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Dalek tea party

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dalek tea party

Originally uploaded by Lloyd Davis.

A trip for tea to Elys in Wimbledon (much more exciting that Starbucks or Coffee Republic and with water, unlike all of Wimbledon Village) yielded a bit of a surprise and a disappointment for anyone who’d been pinning their hopes on getting into what is clearly an exclusive bash. Tea parties when I was a kid were teddy bears (cuddly) or chimps (funny – at least as long as they’re kept at a distance). I think I would have had trouble keeping my tea and buns down if a Dalek had turned up.

I mean, I once saw Tom Baker at a book-signing in the 70s and a toddler had hysterics because there was Dr Who – he was real and not a puppet who lived in the telly. I just hope they have paramedics on call and have made sure the emergency exits are fully operational.

I also wondered how big the Dalek actually was, because the aisles were a bit of a squeeze as it was.

The Christmas trees throughout Elys are the same colour as the title on that notice (only sparkly) all I can tell you is that wherever Vera got them, they don’t seem to have come from Argos – and while on that subject. If you choose to have this in your home this Christmas, please don’t invite me round for mince pies. (note the url’s for the argos site will doubtless degrade over time, I wish I could give you permalinks, but they are just too tight-arsed about their intellectual property – just believe me when I tell you that the one I’ve pointed to is vile and actually looks quite like a Dalek who got carried away at Mardi Gras)

What I've Seen

Bits and bobs, mostly bobs

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lloyd, charles & dianeOK, so no sign of action on Helen’s Blog yet this morning, but the pictures are on flickr and I had a text from her last night to reveal her experience of Celebrity Scissorhands – she was Rowetta‘d and you can see that her hair is very different, but in a “looking good mama” way! Give money to Children in Need now.

And talking of bobs, look at this poseur in the making – I think that’s my ninth birthday party, so probably 1973. Joining in the celebrations are Charles Istead and Diane Rixom. Where are they now? Do I want to know, or have I dug up enough old friends recently? (with apologies to those who read this blog and who might not like to be referred to as “dug up”)

Grumblings and disruption in the music biz are getting my attention, mostly due to my association with Mr Phillips at TunA . This one uses the ‘C’ word – consumer, there I said it, sorry folks – far too often. I’m looking forward to next Monday’s ORG event on copyright extension – NOT

What I'm doing

The One-Man Social Media Empire

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Social Media Empire BagI was always told “You don’t go looking in ladies’ handbags, you never know what you might find” which seemed more of a temptation to me than a discouragement. And in that spirit, today I’m going to open up my one-man social media empire bag and let you know exactly what’s in it.

First an explanation for those who haven’t been following. I’ve been talking about having a one-man social media empire for some time now. I often stand up at events, lift up my green canvas bag and show off about how it contains a newspaper, radio station, tv station and film production company. I don’t understand why more people aren’t doing it – or maybe they are and I’m too busy bragging about my own stuff that I fail to notice everyone else smirking and tittering behind my back – it has been known. Anyway a large proportion of my time is now taken up creating what I call “Rich Records”

I’m tempted to make a video of me emptying the bag, but I’ve decided against it as it wouldn’t actually tell you a great deal more than the following, other than to give you a realistic view of what a ridiculous proportion of cable to kit there really is.

I have to admit that I’ve never been one for splashing out on kit. Ever since I started podcasting I’ve only used what came to hand, stuff that I’d already got – and while I’ve had to replace some items, I’m much more interested in what I can do with them, rather than how much they cost or how funky the spec-sheet is. But this might be useful to those sad souls out there who would like to emulate my empire. Calculating the cost of replicating the kit here is left as an exercise for the reader.

So then, the contents of my bag:

Laptop

OK, so you need something that can connect to the interwebnets, preferably wirelessly and with a battery that holds a charge for a long time. I had to get a cheap and heavier than I’d like Toshiba after my lovely (but stupidly uninsured) Acer Tablet got nicked. Obviously the lighter the better – needs a sizeable HDD to cope with the amount of video and audio that ends up getting stored and plenty of USB ports. I couldn’t find one at the time that fit my budget and came with a built-in firewire port (for transferring video), so I had to get one on a PCMCIA card – fiddly but workable. Some people will tell you that you really need a Mac in order to do podcasting and videoblogging well. In my experience they are the same people who will always tell you that you really need a Mac. I haven’t used a Mac in anger since 1996 so I don’t really know.

