Not sure whether this will take off or not, but Storify is now in public beta since last month. Storify allows you to pull together a ‘story’ by consolidating related content (tweets, Youtube vids, links, RSS etc) onto one webpage, interspersing you own commentary if you wish. I can see that this will have a very useful application for creating a permanent record of instantaneous reactions on Twitter to breaking news or during events. The facility to pull out the tweets that you consider most relevant, and support those with other content and your own comments, creates a richer, more focused and personal narrative than just looking back at the hit and miss tweets on a particular hashtag or search.

I have not had a go at creating my own yet, but perhaps tomorrow’s trip to the OpenTech conference will provide such an opportunity. The interface for creating your ‘stories’ looks intuitive, allowing you with Twitter to select the tweets you want from your own timeline, your own tweets, your favorites, a search term or from a particular user or list. This gives a good deal of flexibility; you could for example, if you are at a conference, favorite all the best tweets of the day and come back to those at the end of the day to order them and put them into a coherent story.

Here is an example of a good use of Storify that is featured on their homepage. It details how a man tracked a laptop he believed had been stolen and eventually got it returned thanks (in part) to the interventions of those helping him on Twitter.

UPDATE: I should note that one thing that appears to be missing from Storify is the facility for collaborative story-building. Not sure if I have missed something in the settings or if it is to be developed for a later release, but this would seem to be a glaring omission considering it is designed to create stories from social media.

In the vein of this blogpost of mine, I thought I would share some more rediscovered music. The other week I was browsing the recent releases section of iTunes and happened upon an album by a guy called Ben Ottewell called Shapes & Shadows. After playing a few of the song previews I was getting a distinct sense of deja vu about his distinctive sounding voice. Here is a video of him performing a track off the aforementioned album called Lightbulbs.

To anyone into the indie scene at the tail end of Britpop this should sound very familiar indeed. The voice reminder of just how much, back in the late nineties, I played (and played and played) the first two albums of Ottewell’s former band, Gomez.  There was a time shortly after the release of their debut album that the single Whippin’ Picadilly seemed to be on one of the music channels every five minutes. So it was, after downloading and playing Ottewell’s album – brilliant by the way – that I found myself finding my copies of the Gomez albums and importing them into iTunes for some nostalgic playback. Whilst I think Bring It On is the better album, my favourite Gomez track is actually off their second album Liquid Skin. Here’s the video for We Haven’t Turned Around Yet.

The New York Times has published a useful list of tech tips here.

Happily I am already compliant with seven of them, but I do still need to get a cloud storage solution that works will sync with my NAS (anyone out there know a good, reasonably priced solution?)

I also found this list of likely changes in social media on RWW quite an interesting read. The most interesting points for me were on the proliferation of mobile (point 3), on the next stage of evolution for social networks (point 5) and on the rise in citizen activism (point 8). We are already starting to see the intersection of these points in the genesis of movements like UK Uncut; self-starting, localised, diverse, loosely-aligned and distributed.

As stated in the article (point 5):

People today look for more personalized, authentic, private information (where we make) a ‘social contract’ around a topic or context that is beyond the reach of search engine results and Facebook crowds,” said Dave Blakely, director of technology strategy at IDEO.

I am finally, a year after making a break from Andy’s, getting around to converting some of my WMA files into MP3. When I was lodging at Andy’s we initially had an all Windows household, so much of the first years there, when the majority of my music library was amassed, everything was ripped in Windows Media Player straight into WMA format. This was efficient and met requirements at the time, as WMA played both on the various Squeezebox devices scattered liberally around the house, but also on my Creative Zen MP3 player. In hindsight a bit of a mistake. The move to a Mac and an iPod a couple of years ago left me with some music in MP3 which would play, but a big bulk of my historical library in WMA which iTunes on the Mac cannot handle (Windows version does and will actually convert WMA to MP3).

