cybersoc.com

opportunities for media/journalism students or amateur jornos

Are you a media or journalism student? Reckon you can podcast, shoot and edit video for the web, blog, write articles for student magazines or newspapers? If so, the We Media Fringe, taking place at a secret location in SoHo, London on 03 May 2006 needs you!

You'll get an exclusive "fringe press pass" to attend and cover the event. You'll get to meet some of the media world's bigger (we won't say biggest) names, interesting new media types, internet activists and a few people with strange coloured hair.

YOU will get preferential access over any proper press card carrying, TV camera toting, radio boom prodding professional journalists who turn up. It is a fringe afterall.

Get in touch if you think you fit the bill, are really going to turn up on the evening, don't expect payment or free beer, and generally just think this might be a cool way to create some content to share online (or elsewhere). Reply with a comment (link just beneath this text) containing your email address and, if you've got a blog or whatever, a link.

**UPDATE: BBC 5Live's Pods and Blogs has agreed that, in exchange of us letting their journalist in, they'll work alonside our "official fringe podcaster" and use their audio on-air. We've cut a similar deal with the BBC News Website, giving a journalism or media student the opportunity to work alongside the BBC's Alf Hermida at the fringe event. **

If you are a bonafide student, a podcaster, an amateur video producer etc and want to cover the event please meet at the venue at 6pm. I've already got a list of some of you but a few more are welcome.

wemedia fringe - confirmation of event

It's unofficially official! Due to the efforts of a small band of co-conspirators, the WeMedia fringe event is going to take place in London on the evening of Wednesday 03 May 2006. So far we've organised the following speakers for the fringe event and are hoping to confirm several more:

• Suw Charman, Executive Director, Open Rights Group
• Neil Dixon, creator of BritCaster.com
• Paul Evans who blogs at nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com
• Michael Tippett,founder of nowpublic.com
• Neha Viswanathan (withinandwithout.com and globalvoicesonline.org)
• Tim Ireland, online marketing expert and activist who blogs at bloggerheads.com
• Dr Chris Yapp, Head of Public Sector Innovation, Microsoft
• Ben Metcalfe (benmetcalfe.com / backstage.bbc.co.uk)
• A political blogger who goes by the name of "Guido Fawkes" (order-order.com)

The conference organisers caught wind of the post I made last month suggesting a fringe and are working towards delivering some interesting speakers from conference itself. I don't have the names yet but will post them when I do.

The event will be guest list only BUT we're going to go to great pains to ensure that a wide selection of people from all walks of life are able to attend. And the event will be covered by some journalism and media students (see my next post if you're someone who fits the bill!) so everyone will at least be able to see what happened on the night.

So what to do now if you want your name on the guest list? Come back here soon...

About We Media - the Conference: The We Media Global Forum brings together the trailblazers of the connected society - the thinkers, innovators, investors, executives and activists seeking to tap the potential of digital networks connecting people everywhere. (official programme)

lot's of bad stuff, you know, happens on...

Lot's of bad stuff, you know, happens on sites like... yeah, that one. Now, reports the Chronicle, students disciplined by their schools for posts they've made online, often from computers far removed from their school's network, are fighting back with help from the ACLU.

Speaking of myspace, I just came across (thanks youthnet) mydeathspace.com which isn't some dark goth site or bad taste parody encouraging teenagers to commit suicide or anything like that, it's actually quite touching. If you can figure out how to close the ad the covers the entire page when you get there that is. From (the page past the ad) mydeathspace.com:

Only three things are certain in life. MySpace, Taxes, and Death. If you have a MySpace account and you die, this is where you will end up. MyDeathSpace.com memorializes deceased MySpace users and picks up where a regular obituary leaves off. Click the MySpace Deaths link at the top to view the latest MySpace Deaths!

wemedia fringe - 03 May (TBC)

A few weeks ago I posted here asking if anyone would be interested in attending or helping to organise a wemedia fringe event in London. The idea is to create a fringe event to the WeMedia conference but make it free or very low cost to ensure it's open and accessible to a diverse range of participants, particularly those unable to attend to actual conference.

