Post-university life

On television accuracy within this "New Media" landscape

Since I had some free time I went over to the Old Theatre of the London school of economics and what we found out from that conversation is that people don’t trust television. According to one of the chairs this was at a ratio of 4:3. This is an interesting situation since the question of trust is one that as academics we all worry about. Any student, whether a primary school child, an undergrad or a grad knows one thing.

17 After the Event- Carrying the Conversation Forward

There are two key events I have been to since the beginning of summer. These are PodcampUK and the Twitter Meetup. Both of these events have been followed up by a continuing collaboration between participants. The first event was the London twitter meetup. I went there knowing just two participants, Sizemore and Jess. Over the night I would end up with interviews with quite a few members of the London twitter community but nothing much would be done with this footage as a result of not having known that I would be doing these interviews.

Why a 20% drop is not necessarily a bad thing for myspace

According to recent articles myspace is losing user share in relation Facebook but this is not necessarily a bad thing. When you think of facebook you know that it’s a glorified phonebook therefore everyone “needs” to use it to remain in the loop. In contrast Myspace is a specialised music sharing site for artists and creators of music to come together and collaborate as members of the same art form. As a result of many users leaving myspace for other social networking websites so Myspace will have far less noise, in other words extra chatter that does not contribute to the appreciation of music.

Andrew Keen, Cynthia Mckinney and Jeff Blankfort

I recently dropped by the Frontline club to listen to what Andrew Keen had to say and his talk was really interesting. There are a few ideas that I found were interesting and I’m still planning on getting something written up about the event. Last night I met up with Documentally to record an interview before going to Cynthia Mckinney’s talk about confronting the empire. She talked for twenty minutes or so before giving the floor for a Q&A session at which man questions were asked.

The podcasting demographic

Whilst listening to a conversation between several podcasters in their debriefing they were asking the question of how to involve a different demographic in the process of podcasting. This is an interesting question. As one participant pointed out the demographic seems to be for white males over 30 years of age to create content whilst younger people seem not to be active. If that last statement is true then I am an anomaly to the rule since I have over four years even to reach that age.

PodcampUK - Part 1 of the debrief

There are many podcamps but Podcampuk was my podcamp. This was an event which was similar to just one previous experience. It was an event where everyone you talked to had at least one website and others may have had several. They also used twitter and prepared radio programs. What is great about the podcast UK crowd is that they’re a creative entrepreneurial group. Rather than take a 9 to 5 job some work as freelancers.

Podcamp UK Day 1

Today has been an informative day where there have been many conferences to participate in. The morning saw the introduction of the event whilst later on a great discussion took place about social networking and I’ve got the footage to give you an idea of the direction the conference was taking. On a side note we were introduced to vlogsnapz, an application designed to make video blogging simpler. So far I’ve seen that you can upload to a number of popular video sharing website and the interface is simple.

What I'm reading - Kadaré's L'Hiver de la grande Solitude

From friendships and the people we meet so our knowledge of authors increases. It is through English literature classes that I learned to appreciate Milan Kundera. I read all his books over a period of years. Following a conversation with an Albanian friend I heard of Ismail Kadare. He originally wrote in Albanian and French, living in Paris for many years. The two books I have read so far are Spiritus and Les Tambours de L’automne.

Facebook, a personal rather than social network

Ten years ago if you met someone and they gave you their visit card you’d put it away somewhere and eventually you might have come back to it but the information would need updating. Over the years social networking tools on the web have evolved from simple mail clients to web forums and finally to Myspace and Facebook. With Facebook we find what I think of as an enhanced phonebook. When you meet someone at a party today there’s a good chance that this individual has a facebook presence.

On the challenge of being brief.

Back in 2000 I arrived in the South West of England as an 18 year old who was used to watching 24 minute documentaries on a range of subjects and I wanted to do the same thing. For the course I was doing when I was told that I had to do one minute pieces I was dissapointed because I thought I would never get through what I wanted to say in that amount of time.