Archive for the 'Multimedia Blogging' Category

Neville Hobson, over at his blog the other day, asked why he should use Posterous.

For those of you who’ve never heard of this application, it’s a blog-like platform that enables you to blog by email. You sign up for a free Posterous account which gives you a blog at www.yourchosenname.posterous.com and you can then blog by sending an email with photos, mp3s, videos or text, and even by calling in on your phone - these items will be posted on the blog automatically. For more details of how it works, check out my review of Posterous from around this time last year.

Neville’s question - and the responses he got from various people - got me thinking about how and why I use it, when I already have this blog.

There seems to be a trend towards not just multimedia but also real time, or almost real time, communication online, facilitated by smartphones with always on internet connectivity as well as SMS (short text messaging) and MMS (multi media messaging). This is emerging as a fresh form of blogging that is being called “lifestreaming” - where you stream a record of your real life on to the online space in nearly real time. Twitter is the most well-known application that enables you to do that via text. Posterous facilitates the process in a multi-media way.

I use my blog at Fusion View for posts which are more like articles or essays where I explore issues and topics in a considered way. These longer posts are interspersed with some video, audio and photo-slideshows. But it doesn’t feel like this is the right place for very informal snippets of what’s going on in my daily life. So that’s where lifestreaming comes in.

I’ve called my Posterous site the Fusion View Lifestream. Since I got my new Blackberry Bold the other week, I’ve really been having fun snapping shots of my garden and friends I’ve met up with as well as my recent jaunt down to Bristol - and then emailing them straight to Posterous. You can also email multiple photos in one email and it will create a little slideshow automatically. There is an automatic cross-posting function that sends the snaps to Twitter, Facebook and my Flickr account - as well as a range of other social media sites, if you were so inclined. This means that my friends and family who follow me in those spaces can see what’s going on for me within minutes of my snapping the pictures or tapping out the text on my Blackberry. But people who read my blog who may not be that interested in seeing my tomato plants or my tourist snaps of Bristol don’t have to be bothered by those more personal moments.

Occasionally, I get Posterous to automatically cross-post to Fusion View as well if it’s the right kind of vignette or mood piece that would fit with the blog and break up the longer, in depth posts.

So, if you’d like to follow my lifestream vignettes, you can subscribe to my Posterous feed or follow me on Twitter.

If you’re lifestreaming or using Posterous, why don’t you add a comment with the link to your site - I’m curious to see who else is having a go at this!

Photo: thanks to Zest-pk from flickr.com (CCL)

Business communications expert and podcasting guru, Neville Hobson, interviewed my co-author Silvia Cambie and me on Friday for his influential For Immediate Release podcast. We talked about how we came to write our book, International Communications Strategy, the main themes and ideas we explore in it and our favourite chapters/ case studies.

Neville has now uploaded the podcast interview on iTunes and his blog - so if you’d like to listen to our discussion, please do go and check it out.

Thanks, Neville!

Photo: thanks to Neville, with permisision

Posted via email from Fusion View Lifestream

Ipadio.com is a live phoneblogging platform - you dial a number from any phone and speak. It is broadcast live on the internet - a message is sent to your Twitter feed so that people following you on Twitter can come and listen to you live. The timelag is about 5 seconds so it is pretty live!

It’s free for consumers and you get 60 minutes* for each phonecast - or “phlog” as they call it (not the most elegant word!).

Mark Smith and his team at ipadio are terrific and taking on user feedback and they’ve integrated a lot of user requested functions. The most useful for me are cross-postering:

# to posterous.com, where I have my “lifestream” and which I have set to further automatically cross-post to this blog
# to Facebook

If you have a Blogger, LiveJournal or Wordpress.com, it will also auto-crosspost to those sites. How cool is that!

There is definitely a move towards immediacy and lifestreaming over polished, edited content. Lifestreaming is your stream of multimedia from your current real world experience online to share with the world what you’re doing right at that given moment. Twitter has probably set the tone for that with the ability to post short text messages online within seconds. Qik offers live streaming video. Posterous enables you to email photos, mp3s, video and text online - if you have a smartphone, that’s pretty easy and immediate - but what it lacked, in my view, was the option to audio blog by phone so with ipadio bridging that gap, Posterous has become, for me, a great way to share my lifestream.

