Our Man Inside

Longplayer Live is an incredible endeavor. I first blogged about it here.

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.

Here is the Longplayer Posterous blog.

The Longplayer trust has been set up to keep it going. Click HERE if you feel you can help.

Thanks to @Encosion for letting me use the audio he captured on the day and for Artangel for helping the whole thing happen.

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).

Here is a full list of the speakers attending the Longplayer live event.

Hope to see you there.

It was about a week ago i tweeted how It would be nice it would be able to go to more than one Twestival.. There were so many events on the one night across the UK with so many great people attending i felt like i was missing out on some great meet ups.

Seconds later I got a phone call from @Philcampbell saying.. “Lets do it.. Lets go to them all.” Phil is always on the look out for a mission that exists on the edges of possibility and we figured that to do the whole of the country in one day would only be possible in a helicopter. Fun but not the most Eco friendly choice..

It was only moments later after Phil dropped a tweet into the ether that we had a driver. Dave @magiprint very kindly offered his time and the use of his Renault Grand Scenic. Another couple of tweets later and we had videographer @barnstormed on board. The next couple of days I had a mission in spain for @thirstforwine and Phil’s fingers continued to carve the project from his keyboard. Dave Goodchild, @buddhamagnet, was soon on board and started coding to assist GPS and mapping functionality into a Rezpondr page for it to become www.4CharityMate.com.

Over the next few days the ideas formed into a reality.. Phil put his money raising skills learnt at Podcamp UK 2007 into action and sponsorship started coming in. People like @sleepydog @thirstforwine, Nokia were all keen to help. Check our videos to see all the amazing van sponsors.

And now we are here. I am writing this in the Malmaison Hotel as the sun is rising over the Tyne. In a couple of hours we will be driving south taking in as many of the UK Twestivals as we can along the way, finally ending up in London later tonight.

The sole purpose of this mission is to raise money for Charity: Water. Please take time to go to www.4CharityMate.com and on the right hand side you will see a box where you can tweet your donation.. this is the Twitterati’s chance to really make a difference to peoples lives.. What ever you use twitter for this year please take a moment to use it for the power of good and enable people less fortunate than ourselves to get access to clean drinking water.

Whilst at the Tuttle Club at the ICA in London, I had the pleasure of grabbing a few words with Iain Dodsworth, the creator of Tweet Deck.

TweetDeck (as it’s website explains) “..is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.”

I really enjoy using it to manage not only my twitter feeds but also my 12seconds account. I’m looking forward to the release of the TweetDeck iPhone app currently being tested.

Talking With TweetDeck from Documentally on Vimeo

Do politicians really understand how to use social media?

Those of us versed in these new ways of online communication know that any political figure who can truly and completely adopt social media methods would have a formidable secret weapon in their arsenal. A weapon that would have to be adopted across all the battling parties or they would quickly fall by the wayside.

Obama has come the closest at showing the world how to effectively use social and new media in a political campaign with great success.

With podcasts, viral videos, twitter streams and Flickr groups there seemed to be no corner of the Internet where Obama wasn’t being talked about. Who knows how much of this was actually orchestrated by Obama’s people themselves? Does it really matter? The conversations were happening and it seemed Obama’s supporters were the most clued up as to how to keep the ball rolling.

Here in the UK, David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party has been dabbling in social media too. You may have seen ‘Webcameron‘ and his Twitter feed.

He certainly has the people around him capable of pulling this off. Hell, he’s even  young enough to make it look like his idea.

Take a look at both parties current web presence though and you will see their pages filled with MySpace style jibes. Social media should be used more for engaging rather than bickering.

I’m intrigued to see whether Reuters‘ forward thinking in getting us in to exercise our social media sinew allows some of our uses of this tech to rub off on others.

After myself and Sizemore documented Gordon Brown’s visit to the Reuters head office in London. Ilicco (Head of Reuters mobile) thought we should take it a step further for a visit by David Cameron.

So, come the morning of the 15th of December (Tomorrow) at 10 am, a team of UK social media practitioners shall be in position to document Cameron and the day in more channels than are usually exercised.

This time the team has grown. Behind the scenes we will now have the technical support of two very well known social media mavens, Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman) and Phil Campbell (@PhilCampbell). As Nik uses some code he has built to trawl the twittersphere for questions and comments relating to Cameron’s talk, Phil Campbell will be at the digital helm of his invention Rezpondr at http://Newsmaker.Rezpondr.com. On the Reuters side of things will be @Chris_Parker and @MarkJones manning @Reuters_co_uk

Myself and Mike we be on the ground as last time. Taking pix, shooting film, streaming live and using our Mac’s to live blog the mornings event.

If we can get enough coffee inside us prior to Cameron’s arrival, between the four of us we should be able to extract as much as possible from the 60 minutes at our disposal.

I shall have my N95 for Qiking, my iPhone for tweeting pix, my Kodak Zi6 for HD video blogging, my Nikon D3 for raw pix and new to the arsenal a Nikon D90 equipped with an Eye-Fi SD card streaming photo’s straight into my Eye-Fi flicker account. Obviously it may be a bit of a struggle using all these devices at once and some will argue that I could consolidate some of this kit as certain items are able to multi task. That may well be so, but this is a test. We are once again undertaking an experiment in extreme social media. We are here to make mistakes and to learn from them.

It could be that I concentrate on streaming video and photos and save the rest for either side of Cameron’s visit. Who know what will happen on the day.

All I know is we have an amazing array of technology at our disposal and some hugely capable minds to tie it all in. All this so as the people excluded from the opportunity to participate can truly be a part of the conversation.

In the future this will be the norm and we will wonder why it took so long for politics and journalism to catch on to this.