Audio recording

For podcasting and recording an audio track for the more formal (snicker) video stuff I do, I use a Sony Minidisc because that’s what I had lying around in 2004 when I met Adam Curry and saw the podcasting light shining from his podfatherly halo. I have improved on the original (which would only transfer audio to a PC in real time down an audio line) by splashing out on a Sony Hi-MD model MZ-NH700. The Hi-MD disks hold 1GB or “quite a long recording time” Note that they don’t talk to Macs at all.

I have no “cans”. I prefer to look stupid for only having little earbuds rather than looking stupid for looking like Phones out of Stingray.

I have two microphones, both cheap and from Maplin I think, but both do the job.

My stick mic is an SBC MD650 from Phillips – came with it’s own cable and I have a phono to mini-jack converter to plug it into the minidisc. I then have a stereo clip on mic for wandering around stuff. This is a Yoga (I consider myself more of an intermediate 😮 ) EM-8 which has far too much cable but does give a really cool stereo vibe, especially weird when listening to me walking in traffic.

Video recording

I have a JVC GR D200 which I picked up in Dixons a couple of years ago for domestic use. I chose it because it was cheap and it fits nicely in my hand and those are the technical criteria I would recommend :-). It records on MiniDV and transfers to PC via a Firewire cable. When I need to buy another one, I’d like quicker transfer to PC and an external mic input. I don’t have a functioning stills camera at the moment but will get a digital SLR when funds allow – I grab stills from video I’ve shot or use my cameraphone.

Tripods

I have two, one is a mini one that sits on a table top and has a mic clip too. I usually use this as a mic stand but have to be wary when interviewing thrusting corporate execs who like to punctuate their speech with thumps on the table. The other is a bit of a cheat as as it doesn’t actually fit into the bag. But especially when I’m doing one-man stuff, it’s good to be able to the put the camera down and walk into the shot or just hold it still for a while several feet above the ground. Not essential, but useful.

Software

Partly a function of the hardware I use but I stick with freebie stuff wherever possible.

I have to use SonicStage to transfer audio from the minidisc – it does however now automatically create .wav files for me so that’s a lot less of a hassle than it used to be. I use Audacity to then edit the audio and produce mp3’s.

For video I just use Windows Movie Maker – it’s fine, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles but they usually confuse me anyway and it does what I need it to do. If I need to convert to Quicktime I use the AVS video conversion suite which set me back something like 15 quid – a useful feature of this is that it will also strip a wav audio file from a video soundtrack for manipulation in Audacity.

Hosting

Obviously this doesn’t fit in my bag…. but it popped into my head that this might be useful information too. I put my videos on YouTube now – may switch if they start to get evil. I also have a couple of libsyn accounts which are useful because they have unlimited download bandwidth but they’re used primarily for podcasts and audio files. I blog here using MovableType but use wordpress.com for freebie blogs.

Cables

Don’t get me started. Separate power cables (with transformers) for each bit of hardware (laptop, minidisc, camera); mic cables; firewire cable from camera to laptop; USB cable from minidisc to laptop; stereo audio line for carrying an audio signal from minidisk to laptop when doing Skype recording (whole other post)

The bag itself came from a very excellent NMK event at the ICA last year – funkiest conference bag ever.

What I think

Social Reporting and Rich Records

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I&DeA Rural Excellence ConferenceDavid Wilcox writes about the role of Social Reporter.

“Online forums need hosts and moderators, workshops need facilitators, networks require some weaving to develop links. But how, for example, do you do that fast around an event, capture content, and follow through afterwards? I’m pondering the possible role of the social reporter. ”

My experience is that it’s a big job, and we haven’t quite worked out whether, or how it’s worth the effort yet. Luckily there are people like us who don’t mind having a go without a stong prior proof that it will work and deliver benefit 🙂

I’m taking a softly, softly, catchee monkey approach. I think (and my order book shows) that we have agreement that it’s a “good thing” or at least a “nice thing” to have a richer record of a days proceedings and that blogs and wikis are a good way of producing that. What I agree we haven’t done yet is get to the point where we’re able to weave everything together to make it useful enough to participants that they want to do more than view the record.