*Update 12 July 2009 - Mark Smith at ipadio tweeted on Twitter re this blog post to say that actually, they are giving all users call duration of 60 minutes now (it used to be 5 mins). Thanks, Mark!

Well, there’s nothing like writing it down and putting it out there to make something happen. I recently blogged about taking up running again, using Podrunner Intervals, a podcast that plays music at alternating slow and fast beats to help you with interval training. Within a day of my posting that up, my friend and blogging massage therapist, Melanie, dropped me a comment inviting me to join her for her second London Marathon in April 2010. My response was: Are you crazy!? But, still, I was chuffed to have her encouragement for my baby steps in running — especially as she is a superfit athlete.

A few days later, another friend, Sue, also learned about my new found fitness addiction from my blog and invited me to join her for a 5K fun run at the end of April. Sue is a homoeopath who lives round the corner from me and we are very close to Dulwich Park, where the fun run will be taking place. Since I go for my baby runs in that park every week, I had no any excuse not to sign up for the fun run. But the clincher was that Sue and I agreed to reward ourselves after the event by going for a slap up meal — how could I refuse that incentive! I have now sent off my cheque and application form…

Part of the thrill of starting a new hobby is to go shopping. I headed to London City Runner in my lunch hour and got myself a new pair of running shoes (Saucony) with stability support for my flat feet and weak ankles. I’ve also got some running shorts and a running T-shirt, both made of what they call “performance material” — silky, smooth to the touch: presumably to reduce the wind drag on my speedy pace of a mile in 20 minutes (yes, that’s called “walking pace”)… so while I huff and puff round the Park, regardless of my feeble performance, I look REALLY GOOD!

I have to confess that this new hobby has been inspired in the most part by my love of social media. While surfing the net the other week, I came across a number of podcasts and blogs about running and triathlons. Specifically, I typed in the word “Zen” into iTunes, thinking that I might like to listen to some podcasts about meditation and relaxation. One of the shows that came up was Zen and the Art of the Triathlon, a fantastic podcast by a triathlete called Brett living in Texas. It’s a really free-form show with him talking about training, cycling, swimming, testing out different kinds a gear. He has a very laid-back manner and a lovely energy that for some reason I find very inspiring. After listening to a couple of shows, I just wanted to get out there and run! (I would also love to swim and cycle but organising that in London is a bit more tricky than popping on my running shoes and trundling down to the park. But we’ll see… ) In addition to Brett, there is a huge community of running/ triathlete podcasters and bloggers out there and I’ve been getting a lot of tips and inspiration from many of them — if you want to check them out, just type in “running” or “triathlon” in iTunes or Google Blog Search.

What is interesting is that I have tried running off and on over the past few years but it has never really bitten and gotten hold of me in the same way as it has recently. I put that down definitely to finding the online community of runners/ triathletes. I’d always thought of myself as a non-sporty, literary type — not at all like those sporty, super athletes that think nothing of running across the desert or swimming the Channel. But listening to their podcasts about the pain that they experience in their training or the exhaustion that they have to fight through or about times when they just have to give up - as well as their enjoyment of the landscape that they are cycling or running through - has let me see them as ordinary people who have built up their stamina and skills over time and experience. It all seems less intimidating and more like something that even I could do!

So no sitting meditation or relaxation. Instead, I’m finding Zen in physical activity. Who knows where this will lead me. Watch this space…

Photo: thanks to klbw from flickr.com (CCL)

I think the writers and book readers amongst you could find this behind-the-scenes process interesting in terms of seeing how the publishing world works and also, understanding the importance of a book title, whether in the fiction or non-fiction sector.

When I was writing my first novel, The Flame Tree, that was the working title I used and when I submitted it to Hodder & Stoughton, that was the title they went with. The flame tree is the central symbol of that novel and it also evokes the Asian setting of the book.

