Archive for January, 2008

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NOTE: Some technical notes and further thoughts about Shozu and social media integration:

# Shozu sends the media file to your blog but your viewers have to download the file to watch it on their PCs. To get the player above to integrate automatically, I set Shozu to send the video to my blip.tv account which I set to auto-update my two blogs - and voila, the player automatically appears.

# It would be good to see video integration with Facebook, not just still photos. So, again, I am using blip.tv’s Facebook interface for that.

# You can upload to Shozu via email from your phone or your email application. For this test, I used my email application.

My colleague Angie and I have been working with the Friends of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London on pro-bono basis to develop a multi-media online arts magazine, Dulwich OnView, which is launching this week. The process and objectives make a useful case study for anyone looking to set up an online community project on a limited budget.

Beginnings

The Friends is a volunteer group that supports the work of the Dulwich Picture Gallery by raising funds through events like summer parties, talks, films and other charitable fund-raising activities. Ingrid Beazley, their energetic and dynamic Chair, has been keen to use social media to promote the Friends and engage more with the local South East London community for some time now. We first talked about developing an interactive online presence in mid-2006 but what was needed was a strong volunteer team to help us run the project and for awhile, this key ingredient seemed elusive.

A great volunteer team

Then during last year, along came Catherine Fraher, who has a background in marketing and has worked with eBay. Taking time out following her new baby, Catherine has been thrown into the Friends e-world, first setting up a Friends photo group on Flickr and now taking on the role of co-editor for the new online magazine. At around the same time, a number of very talented and lively people began to offer help and suddenly, we had a great volunteer team - writers Anna Sayburn, Angela Corrias, Sally-Ann Johnson and Patrick Fraher; IT specialist Stephen Hendon and photographer Rebecca Portsmouth as well as my colleague at ZenGuide, web-content writer Angie Macdonald. The volunteer team is the real key to the magazine’s success - we have to work together well, approach the project in a professional way even though it’s just something we are doing for fun in our spare time, deliver our contributions on time and give each other the help and back-up that is needed in such a big project. And we really are doing all that with such ease and enthusiasm - it’s really fantastic!

A blog-based central hub

Given that this is a community project, my brief was to use free or low-cost applications that are freely available on the web. As the central hub of the multimedia magazine, we needed a platform that would fit well aesthetically with a world class art museum. I chose Wordpress.com for its ease of use and wide range of functions. Also the platform’s own branding is minimised - unlike Blogger which makes it clear you are on a blogspot.com site with its masthead across each blog. A survey has also reported that a large proportion of Blogger sites are spam blogs.

Blogging technology is easy to use and just the right platform for an online magazine. The free service does not allow you to re-design the layout in any sophisticated way but for our purposes the basic reverse date order presentation works well enough so that the latest articles appear at the top of the front page. The volunteer team will be able to upload their own articles with some basic training. Easy intergration with the photosharing site on Flickr.com means that the magazine can be quickly brightened with a lot of great images.

Other free / low-cost applications

For audio podcasting, I chose Gabcast.com which gives you a local UK telephone number to dial into from an ordinary phone. You record your podcast by leaving a voicemail message and press 1 to publish it. It automatically uploads the mp3 file and publishes a post on the magazine. It is free up to 200 MB and then there is a small monthly fee. There’s no messing around with sound editing equipment and FTP transfer software. But you can’t edit or add music tracks/ sound effects and you have to record your podcast in one continuous take - which can be a bit nerve-wracking!

We will be adding videos via our on Dulwich OnView YouTube channel in due course, which is a free application. In the meantime, we have collected videos about or filmed at Dulwich Picture Gallery using VodPod.com, which is another freebie - you can see the collection in the sidebar on the magazine site.

The Flickr pool is free - it collects together photos submitted to the pool by any user. However, Catherine has set up a Pro account for the photos that the team themselves want to upload for the magazine and that is a premium account at around £12 a year (US $25).

Some caution

Before you rush out and sign up to any old free application for your community project, a word of caution. You need to check out each applications functions and design options. The old adage is true that you get what you pay for. There are numerous free applications but some are easier to use than others - or have more suitable functionality to your project, or have fewer ads, or have a better look for your brand, or integrate better with other applications etc etc.

Also if you are likely to be particular about look, layout and the details of design, going for something free may not be the right way forward. And if you have high demands for functionality and specific things you want your multi-media to do, the free stuff is bound to limit and restrict your vision.

Knowing how to work around some of the limitations and restrictions of free applications can help. There is obviously only so much you can do with clever work-arounds but it can contribute to a quality user experience for your visitors.

Please do come and check out the magazine at www.dulwichonview.org.uk.

Back in 2006, Microsoft announced: “that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.”

Now that we are in 2008, Bill has made his last keynote speech and is winding down for July. This is a video of that last speech, which includes a little home movie that he made with his mates about what he might do after he steps down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft….

I blogged awhile back about my research into the history of the web for the book I am co-authoring with Silvia Cambie on New Trends in International Public Relations. During the Christmas break, I’ve been working on the introductory chapter, developing my research into a coherent story. It starts with Tim Berners-Lee developing the first website in 1991, building on my blog post on that subject. But to get from the first website, a visually unexciting collection of text pages to the social media space of Web 2.0 that we have today is a huge leap.

So I’ve been trying to identify the milestones on the journey from 1991 through to the present day. How did an academic research tool come to change the world?

The key events for this story came together during the mid- to late 1990s.

It was all very well having websites but the processes and technology needed access them in the early days were still complex and time consuming and you needed to understand computer programming language to boot - not the best formula for viral take-up by the public. What was needed was a web browser that was cheap and easy to use. There were a number of attempts within academic and research institutes but the one that really took off was Mosaic developed in 1993 at the University of Illinois by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen. Andreessen then went on to partner up with Jim Clark, former chairman of Silicon Graphics Inc and together they created the Netscape browser, which they gave away to consumers for free via download from the internet. This was the breakthrough browser that brought the World Wide Web to the world outside of academia and research and for a brief moment in history, it looked like Netscape would dominate the way we accesses the internet.

But they had not reckoned on Microsoft. Late in the day - 1995 - Bill Gates realised that his company was missing a trick by chasing interactive television as the next big thing and wrote his now famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo. It was a clarion call to Microsoft that they could no longer ignore this internet thingy. Within a few months, they were able to bundle the first Internet Explorer browser with their latest Windows software, Windows 95. In just over a year after that, Microsoft overtakes Netscape as the winner of the browser wars with a third of the the market share.

Once Microsoft, with its existing dominance of the overall computer software market, had got in on the game, it was just a matter of time before the web would become mainstream, with access to the internet bundled into every PC that was bought for business or home use and developing products like FrontPage and Publisher, alongside Word that could easily create and upload webpages onto the net. Another bundled product, Outlook Express gave us the means for fast, electronic messaging while Microsoft Messenger offered us instant messaging.

It became so easy to publish a website, send an email, IM someone. It was at this point that the computer started to become an integral part of our daily lives - beyond word-processing, beyond spreadsheets, beyond CD-ROM games: beyond our individual selves. When it became a tool that gave us the ability to reach out beyond our individual studies and households to others out there in the world, that, to me, is when the age of the internet truly began.

Coming up in future posts: how computers got personal and the need for speed.

Photo: thanks to CommandShift3 and Zapfino from flickr.com (CCL)