After dozens of emails and phone calls, and with the help of a few supporters in the wings, I've managed to find and tentatively reserve a central London venue for the evening of 03 May. Several people are now working on securing interesting speakers from wemedia to come speak at the fringe event.

It's still a bit premature for me to reveal the details but watch this space - on Tuesday the 25th I'm hoping to have the details all firmed up and a way for people to register their interest in attending.

Don't book a train or plane ticket. Don't email me in an attempt to pry out more information. But do jot down the date on your hand and stop washing...

WeMedia Conference Website

The post where I originally pitched the idea of having a "wemedia fringe" event

(Please Note: "wemedia fringe" is not endorsed by or in any way connected to the wemedia conference, The Media Center, or BBC and Reuters who are co-sponsoring this years' event)

europeans still surfing, not creating online content

A new study by Jupiter Research, as reported in yesterday's Guardian, suggests that "bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society..." Ok, we already knew that, but the research is actually quite interesting because it suggests that alongside the huge growth in social networking and other community building websites in recent years and months, 3/4 of Europeans don't actually create any online content. The study suggests that:

• More than half of the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all
• a further 23% only respond when prompted
• although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends
• unprompted contributors are generally younger and more vocal than the wider online population and are increasingly important as opinion formers and trend-setters.

Jupiter's Julian Smith told The Guardian that "The strongest part of their influence is on the media: if something online suddenly becomes a story in the local press, then it matters."

bbc blog embraces audience content on 3rd party platform

I'm always saying that mainstream media needs to start seeking out and embracing audience content wherever it might exist, even if that means just linking to it rather than supplying the platform and making claims of ownership over the content.

Examples of this approach are fairly thin on the ground:

• A number of American newspaper sites, including the Washington Post, are experimenting with displaying blogger content via blogburst.
• The Observer Magazine (a print publication that comes with the Observer newspaper on Sunday) uses content from PostSecret.
• And of course there are lots of msm print publications and websites that quote from blogs, chat rooms, message boards, etc from time to time - I like the Ben Rooney column in the Guardian which does a nice job of using blogger content about whatever is the big story of the day

It seems that the BBC is (finally!) dipping it's toe in the water. The recently launched World Have Your Say Blog, which I belatedly took my first look at today, is taking a flickr feed and displaying it alongside BBC content. They've even signed up for technorati!

The BBC's Kevin Anderson, who blogs on the World Have Your Say blog, explained to me that:

"For us to blog doesn't mean just pushing more BBC content out at our audiences, it's part of what we call the global conversation. And the blog gives us as much of an opportunity to listen as well as to publish. Using Flickr is our recognition that there are a lot of communities and conversations already going on outside of the BBC. We're trying to being a good neighbour online and be a part of those communities."

10 things i wish i'd known when i started blogging

People I meet are always telling me that they're about to start a blog. Having sort of just woke up one day and started this blog, I've made my fair share of mistakes which, hopefully, this post might help a few other people avoid:

1. Sort out your domain name: if you think there's a chance you'll keep blogging, buy a domain name and map it to your blog before people start to notice and link to it, otherwise you'll get trapped into the service you initially used to set your blog up to avoid losing all your traffic
2. Sign up to a third party RSS service, such as feedburner, and de-activate the one that comes with your blogging platform (or you'll get locked in - see number 1 above)
3. Join technorati and claim your blog. People always talk about blogs being "conversations" yet most blogs get very few, if any, comments. The conversations that pundits talk about often take place on other blogs, where people link to and comment on your posts. Technorati helps you keep track of the longtail of conversation.
4. Host your images using another service, for example flickr or buzznet, and when you post them their link back to your blog. It's a good way to point people towards your blog. It will also help you keep within your monthly bandwidth allocation.
5. Consider signing up to sites like blogburst which syndicate your content to news and media websites (giving you links from sites like the Washington Post)
6. Make sure you add your URL to Google once you've sorted out your domain name (and I'd almost swear that signing up to display google ads and use google search on my site got me indexed more quickly - it's also helped by for the blogging service I use)
7. Add some sites with similar content to yours to your typepad list, blog roll, or whatever your blogging platform calls lists of links. You might also want to consider displaying the RSS feed contents from those sites actually on your page. Then, when you're looking for something to write about, visit your site and use those links. They owners will see traffic coming from you and perhaps visit themselves, maybe finding good content in the process. Don't underestimate the importance of linking and checking who is linking to you but also don't sit and click on the links just to get noticed as it's likely to make you look like an idiot.
8. Sign up for, and start using, del.icio.us and publish the links you collect there. (I'm just starting to experiment with this.)
9. Use pingomatic to let various content agregators know when you've published new content
10. Post comments on other blogs and leave your URL there - but don't make an ass of yourself by doing this when you don't have anything to say!
11. When you first set up your blog, really put some thought into the categories you're going to use. I'm sure I'm not the first blogger who has over a dozen categories currently active, all of which are getting traffic, but half of which make no sense or are duplicated by other tags.