With my second novel, my working title was Mindgame but Hodder were not initially keen on it. I remember sitting down for days coming up with a list of over 30 different alternative titles in response to their feedback. In the end, they looked at my list of 30 something titles and came back to say that Mindgame was the best of the lot!

For the last year, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I have been using the working title New Trends in International Communications/ PR for the business book on cross-cultural communications that we’ve been writing. The title seemed to us to sum up what the book was about and whenever we talked about it to friends and people we met, they would nod in recognition and understanding so we wouldn’t have to go into a long-winded explanation.

Originally, our publisher Kogan Page were keen to ensure that the title included the words “Public Relations” but Silvia, an experienced business communicator, always preferred the word “Communications”. She explains that in the world of business communications, marketing and PR, “communications” is the wider expertise, of which marketing and PR are subsets and that a title that encompasses that wider context would have a wider audience. From my point of view, coming from the world of social media, I also prefer “communications” as, unfortunately, “PR” has a bad name in the online landscape, being associated with spin and hype without authenticity in the minds of bloggers.

So when we submitted the manuscript to our publisher Kogan Page, it was time to discuss the final title of the book in some detail. After some discussion about the issues around “communications” and “PR” with her marketing and editorial team, our editor came back agreeing with the choice of “communications.”

There was another issue, however, she told us. The problem was with “new trends.” The book is going to be published in July this year and the aim is to keep it in print with good sales over the foreseeable future. What is “new” now is not going to be new in a few years time. Similarly, what are “trends” now are likely to have become mainstream in time. But what we are writing about - the case studies, the concepts etc - which are the meat of the book will remain relevant for businesses and communicators because they have practical and useful applications beyond newness and trendiness. So the publishing team felt that the phrase “new trends” did not fully or accurately capture the thrust of the book.

So what to do? We batted some ideas back and forth in a series of emails and finally, we all agreed on the final title: International Communications Strategy: Developments in cross-cultural communications, PR and social media. We introduced the word “strategy” to capture the aspects of the book where we discuss how businesses can take advantage of developments in technology and cultural sensitivities. From the publishers point of view, the word also emphasise that the book is aimed at high-level executives within businesses and communications professionals who will need to be thinking strategically in today’s globalised world.

Our pro-bono blog project Dulwich OnView was the subject of a conference for the heritage sector the other week, bringing together representatives from the major musuems and cultural centres around the UK, including The Barbican, The Globe Theatre, The Royal Academy, The Natural History Museum, Canterbury Catheral and more - all keen to find out about how we put together the project and how we make it the success that it is.

One of our team editors, writer and museum strategist Steve Slack, described the day for our Dulwich OnView readers and I’ve poached his post (with his permission, of course) to share here with you.

Steve writes:

Dulwich OnView is all about celebrating people and culture in the Dulwich area. Last week we tried celebrating ourselves, for a change.

We’ve just held a successful gathering of the Membership Membership Forum at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The DOV (Dulwich OnView) co-editors gave an extended case-study about why and how we set up this online magazine and why we think it works for us, for the Friends and for Dulwich Picture Gallery itself.

Here’s a snap of us about to present. Left to right are: Alix Slater (convenor of the MMF), Bernard Hunter, standing (Trustee of the Gallery who kindly introduced us), Ingrid Beazley, Steve Slack, Sally-Ann Johnson, Angie MacDonald and Yang-May Ooi (chair).

The delegates at the conference were mostly membership, marketing and development professionals from some of the most prestigious arts and heritage venues in the country. It was great for us that so many turned out to hear our case study and were eager to learn more about what we are doing.

It was also really encouraging for us to have so many people agreeing that what we’ve done is worthwhile. We – the writers of the Dulwich OnView blog – all left the gallery on Friday feeling really proud of what we’ve achieved as a team of volunteers.

The Dulwich OnView model won’t work for all museums, of course. The Gallery is unique and as a result so are the Friends and this magazine. But we certainly hope it was food for thought for those who attended.