But maybe that’s not our responsibility…yet. I see a risk that we’re pushing people too fast along a learning curve that we’ve taken a while to go along ourselves. I found last week that It is enough novelty for the average conference participant to deal with the fact that we’ve taken pictures, done some vox-pops with people and live blogged a keynote and they are up on the internet at the end of day 1! Maybe we should just let this aspect sink in for a little bit – if they want to interact as well, then that’s fantastic and we should be ready for it when it happens, but in the meantime, perhaps we could be honing our reporting skills in this new environment.

Especially if we are also introducing more social aspects to the event, breaking down the distinction between presenter and audience – novelty fatigue might set in – I have to remember that not everyone gets bored as easily as I do!

[Bonus Link: Tara Hunt opens up an interesting conversation about measuring the health of communities – graphic equalizers are a little cybernetic for me, but rtwt]

What I've Been Doing

A Yorkshire mini-adventure

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I trundled up to York on Sunday evening (thumbs down to GNER for their wireless not working, thumbs up to Best Western Hotels whose wifi was not only working in my room and all over the hotel, but was free too). I was there to cover, in blog form, an I&DeA conference on Rural Excellence.

I’m currently selling this service as “Rich Records” and Mark Hucker, one of the agency’s most forward-thinking senior managers (thanks for the fiver, Mark) asked me to use their communities of practice software to pull together something for people to talk about during and after the event. Since the CoP stuff had difficulty embedding video initially (it’s OK now) I put up a wordpress blog to run in parallel so that people could see everything together – which means that you can go and have a look yourselves without having to go through the registration with I&DeA. Of course, if you have a real interest in rural issues or other areas that the agency deals with, I’d recommend signing up with them anyway, but for the casual visitor go look at the blog for now (until I get asked to take it down).

Anyway, another thrill of the two days was to get to meet and interview Prof. Heinz Wolff childhood hero from his time on Young Scientists of the Year (shockingly little of this show survives on the interweb) and The Great Egg Race. Prof. Wolff gave us an entertaining after-dinner speech on the need for greater risk-taking in society (including some potentially hair-smouldering pyrotechnics) and then he addressed the main conference talkign about using traditional aspects of rural society to solve 21st Century urban problems. I particularly liked the idea of using old ladies to staff call centres – “Oh, yes Uncle Harry had that problem too, and do you know what we did with him? Well…”

After everyone else had gone home on Tuesday evening, came the least-planned, but most heart-warming bit. I made a last-minute arrangement with the author of Knitting Yoghurt, whom some of you will recognise from her blog and whom I haven’t seen for 20 years, to dash across from York to deepest West Yorkshire for an evening of Yorkshire Pudding… meat-free toad in the hole, getting to know her delightful children (a discussion on which was the toad and which the hole and an exploration of German vocabulary for fruits and vegetables) and then sitting by the fire and reminiscing over a lovely cup of tea. In the morning, after meeting the assembled playmobil folk, I had to get on a train at 10.50 to be back in London, but it was a lovely, spontaneous thing to do – clearly those red pants are working.

What I think

Love, Links and Lysistrata

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oooh!Gia says “Typing ‘a href’ is not a creative act.” after her run in with Maryam Scoble.

I disagree. Typing ‘a href’ is *the* new creative act that makes all of this possible. Without links we just have nodes – we need both to make the network – the best bloggers have always been the ones who write amazing stuff *and* link to amazing stuff.

We’re playing the old game when we discriminate between different types of creativity. Shall I throw a tantrum because I didn’t get a round of applause for the amount of carbon dioxide and methane that my body has created today?

In my experience, demanding credit is a much less satisfying use of my time than just making more stuff that I think is cool.

I think we need to scale down our expectations of link-love a lot and be satisfied with the offline credit that we do get. It’s still great for me when people I’ve never met say “oh you’re at Perfect Path” or I hear someone go “there was this guy making bottles of Stormhoek explode” and I can say “yeah, that was me”. It’s taken a while, but there are now people saying “We’ve seen that you can do this stuff, have a large wodge of cash for doing it for us”.

Anyway I think Maryam’s way more pissed off with Robert than with Gia – time for some offline credit building activities I think – someone in her comments has already suggested the Aristophanean solution.

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.