Anyway, this long and unnecessary story is just a tedious introduction to some music I rediscovered tonight whilst converting some old WMA files. Starting alphabetically, I soon came across an album by Adam Snyder, a long forgotten support act that Lee and I (I think) once saw supporting Tom McRae some 6 or so years back. If memory serves, I don’t think he was even supposed to be the support act that night, but was stepping in for someone else. He was touring on the material from his debut album release at the time, a melodic, folky album with some great tracks. A quick search of Amazon reveals a second album in 2006, but nothing since then. YouTube likewise had scant material from Snyder, but I did manage to find this live performance of Two Moons, a track from his debut album.

The Guardian has set up a collaborative map of the community campaigns in the Leeds area.

View Leeds community campaigns in a larger map

I am somewhat surprised that there is not already a website set up out there that maps these campaigns nationwide. Am I missing something?

Glorious day yesterday at the RPSB reserve at Old Moor.

Sightings wise it was a quiet day though. We went to the Bittern Hide first in the hope that we might catch a glimpse of the Cetti’s Warblers they have been reporting there. The only time I have actually seen one was last year at RSPB Titchwell and you do well to get a glimpse of these secretive little buggers. Consequently I was not in the least bit surprised when we neither heard nor saw one. We did though get great views of Sparrowhawk on three occasions during the day, Kingfisher, Greenshank and a male Kestrel hunting.

The Wath Ings hide, normally so good for spotting waders, was a bit of a let down after my last visit, with  just a couple of Greenshank and 4 Dunlin amongst the flock of Golden Plovers and Lapwings. We did though have the spectacle of a female Sparrowhawk flying over, putting all the plovers up and very nearly picking off a lone starling that was feeding on the mud in front of the hide. The other big positive, especially considering the bright sunshine, is that many of the ducks have started to come out of their drab eclipse plumage, with the male Shovelers and the Wigeon looking especially impressive.

I did a post a couple of years back about the explosive end of one of my favourite Leeds pubs from those years when I consumed more alcohol than was probably good for me. The death of the local boozer is of course part of long and ongoing trend, of which I was reminded again recently by two things.

The first was this report today on how changes to the licensing laws could actually jeopardise more local community pubs, ironically as a result of the coalition governments much feted localism agenda.

Secondly, having joined the recently set up Leeds Forum, I saw and commented on this thread entitled Pub Nostalgia, which was started by the posting of a link to a Flickr group entitled Leeds Pubs Past & Present. I must admit to spending a hour or so clicking through the pictures looking for the pubs I used to frequent; many of which I discovered had now closed and were pictured boarded up and derelict. I am not sure why seeing closed pubs is such a uniquely saddening experience compared to other types of businesses, but I suppose it must be something to do with the memories one forms of times spent in pubs that do not translate to say a particular shop one used to go into. The Flickr group does have that feel of capturing the slow death of a particular kind of pub too. Best shut up before I lapse into more bouts of nostalgia.

I used to use these very cash machines quite regularly when I worked over that side of the city centre.

[Source: Leeds edition of Guardian here]

Sums up the current sentiment of much of the populace quite accurately I think, especially where the banks are concerned.

The article the picture appears in also contains details of the Guardian’s Cuts Watch initiative, which is an attempt to map the cuts in Leeds as they are reported.

It has been fashionable for quite some time now for enthusiasts to quote people like Clay Shirky on the value of social media in facilitating group campaigning activities. Anyone who has read his book, Here Comes Everybody, will know it is packed with examples of when the internet and social media has been able to bring together disparate individuals into a potent campaigning force in a way that simply would not have been possible even 10 or 15 years ago. The last election saw the Conservatives launch their proposals for creating the Big Society, which is described as:

The Big Society is a society in which individual citizens feel big: big in terms of being supported and enabled; having real and regular influence; being capable of creating change in their neighbourhood

There is of course much political debate about what it means, the extent to which it was happening already and the impact the cuts will have on the desire to create the Big Society (or Bigger Society). In principle though, empowerment of citizens within their communities is something that should be welcomed. Even Labour, who originally rubbished the idea as being just a cover for cuts, have belatedly started to engage in the debate on community campaigning and empowerment.