Well done us. A great big pat on the back. We’re also filled with enthusiasm for the future as well. 2009 is going to be a great year for Dulwich OnView.

Related articles:

Dulwich OnView makes impact in heritage sector

How Dulwich OnView came about - Phoneblog

Photo: thanks to Steve Slack (with permission)

Phoneblogging without internet connection - using Pocket PC mobile phone without much success but an iPhone saves the day.

Gabcast! Yang-May Ooi’s Phoneblog #2

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Following up from my post the other day on my blog FusionView.co.uk about using the live streaming video application, Qik, it looks like the Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is also a Qik fan:

The Singapore Straits Times reporting on the event, wrote, “Mr Lee’s candid camera moment held a serious point. Anyone can now be an amateur film-maker, capturing politics on film, and people will do so.” The PM’s use of Qik indicates a relaxation on the ban of political films that had been in place for 10 years, according to the report, and is welcomed by local filmmakers.

Interestingly, Singapore’s satirical blogger “mrbrown” is also using Qik . The tagline of his blog is “L’enfant terrible of Singapore” which hypes up his reputation as the country’s “badass” blogger. In 2006, he hit the headlines for “hit[ting] out wildly at the Government and in a very mocking tone”, as reported by Asia Media. He was allegedly suspended from his position as a part-time columnist for a local newspaper for this, according to Vnunet.

As new technology empowers citizen self-expression globally, these are going to be interesting times for countries like Singapore which have traditionally preferred their citizens not to engage in outspoken public debate about political matters or matters that are deemed culturally sensitive by the powers-that-be.

For those of you who’d like to try blogging but feel a bit intimidated, there’s a new platform that makes it very easy to start your own blog. If you know how to send an email, you can blog. That’s the premise of posterous.com. You don’t have to sign up or go through any complicated setup steps - all you have to do to start blogging is to send them an email at post@posterous.com and they’ll reply giving you your own site at http://yourname.posterous.com. Once you receive their welcome email, you’ll be taken through a simple process to allocate a password so you can access the control panel to your site.

You can email photos, videos, MP3s audio files and other files such as Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and pdfs and they will be instantly uploaded as a blog post. The text of your email will become the text of the blog post. If you are in the US, you can even blog by SMS by authorizing your phone once you’ve got yourself a posterous blog.

Posterous can also automatically cross-post whatever you email to your other sites such as Twitter, Flickr and the major blog platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger as well as self-hosted blog sites. Also the audio feed is an iTunes-ready podcast feed so people can subscribe to your audio content via iTunes without your having to do anything more.

In the interests of simplicity, Posterous does not offer options to add widgets to your sidebar and there are no tools such as Categories or a Blogroll that you would normally expect to see on most blogs. For most people who just want to post items by email as and when they feel like it and wherever they may be, that simplified interface means there is less to think about - all you have to do is send an email and voila, you’re blogging.

You also cannot customise the design or layout of your site but then, again, the focus is on simplicity. So while Posterous may not be right for people who want the full blog experience with the ability to have a customized design, widgetized sidebars and all the usual elements such as Categories etc that help your visitors navigate around your blog, it’s a great starting point for people who are happy with the simple, streamlined way to post their content online.

For those of us who already have blogs, Posterous can be a fun supplemental tool - if you set up the automatic cross-posting function, you can blog by email via Posterous. It also means that your content is available on another platform and this can be helpful for making it more widely available to a different audience. Via your Posterous control panel, you can subscribe to follow other people’s posterouses (posteri?) and vice versa so it’s a great way to explore other multi-media posterous bloggers.

I’ve been using Utterz.com for my multi-media blogging but I will try Posterous. I like Utterz because it gives you the option of blogging by phone - ie you just dial a number from your mobile or a landline and speak, then press a couple of buttons on the phone and you have an audio-blog which is automatically cross-posted to your blog(s). I may still use Utterz for that. But from what I can see, Posterous has the advantage on other points in that the video player looks bigger and cleaner and for text posting there is no text character limit, compared to Utterz.