Steve Bridger has been kind enough to share his presentation about Flickr in the Cultural and Heritage Sectors. It's a really well thought out, beautifully presented set of slides providing many insights, and examples, to those trying to make the most out of photographic assets through sharing...
This morning I discovered that Amazon's Kindle now offers the ability to subscribe to blogs. If you're a blogger, and want your blog to be available through Amazon, the details of how to sign up are here.
I don't have a Kindle and can't vouch for how it looks, but I've already signed up to sell cybersoc content subscriptions (free 14 day trial, then US $1.99) through the service. I'm interested to see if anyone goes for the subscription and what they think of it.
Blogs through Kindle will be, I suspect, quite a nice way for bloggers with good, regularly published, niche content - such as Shedworking - to earn some revenue from their efforts.
Last Friday I attended Jeecamp - the Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Unconference - in Birmingham. The event, organised by Paul Bradshaw from Birmingham City's School of Media, brought together journalists, editors, academics and entrepreneurs for a day of interesting discussion.
It's already, given the subject matter, been blogged to death so I won't duplicate the effort of others here, but I did want to point you to Journalism.co.uk's audio of the panel I was on along with Jo Wadsworth (Brighton Argus), Andy Dickinson (UCLAN), and Robin Morley (BBC) which was moderated by Dave Hart (Digital Birmingham).
For more coverage of the event, see Michael Haddon's posts for the Telegraph or Martin Belam's PDA Newsbucket piece on the Guardian website.
Last week I spoke at one of the strangest conferences, in one of the most far flung places, I've ever been to - the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The conference brings together journalists, business leaders, academics and politicians for two days of discussion ranging from news coverage of global events such as the current economic crisis to the implications of the Obama Presidency on East-West relations.
I went, at least in part, in the hope that by talking about the tools and techniques of blogging and social media, I could encourage delegates to think about being more open, transparent and direct in their dealings with audiences, consumers and, for the politicians in attendance, the populaces they govern. It was my usual sort of presentation but in unusual circumstances because, little did I know as I was speaking, something rather unusual was going on outside the building. Dan Kennedy covered the action outside, and what happened in the subsequent panel which we both participated in, on his blog Media Nation:
"The InterContinental Hotel
in Almaty, Kazakhstan, is about as isolating an experience as you can
imagine. The luxurious surroundings — and the ever-present security
guards — effectively separated the several hundred journalists
attending last week's Eurasian Media Forum from whatever was going on outside.
So
it was something of a surprise when that separation was breached last
Friday afternoon. Between a panel on the global media crisis, which I
moderated, and a panel on blogging, in which I participated, several
people approached us with handouts, warning of proposed laws that would
crack down on Kazakhstan's burgeoning blogosphere. We exchanged
pleasantries, and that seemed to be that.
Then, during the
blogging panel, one of them — an audacious 24-year-old woman named
Yevgeniya Plakhina, wearing a shirt that proclaimed "SHHH!" — got up
and demanded to know why six of her friends had been arrested for
demonstrating against the proposals.
The moderator, Vladimir
Rerikh, a Kazakh journalist, clearly wanted the issue, and Plakhina, to
go away. But Danny Schechter, a well-known American progressive
journalist, spoke up on Plakhina's behalf, and she was able to continue
pressing her case. (Here is Schechter's account.)
The organizer of the conference, Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of
President Nursultan Nazarbayev, could be seen talking on her cell
phone, leaving the hall and returning several times..."
Local campaigners fear that the law in question, explains Matthew Collin [on the Frontline Club blog - a Headshift project] who reports for Al Jazeera from Georgia and was another of the panelists in the blogging session, would "put serious restrictions on internet journalists and bloggers and potentially allow the authorities to block sites on political grounds."
Danny Schechter reports that the arrested protesters were later freed by authorities, quoting an email he received from Plakhina, which read “I really appreciate your help. Thanx. My friends are OK. I guess the authorities were afraid of international scandal, so an advisor to the president took care of letting my friends out..."
Needless to say, the panel discussion didn't exactly go as those of us on it had planned, nor - I suspect - as the organisers had intended. But I'm glad it happened - the protest I mean - and hope that, by being one of the many foreign participants in the conference, just being there helped ensure that the protesters and their colleagues both reach a wider audience with their appeal and remain safe from arrest whilst doing so.
