Month: July 2006

Needless to say, things got a bit better as the week went on. Two schools’ workshops, with absolutely fantastic kids; they made some barking crazy films. The production values aren’t wonderful (they’re not bad – it’s more that they’re rushed than anything), but the ideas are great and I’m astonished at how complete they all are. Two things stand out: firstly, 12 year-olds are really good at thinking non-linearly, and that’s not an oblique reference to their being hairbrained eejits. More on that later. Secondly, they can be astonishingly ruthless with their own material, hacking out swathes of stuff they slaved over shooting because it just kills the pace of the final film. I heard the phrase ‘I liked that… but it’s better out. Delete!’ often. Excellent.

If only… if only RocketBoom was made by 12 year-olds? They’ve replaced Amanda with – and I’m sorry, this is really catty of me and may not even be accurate, but it has to be said – somebody else who can’t present. I lasted 1 minute 14 seconds. How about you?

It’s 11pm. I should be in Bristol. Unfortunately, I’m still in Glasgow. This is, I think, indicative of just how badly today has gone.

It started with Word losing four hours’ work on me, and progressed through my spending in excess of 2 hours in various and sundry queues. In shops. Somewhere in the middle there I managed to book a room in an hotel that, on closer inspection, turned out to have quite the worst reviews I have ever, ever seen. Dozens of them.

Then there was the argument with the car hire company, who tried to claim that a Daewoo^H^H^H^H^H^H Chevrolet Matiz is ‘exactly the same’ as a Fiesta. Their argument rather fell apart when they attempted to demonstrate the luggage area with the rear seats folded, only for the rear seat lever to shear off in their hand.

Once I had the Fiesta home, I managed to do the exact opposite of locking myself out of my Smart. See, it has a flat battery, so the only way in is the secret squirrel handshake dipsy-doodle. That I happen to know said maneuver is lucky, since the handbook describing it was locked inside the car. Deftly I did the … thing … and retrieved my road atlas. Then I tried to do the reverse thing, only to find that it doesn’t work. Contrary to what the manual says (easy to check, at this point), you can’t actually lock the car that way. Huh.

Several hours later, I finally managed to get the doors locked again via the slightly more brute-force involvement of a charmingly accommodating chum, his Alfa, and a set of jump leads. It’s a sad day when you have to use an Alfa to jump-start a Mercedes, but there we go.

Somewhere in the middle of all this my PowerBook spontaneously powered off, I think because there’s something screwy with the power adaptor.

But really, I should have been in Bristol by now. Oh, damn.

So, tomorrow:

Early start, M6. @Bristol (if you see a man blundering about with a camera, that’ll be me. Please say hi. Or buy me coffee). Thence to Bath, and what gives every impression of being a glorious little family hotel (as opposed to the shit-hole I’d previously booked). Hopefully I’ll be refreshed for my first school on Wednesday. We’ll see.

Wish me luck. And no, don’t worry — I’m not going to drive tired. If I am, I shall stop. If that means I don’t make it to @Bristol tomorrow… well, tough. They’ll survive.

UGTV’06, in London in a couple of weeks’ time. Full. Drat. And I’m in a school in Warrington anyway… making ‘user-generated TV’ directly, ironically enough.

All set up, it seems, by Mint Digital, founded by an ex-RDF chappie and chaired by their founder and CEO. Rosie – who was the RDF chap you were listening to this week, what were they talking about, and what, specifically, did you tell them about SciCast? Just, you know, idly interested. Ahem.

[update: OK, look – on closer inspection, it’s a 45-minute panel discussion followed – one presumes – by a networking event. I’m going to assume the discussion part at least will be on camera and bunged online ASAP. If it isn’t… they’re rather missing the point, aren’t they?]

Not sure if I’ve done this before, but if so I’m prompted to revisit it by Richard’s post about OpenWetWare, an effort to promote information sharing amongst biology & biological engineering labs.

I love wikis. I think they’re a phenomenally subtle, clever concept that can be usefully applied in many distributed group situations. And yet, all my own wiki projects – notably ScienceDemo.org – are on hold. I’m waiting for the software to catch up.

In my view, wiki software falls into two categories: too limited/expensive (JotSpot), or too hard to use (everything else). I generalise, but you get the point.