It was with these two themes – one technological and one political – in my head that I attended the OpenTech conference in September, hoping that some of the talks would start to join some of the dots between the internet/social media on one hand, and community empowerment and campaigning on the other. I will one day soon get round to jotting down a few thoughts on the conference more generally, but for now I will just mention the second session I attended. It was the second session of the day (audio for it here) and it had three speakers:

1. Dr Sue Black talking about how she had used Twitter to raise awareness (and funds) for a campaign to save Bletchley Park [more details here]
2. Nick Booth talked about how a conversation between him and several other bloggers he knew about what could contribute to their local community led to them setting up Social Media Surgeries. These were informal gatherings where advise could be gained by local businesses, campaign groups, charities etc on how better to utilise the internet and social media.
3. Dr Carl Reynolds on his fight to improve the management information provided to doctors on their diagnostic accuracy [slides here]

It was a rather rushed session in the end I felt and the Q & A session was dominated by one person, towards the end, asking a bizarre set of questions about some analogies Dr Reynolds had made between medical diagnosis and fault identification in the aerospace industry. The bit that stuck with me was Booth’s talk and the idea of building up knowledge of social media in the  local community.

When I returned from the Open Tech I thought I would do a bit of reconnaissance of the internet in Leeds to see what was already out there in terms of local websites, blogs, Facebook groups and so on. Through that process I have found a few good local websites (listed in my Links under Leeds) and a relatively active Twitter community. It was through these connections that I became aware of the Hyperlocal online community (search #hyperlocal on Twitter), which is really about encouraging communities to find their voice and interact in a shared space, most commonly a blog or a forum. It is all about building that shared experience of what it is to live in the same community and using those interactions to move that community in a positive direction. The development of these localised networks is supported by Talk About Local and OpenlyLocal, which has a directory of hyperlocal blogs/websites.

Even the BBC has a blog on hyperlocal websites written by none other than Nick Booth. In his most recent blog he is talking positive side effects of the social aspect of photograph sharing site Flickr:

I’m a trustee of the Birmingham Conservation Trust and last year we made a similar offer to the Birmingham Flickr group. We asked them if they’d like to take photographs of Newman Brothers, the coffin fittings factory which we had hoped to turn into a museum.

Many of the photographers love old buildings and the last minute offer tempted 15 of them to come down and take some wonderful shots. As they did so they asked us about the future of the building. We told them it was bleak because a few months beforehand funding had been withdrawn. What happened next was a campaign accelerated by the Flickr group. As they put their photographs on the web they also used their blogs and Twitter to tell the world that Newman Brothers needed help. Their care and their networks gave legs to a letter writing campaign, which turned into an e-mail and phone call campaign, which ultimately resulted in a new plan emerging for the building.

Websites like Flickr are not just collections of pictures. They are places where people forge links which are strong enough to change the places we care about.

This is one of the things that is encouraging about social media; sometimes all that is required to spur action is the catalyst of interactions and of shared sentiment. I was only commenting the other day to a family member, on Twitter as it happens, how social media has changed the interactions I have with family and friends in a positive way. My family and friends are dispersed across the globe, so using social media to communicate has been doubly effective in fact. Sadly, I still have a few curmudgeons to win over; ones who see social media as just more of the modern era’s white noise, but when I think about how much colour it has added to some of my family relationships, I do find it difficult to understand why they are still unmoved. Yes there was always e-mail and the phone before, but you would sit and dash out an e-mail with the regularity you might send tweets, and they are one to one forms of communication anyway for the most part, they are not part of a ‘family discussion’. Little interaction often mean the most in families, like sending a tweet of encouragement in difficult times, or sharing a joke or picture. I think about how much of my nephew growing up in the past few years I would feel I had missed out on if it were not for sites like Flickr, Qik and Vimeo – of course I have not physically been there, but it just feels like I have been involved.