Ok, so that's eleven, but I think they're all sensible tips. Of course there are other things you should do, for example take time to properly design and layout your blog, choose the right blogging platform for your needs, keep posting after the initial excitement of the first two weeks, tell friends and colleagues who might be interested about your blog, post stuff that people might actually want to look at, etc. Maybe I should have called it twenty things I wish I'd known when I started blogging...

Do any readers have tips they'd like to add?

(This post is available as a podcast)

geek stuff in french: the infrastructure behind myspace

I don't know more than four words of French so there's always a risk that the blog post by Fabrice Epelboin that I just stumbled upon, L'infrastructure derrière MySpace, may actually be about photos of butts on myspace.com rather than the infrasctructure behind it:

Quelques chiifres pour nos amis geeks :

2,682 serveurs web
90 serveur 'cache' avec 16GB de RAM chacun
450 serveurs Dart pour la pub
60 serveurs de bases de données
150 serveurs spécialisé 'média' (son/image)
1000 disques dur en SAN
3 data center
17000MB/s de bande passante

Here's Google's French --> English translation of the text.

how i didn't get quoted in a myspace hatchet job

Last Friday I received an email from a journalist writing a story about MySpace.com for The Independent on Sunday. Reading through the questions he'd emailed me, it was fairly obvious the article was going to be a hatchet job on myspace, something along the lines of "it's a dangerous bad place and something must be done..."

So I just HAD TO reply. I pointed out that with many millions of users (the article says 55 million), the number of incidents appearing in the press about myspace has actually been quite low: if you dumped that many people into a park for a music festival you'd expect hundreds if not thousands of arrests. I also pointed out that if Playboy really is doing a "girls of myspace" feature, as the Independent article claims, it's not really anything to do with myspace. When photographers from FHM or another lads magazine do a feature with "girls on the sofa" talking about sex, or a topless photo spread on beautiful undergraduates, we don't blame the university and why should we blame myspace?

I tried to reason. I tried to explain that it's just like any other place where people come together, online or off - some people are bound to be trouble makers whilst the vast majority behave themselves and don't cause any problems. I tried to point out that myspace simply can't be held responsible for something Playboy is alledgedly planning.

So what did the journalist do? Well, he didn't use the interview to balance out the scaremongering piece he'd probably already written titled: My (Porn) Space.com: Rupert Murdoch has been caught with his trousers down by investing in the hugely successful (and smutty) website.

The article doesn't bring anything new to the table. I just wanted to point out the media backlash that myspace seems to be up against at the moment... wait a second, did I just defend part of the Murdoch empire?!

user videos on 3 prove popular

3 mobile in the UK is offering users the opportunity to make money from cameraphone videos and images. According to the website, 3 subscribers can upload their video using the short code 32323.

The Guardian reports that the service, which carries the moto "Break the news and spot celebs wherever you are and make money too", is now serving 1 million downloads a month. But a word of warning: it costs 50p to upload a video and 10p to download a video - with the person who submitted the video getting one pence of that - so it would take 50 downloads for a contributor to break even.

[Spotted on Smartmobs who saw it previously on Textuality.org. 3 has a press release here.]