d like to come along as well.
See www.longplayer.org for the official project website, and if you miss out on the free tickets you can still book discounted tickets direct from this link http://bit.ly/2EJDzJ (use the promo code ’144′ to get a third off the face value).
I guess I should not be surprised that the leader of a political party should contradict himself. It happens all the time. In the case of David Cameron and his twitter comment though..“Too many twits make a twat..” It doesn’t seem that long ago that Mr Cameron was extolling to me the virtues of social media.
I’m not sure how we can believe anything he said in the Audioboo interview when he is now so keen to slam tweeters.
Twitter at the moment is the mainstay of all the social media I’m involved in and I think others use it in a similar fashion. It’s the back bone, the spine of cross platform conversations. Interesting how Cameron says “Politicians do have to think about what we say..” Perhaps they should also think about what they have said..
Maybe he just wanted to reconnect with his ‘Base’.. Maybe he still just doesn’t understand social media at all.
UPDATE: The comments that follow this blog post have become way more important that any statement I made in my original hasty proclamation.. Please make sure you read them.
E3 was a blast.. Loads of meetings, loads of gameplay, some Audioboo action and no doubt this will all keep trickeling into my feeds over the coming weeks..
On the last day at E3 we were ushered into a room within the Xbox Live stand and sat with Aaron Greenberg (Director of product management at Xbox). We were allowed to ask him anything, so i started the ball rolling with a question from avid Xbox fan and gamer Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman) Nik wanted to know why you couldn’t cross dress Xbox Live avatars..
(I must apologise for the crappy sound but the expo was really noisy and i have found out the hard way that the Kodak Zx1 is nothing like it’s predicesor the Zi6 in handling noisy environments. As a result the audio crackled on all the footage it shot. (No low cut filter me thinks.) I am going to try shooting video with a more highly spec’d camera for a bit..Mainly because i have dropped my trusty Zi6 )
I’m writing this on my last few minutes of battery power, about 38,000ft above sea level, with six and a half hours left on my flight from London to Los Angles.
I am traveling in a group of thirteen after being asked by Digital Outlook, in association with Xbox, to blog the E3 Gaming Expo. Not only blog in the normal text based sense but to use some of the tools I normally use that feed into twitter.. AudioBoo, flickr, 12 seconds etc.
I guess they are after a non serious gamer with a different perspective to give their take on the event. And i shall. There’s loads of new tech and game releases for me to get my teeth into so there should me more than enough content to get me excited..
So why then am I writing a blog post before anything has happened?
I chose WordPress as a basis for my blog a while back and have been happy with it ever since. Me being me though means I have to try and be a little bit different.. a little css adjusted here an over sized graphic here.. As a result I have had to ask Derek (@Delboydare) to assist me in upgrading my wordpress version and he has done a great job. Tapping away behind the scenes, he has ensured my transition to the latest version of wordpress has happened without a hitch.
Then there’s Nik, @loudmouthman. It seems he has been hosting/managing a couple of well known blogs recently and as I’ve been wanting to make the switch from my former hosting company NXS.nl, I thought I’d take him up on his offer. I know that with Nik being on the other end of the tweet almost 24/7 i could not wish for better hosting support.
The changeover itself happened almost too fast for me to notice.. All I had to do my end was insert the new name servers and it was done. I had to check three or four times because I did not think it could really be that easy. But no.. it was done and i was up and running on my new server with no visible downtime.
The conversation with Nik that followed informed me that my security had increased substantially and some extra plug-ins had been installed into my wordpress blog that would on the whole make my life more easier when it came to posting anything on my blog.
I spend a good portion of my working life recommending tools sites and apps that i think worth using.. Derek has shown me how valuable our networks are when it comes to sourcing the skill sets outside of our own and Nik has shown me that I can love a platform without knowing it’s full potential and that there are some people out there that don’t just talk the talk and really know their game.
So.. here i am re-enthused, reinvigorated, reminded on how good a platform wordpress is and stuck in the air unable to post this to the web till I return to terra firma.
I should be in the hotel about 8 hours from this sentence. There are about 12 people in the team that headed out from the UK.. Many had come in from other cities in other countries.. Spain, France, Italy and Germany to name a few. Some host gaming forums/sites like www.XboxWay.com and www.Xboxdynasty.com Some are PR.. One guy Sean Geer calls him self ‘old media’ but i think he is much more than that.. Anyone that packs A Nikon D90, Lumix LX3 and an Eye-Fi card is ok in my book.. Especially as I have the same in my bag.
I also am packing two laptops.. two Kodak HD recorders, solar chargers with extra lithium-ion cels.. and so on.. My back is already having a go at me. I really need to make a point of using everything that I have brought just so as this pain isn’t in vain.
All going well and I can jump through the security hoops stateside, I’ll be tagging all of my content with the hashtag #E3. you can listen to my Audioboos on www.audioboo.net or through Buddhamagnet‘s BooBase.
If you want to see everything on one Page then Documentally.Rezpondr.com is the place to be (thanks to @Philcampbell for creating/setting that up) and no doubt everything will go through my Twitter account as normal… Documentally
If you start watching/engaging now you will hopefully see the transition from bumbling ignorance to slightly clued up. I will be filling in all the spaces in my gaming knowledge through regular contact with Nik Butler but please feel free to drop a comment on this blog if you would like me to cover anything in particular in the world of XBox..
Thanks for all the tips on what i should go to see out in LA but i feel i may be too busy channeling all of my Expo observations into www.xbox.com/e309
Still, i hope there will be a few hours off here and there so if you get the chance.. ping me on twitter and maybe we can grab a beer.
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.
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