I don’t think local communities are all that different really are they? A shared and open community dialogue should have all the kinds of positive spin offs I talk about above. Knowledge is shared, people are encouraged and motivated, debate is stimulated and curmudgeons grumble on the sidelines.

The daughter of my Australian aunt recently sent me an e-mail, part of which was sharing and eliciting opinions on books. The e-mail closed with a request for recommendations of good books I had read. The last time I saw her I was rattling through a few books, mainly because that’s what I do when I am on holiday, but since then I have made several abortive attempts to read some of my huge backlog of books. It struck me when reading the e-mail just how peripheral the reading of a good fiction book has become to my life and I started to list down some of the reasons underlying this:

1. Work, work, work.
2. Increased income in recent years means that books now have to compete with other forms of entertainment: TV, DVD & Console Games. The move towards TV On Demand – watching the programmes you want, when you want to – has, if anything, increased the grip of TV on the modern household. Other forms of home entertainment are much cheaper and more interactive than they used to be too.
3. When I used to work in a fixed office location and take the bus, I used to read on the journey. Now I either work from home or drive to where I need to be, so I have lost that daily hour of reading I used to have.
4. Mobile devices have also started to lay claim to the same social space that you might have once used to read. Travelling on a train to London, or sitting in a coffee shop, I am now more likely to break out the laptop or iPhone rather than a book.
5. My magazine subscriptions land with a thud every week or month and place a pressure on me to read them first before I get to picking up a novel.
6. Internet, internet, internet. This is the modern addiction to the Now if you like. Real time information from social media, reading blogs, surfing news, status updates of my own and endless others ways one can find on the internet to distract oneself. Immersion in this nexus is addictive, not least because it does provide day-to-day social connections with friends and family, but also is a great source of knowledge and learning.
7. Finally, connected to my last point and to be expanded in my next blogpost, my level of concentration is not as good as it used to be. Or rather, should I say, my level of the type of concentration required for reading a novel is not what it was. Some of that discipline has gone and my mind is restless when not multi-tasking. This is almost certainly learned behaviour from both my work, which is for the most part pressurised multi-tasking and firefighting (who’s isn’t?), and the impact of the internet and social media, which is, due to the speed and volume of data, dispersive with regard to your attention. Think about web browsers for example, which started as one window where you navigated sites and bookmarked pages of interest you didn’t have time to digest at the time. Now we have tabbed browsing, it feels more natural to be looking at several sites at the time, splitting your attention between them, absorbing sections and then flicking to another tab. Don’t get me wrong, I would not want to be without tabbed browsing, but it does encourage a certain kind of surfing behaviour; one that invites you to bob in and out of webpages, absorbing a bit at a time in between checking you Facebook update and surfing Amazon for Christmas presents.

I am not sure if these experiences register with anyone else, after all it is not as if books are suddenly unpopular, on the contrary, but it does make me wonder if there are some wider social trends here. There have been doomsayers predicting the end of scholarly learning since the advent of radio and television. Arguably, at least the internet is, in part, an interactive model, rather than a more purely passive model like television. There is also the fact that the modern workplace increasingly demands the ability to multi-task and absorb information quickly from a variety of sources, coupled with an intuitive grasp of technology. We want our kids to be able to set up our new DVD player for us, not recite the instruction booklet chapter and verse right? In a fast moving world, we need an equally fast moving brain right?

Will come back to this topic, but for now I will close with an observation. I once saw a comedian who said as part of his routine that philosophers contended that man’s mission was the search for truth; he disagreed stating that it was the search for convenience that was man’s driving force. Is it more accurate though to say it is actually the search for instant gratification that is the driver? If it is, then the combination of television and the internet, especially with the rise recently of real time social media, would represent a potent challenge to any tasks that require more active, focused, protracted concentration.