The whole incident reminded me that media freedom is a precious, and all to rare, freedom. And blogging is, I think, an important tool for helping those who are brave enough to fight for it to make themselves heard. It's a long long way from the worlds of media and corporate blogging which I usually inhabit to the scenes I at least partially witnessed in Almaty but I hope that, some day, when they've won their fight for rights, blogging will become as everyday and mundane - and safe - as it is for me and most of you reading this.
Slideshare doesn't seem to like the Below you'll find the presentation on mobile journalism I'll be delivering to students on the MA Magazine and Newspaper Journalism course at City University, London on Thursday. The presentation looks at:
• service providers - why do companies offer services which enable mobile content uploading and social networking?
• citizen journalism - what motivates people to "report" what they witness; what sort of content do they create and share?
• journalism - how are professional journalists and new organisations using mobiles?
• tools - what tools are available for documenting and sharing content online?
And at some point during the lecture I'm hoping to involve some professional mobile journalists - by mobile, of course....
Last December, in a guest post I wrote over on the Telegraph's Technology Blog, I gave some of my own predictions of social media trends I think we'll see in 2009.
Along a similar line, Trendspotting has shared an interesting slide show presenting Influencers Predictions for Social Media in 2009. It's worth a look:
Many thanks to all of you who visited, and particularly to those who commented or quoted and linked, over 2008. I look forward to what the year ahead will bring.
Over the year, there were 78,128 page views from 65,681 unique users. A monthly breakdown can be seen (click to pop-up) below:
Feedburner reporters that, in addition to those who have visited through the website itself, there are currently 1005 people subscribed to the RSS feed.
Numbers are significantly down on last year's figures of around 95,000 page views and 74,000 unique users in 2007. I attribute that to having a new job, new kid, and subsequently less time to blog rather than the credit crunch having affected traffic, but you never know...
Interestingly - to me at least - is that the blog I do for fun, which is all about St. Albans, the small Cathedral City just north of London where I live, got 1200 more page views than this one. The number of unique users and RSS subscriptions is still far lower.
I've also noticed some changes in the services I've been using daily in comparison to previous years. My use of delicious has gone down since the auto-publishing to this blog stopped working a few months ago. I've also cut down on the frequency at which I check my RSS reader. Both, I think, have been surpassed by my increasing use and dependency upon Twitter to help me find new, relavent content. I've also been favouriting a lot of tweets there rather than adding them to delicious, and adding interesting bloggers as friends rather than subscribing to their blogs. Perhaps John Humphries was right and twitter really is killing my blog. I guess what I'm saying is that although I appreciate your visit, I'm posting elsewhere more frequently than here - so do please have a look if you want to keep up with what I'm up to.
I've been really busy speaking at different events the past few weeks.
At the end of October, I spent an afternoon at the News of the World Editors Conference. I'm afraid I can't tell you much more about that but it was a lot more fun "being grilled by Fleet Street's finest attack dogs", as Editor Colin Myler put it in his invitation, than one might initially suspect from an event with a billing like that. They sell 3+ million copies of their Sunday paper in a country of around 60 million people but have, thus far, only made baby steps online.
On the 9th I was at blogboat.be in Ghent, Belgium, to moderate the evening panel debate between Dan Gillmor, newspaper editor and author Henk Blanken and Han Soete from Indymedia. The panel was proceeded by an afternoon discussion about citizen media, blogging and journalism which took place, as the name might imply, on a boat.
Then, on the 12th, I was one of two guests invited to take part "in conversation" on the stage at the Association for International Broadcasting Awards dinner at St. Lukes LSO in London. I was interviewed by Jonathan Marks - video below:
I also did the first of four three hour teaching sessions, each comprising of a lecture followed by two workshops, at the Department of Journalism at City University, London, where I'm teaching on the MA International Journalism programme. I'm back there again on the 2nd of December.
In Mid-December, I'll be in Dubai for the New Media Event which I'm particularly looking forward to as it, potentially, will be an entirely new audience for me and I'm hoping to learn as much, if not more, than I dish out myself.
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