It’s not that, in itself, wiki markup is a difficult thing to get one’s head around – CamelCase is ridiculous and bracket markup is almost as ugly, but it only takes a brief explanation to make them comprehensible. I’d prefer WYSIWYG, but that’s hard to do well with document linking, and I’m not sure I’ve yet seen the slap-forehead-of-course-that’s-how-it-should-be-done UI.

It takes a little longer to ‘get’ the idea of wikis. The idea that you’re supposed to edit the web page you’re looking at is a bit alien, and it takes some training/encouragement to understand the power of that.

Then it takes a little longer to understand Creative Commons licensing.

Then…

See, none of the hurdles are particularly difficult. It’s just that, currently, there are rather a lot of them. And it’s that stack of concepts that, in my experience, makes wikis a hard sell. If you can afford to gather people together and train them properly – great, get on with it. But lobbing something up and hoping that its evident utility will shine through is, currently, being far too hopeful. You might get lucky, and maybe it’s worth trying, but don’t expect a flood of willing participants.

This, of course, is one reason why I’m introducing schoolchildren to Creative Commons licenses with SciCast – it’s one less hurdle for them when they next encounter this sort of circumstance. See, some of these problems we’ll solve with technology, some with design, and some, I think, are cultural/education issues.

We have to get used to being publishers/editors/contributors far more than we were ten years ago. We’re so used to being treated as consumers of information that we tend to limit ourselves to that rôle even when we’re invited to pitch in. This will change, but it’s going to take time.

I’ve just drafted two rambling posts about this, but I’m going to let them ferment a little longer because I’m not yet happy with the thrust of them. However, the hand-waving version goes something like this:

‘That’s so old media’ is a common insult in the blogosphere. Scoble seems proud of the minimal production values of Microsoft’s Channel 9; Amanda Congdon slates her former business partner in rocketboom as ‘very old media’; heck, I’ve used the phrase myself, recently, when comparing SciCast to a superficially-similar project being planned by a major national media organisation [cough-can’t-talk-cough].

As insults go, slamming something for being ‘old media’ is not only patronising, it’s self-defeating. Sure, let’s throw away the baggage, excess, and surrounding bollocks of broadcast, but let’s not pretend that we know more about what they do than them. Think ‘all TV is crap’? Think again. Sure, lots of people watch TV because it’s all they’ve got, or out of habit, or whatever. But the proportion of the TV audience who watch because they like it? Tiny, you think? That group is still bigger than your audience, sunshine. Even if you’re RocketBoom.

And that audience isn’t built just by being lucky. It’s built by caring about the details, making deliberate choices, and getting it all right. You can dismiss that expertise if you like, but be very clear exactly what you’re dismissing.

Just like ‘Web 2.0,’ ‘Old media’ is a label that’s wrong enough to be occasionally useful. But it’s still wrong.

There will be more on this.

Chopping up politicians’ speeches to make them say something different is an old gag. Pitch-bending them this skillfully is, however, a whole other level of time-consuming genius. Respect due.

Somehow I missed this on the Today programme this week – Sharrow Vale Road in Sheffield, which I’ve a sneaking suspicion I know, has a piano. In the street. It was almost taken away by the Council, but at the last minute they relented. This is its tale.

Aw, bless!

Ever since the ‘switcher’ ads, it’s been my suspicion that one of the brief goals for Apple’s adverts is that they’re ripe for parody. The new ‘I’m a Mac / I’m a PC‘ ads certainly live up to that, and there have been several valiant efforts to put the boot in. The best I’ve seen are these, though I’m mightily confused as to who made them.

I’m not quite sure what I find funniest, though – the ads and spoof ads, or the complete humour failure of the disparate computer users viewing them.

More deliveries. I’m a little intimidated by this, actually – to put this much tape in perspective, the whole series of Scrap It!, shot two-camera and with graphics rolls, dump tapes, backup stuff, and a few things rendered on my PowerBook and transfered to the online Avid, came to, as I recall, 103 rolls of DV. The 50 tapes you see here represent just the first part of SciCast. I’ve probably over-ordered. At least, I hope I have.

Yikes. This is not a small endeavour.

Pictured at left: my breakfast, this morning. Large coffee; croissant; biscotti; magnifying loupe. Er… yeah. Magnifying loupe. Bit weird, that. But it turns out that you can take surprisingly good macro close-ups using a loupe and… um… a mobile phone camera. It takes a little fiddling around — my coffee went cold, boo! — but you can get some decent shots. I’m particularly fond of the croissant close-up.