Oh.. and in answer to my initial question. I think not.. but some of their aides will no doubt do it for them.

Thomson Reuters is hosted a NewsMaker event on the present economic crisis and in addition to it’s regular text, streaming video and picture coverage, they opened up their doors and minds to social media.

In addition to making live and edited video content available worldwide over the web, myself (@Documentally) and Mike Atherton (@sizemore) were given unprecedented access to the event and asked to utilise some of our favorite social media apps in order to facilitate conversations around the day.

In addition to the following places I will no doubt attempt to blog what else we did as soon as i know what exactly what it was.

Documentally on Twitter.. Phreadz.. 12Seconds.. Qik.. Plurk.. and Seesmic

Sizemore on Twitter.. 12Seconds.. and Seesmic

I have been getting back into Geocaching recently. It all happened when I installed a couple of new gps based apps on my iPhone and one of them allowed me to check for geocaches in my area. There are loads! So now when on a dog walk I occasionally turn on my gps just to see if there may be some hidden treasure in the area.

It’s a great way of just getting out to enjoy the land around you.. be it in countryside or the areas of a city you haven’t explored yet. On top of that.. You never know what you might find.

I will probably write about this more in depth in the coming weeks.. I just felt i had to talk around the subject in order to justify a blog post where I can hide the coordinates to a real life social media treasure hunt going on right now..

Good Luck!

Here is a phone call between the Independent Newspaper and myself as I try to resolve the issue of my photo being published without my permission in this story.

I must add that this is not the first time it has happened. I had to make similar calls regarding photography taken in Iraq. Once a photo has been kept on file (with or without permission) it is impossible to know if it is being used unless you buy every newspaper every day. It is especially difficult, as in this instance, when a picture has not been captioned at all.

This is lazy journalism, but above all, disrespectful to those supplying you with the content to fill your pages.

I am writing an invoice to them now and will keep you posted..

Today whilst passing through London and before descending into the tube, I just happened to pop outside Euston train station and spotted Tony Benn sat on a bench lighting his pipe.

I was on the way down to Southampton to pick up a car and although I have no idea what made me pop outside the station after getting off the train, I am glad i did.

I was not going pass up the opportunity to chat with a lifelong hero of mine so I wondered over and introduced myself.

We had a brief discussion about the National Union of Journalists before I suddenly remembered I had in my bag a pro stills camera, a web enabled mobile phone and a mini video camera.

Although Tony Benn only had about five minutes to catch his train to Preston he was kind enough to humour me as I conducted a short interview on video.. I then took a few stills and showed him how easy it was using Qik to stream from a mobile phone.

Tony is no stranger to being interviewed or filmed as he spends much of his life on the lecture circuit in the public eye. It was the quick demo of the technology around live streaming from a mobile device straight to the web that seemed to interest him the most.

In about three minutes we were done and a slightly amazed Tony Benn took my card and invited me to get in touch so I could introduce him to more of this technology.

It was a really great start to the day for me. Totally unexpected and I was glad I had my ‘geek’ bag at the ready.

I have been a fan of Tony Benn and his work for a while now and am so glad to have finally met him. Not only that, but as a great bonus I now have his home number and hope to do a more in depth interview in the future.

Here is the same video on YouTube

..and my thoughts on Qik straight afterwards.

On more than one occasion, while out and about taking photographs, (mainly in London) I’ve been stopped for having a camera round my neck and looking like I might be about to take a picture.

Yup, that’s all it seems to take now-a-days to raise the suspicions of some underpaid private security guard. Just be out and about minding your own photographic business, perhaps dangerously close to the threshold of some crappy shopping centre and as quick as it takes for a CCTV camera to rotate.. There they are, trying to enforce some imaginary law.

Normally I flash my press pass and tell them I know my rights. Sometimes I am feeling a little more confrontational and ask exactly what law it is they think they are enforcing? On one occasion a confused security guard told me it was one of the prevention of terrorism laws. The conversation then swung round to me asking.. “Do I look like a terrorist??

(Don’t answer that.)

I am not sure when all this started.. Perhaps it was just after 9/11 when everyones hightened level of paranoia needed to be justified by inventing some extra imaginary threats.

Most of the time, the least that happens is I’m looked at in a “I am watching you” kind of way. This is with a Mediterranean complexion, who knows what would happen if i wanted to go out with a camera and I was slightly darker skinned!

You may well have seen them yourselves, but once in a while I pass by a shop window and catch sight of those scarily Orwellian anti-terrorism posters asking YOU to be vigilant and to keep an eye out for people who use more than one mobile phone, or people who travel alot.. or who take photographs in a public place.

This kind of fear-mongering really pisses me off and in the past I have gone into the shop and asked if I could have the poster. Part of me could not believe the ridiculousness of it all and seemed to be wanting to gather these posters as evidence of crimes against common sense. Are the general public really so small minded as to report one another for doing normal everyday things?

Probably.

Anyway it seems like I needn’t have bothered collecting these posters as most seem to be available.

online to download.

I was slightly comforted today to read this article in the Guardian Newspaper. Bruce Schneier states that the Police’s ‘War On Photography’ is daft as.. in his words.. “..real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything.”

With that reassurance in mind, read the article to learn that perhaps ‘movie plot‘ threats are being concocted to have some kind of psychological grip on our already fear laden minds. We really must make a point of fighting for our photographic rights..

If you are out and about with your camera, be it video or stills, stick a printout of your rights in your bag and make a stand, just in case.

UK Photographic Rights

US Photographers Rights

Aus Photographers Rights

This topic and others relating to our rights and what denotes a public space in todays day and age will be discussed at the social media picnic on the 25th of June.