rosie fields

A site to behold

2009-05-25T20:47:00.000-07:00

A very interesting site investigating the notion of user-led content – http://produsage.org by Axel Bruns. Especially Snurb’s blog featuring his presentation on produsage and business: blogging from next09.

First blogger to win Australian prize

2009-05-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

Blogger Alison Croggon of Theatre Notes, mentioned in my second blog as ‘my taste’ in blogs is the first blogger to win the Pascall Prize for excellence in arts journalism, the sole award for arts criticism in Australia. The prize is $15,000, and for background on the prize and Alison’s forthright and inclusive approach to ‘curation of a public conversation’ (per prize judges) see her invaluable Theatre Notes. The Age reports that Alison is ‘particularly pleased because the award “validates what blogs can be.”’ Note her vivid disclosure of who she is, what she does, the ‘financial’ status of her blog and her use of a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Official Twitter coverage of the Future Summit is an important comment on the increasing popularity of this medium as a seriously interactive and a ‘real-time’ connection for the future, although I find the notion of a conference paper being reduced to a tweet of 140 characters challenging. See the Age report.

San Francisco Chronicle considers ‘how much information is too much in cyberspace’ as syndicated to the Age, a question that will develop and transform as we move rapidly into the future.

Meanwhile Professor Todd Gitlin's keynote presentation at the University of Westminster, London's Journalism in Crisis Conference entitled "A Surfeit of Crises: Circulation, Revenue, Attention, Authority and Deference," makes for good reading. Professor Terry Flew's presentation this week in Chicago offers another perspective on changes in media "The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty and its Contribution to Media Citizenship Debates".

From cultural convergence to analysis paralysis and beyond arts

2009-05-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

“The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Cultural Convergence in the Digital Age” is a fascinating study of the intersection of media and culture in the area of fandom and paves the way for Henry Jenkins’ eloquent book published in 2006 Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. In an era when 'convergence culture' has spread across all forms of media and entertainment (fandom is no longer an underground activity) and media is in transition it is difficult to assess how creators can be financially rewarded for their creations, the notion of intellectual property and copyright are ‘punitive models’ that are inadequate to deal with the contemporary media environment. Corporates e.g. Star Wars/ LucasArts have had to negotiate a balance with fandom enthusiasm and investment in production and protecting intellectual property.

Jenkins’ paradigm for understanding media change spans franchises (corporates top-down) and grassroots level (bottom-up) as media producers as well as consumers. “This book is about the relationship between three contexts – media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence,” he writes. He discusses the migratory experience of audiences who will go ‘almost anywhere’ to find the entertainment experience they desire – and the unpredictability of the appropriation of cultural images and their circulation – in a complex media environment which depends on active participation “by a new set of rules nobody really fully understands”. Convergence is not simply a technological term. Jenkins covers the notion of divergence as part of the same phenomenon, and while his focus is on popular culture, he understands that the lines between this and politics have already blurred (Obama’s election campaign is a prime example).

As Pool predicted before Jenkins, convergence does not imply stability, rather as media cultures compete and diversify, it is predicated on tension with change. Jenkins’ aim is to understand some of the ways in which convergence is impacting on popular culture in America, “in particular the ways in which it is impacting on the relationship between media audiences, producers and content.” He describes us as living within a ‘convergence culture’ which will lie somewhere between the world ‘without gatekeepers’ and the world with ‘too tightly controlled gatekeepers’. A world where audiences empowered with new technologies are part of the landscape and producers will be rewarded for embracing participatory culture.

I found Douglas Bowman’s ‘abrupt exit’ (The Sunday Age, Business syndicated from the New York Times) from Google very well-handled by the designer who explained on his blog that when user data wholly dictates the engineering of a site, it leaves little room for designer innovation (is this an example of ‘analysis paralysis’?). The question is how textured the feedback is and whether reactive data when taken to an extreme, is the most useful in building web design. Certainly, Bowman is not suggesting that designers should ignore user feedback which he states informs valuable insights.

The website I’ve been following Arts Hub has become slightly more streamlined but has not improved aesthetically. News is divided into latest reviews, views and profiles with the first and last being free content. It still carries advertisements including the easy stray click to Deakin University on the right hand side. It is a straightforward click on reviews to ‘free content’, but ‘premium content’ – e.g. latest Australian news takes the user to the beginning of the article with only one line displayed before it asks you to sign in or join now. I guess it’s the balancing act of piquing interest as discussed last week. Partial feed is not saleable, however, just look at the presentation of Crikey's new aggregated content.

Arts Hub has a flash through of top stories that seems to be regularly updated but features many media releases. It is optimising business opportunities and resolving copyright issues (although Fairfax has attempted to claim copyright over headlines and bylines) by making the user click through directly to other publications to see full stories from national or international publications (the view remains clunky and aesthetically unappealing with the summary, link and comment box). It features an arts directory with many entries ‘that have not yet provided a profile’. CEO Lisa Watts was announced in early April. Under events, classifieds and arts directory users are invited to browse or lodge an advertisement. It is offering a free 60 day trial for companies. It is encouraging members to keep in touch with Facebook page (for latest giveaways) or Twitter in its e-bulletin. Central to driving its subscriptions are employment and volunteering opportunities, residencies and auditions etc. However, it does not sort employment opportunities from voluntary and other opportunities for members except to offer a volunteer search for the user actively seeking voluntary positions or a breakdown of industry sectors. It offers a browse job function without specific organisational details to all users. Arts Hub charges for job and volunteer listings.

Having looked at mediabistro.com, although overwhelmed, I find the content much more tantalising and it’s skew more creative than Arts Hub, while it targets a broader, more textured demographic and showcases more interesting offers.

Some must sees

2009-04-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

The Age, Insight, Saturday 25 April made interesting reading for a world that is shedding newspapers at an accelerated rate. The convergence of global financial crisis and advanced digital technology has meant that well-known titles such as The Scotsman institutionalised during the Edinburgh Festival is ‘shuddering as advertising collapses’ in Britain and in the US the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are ‘in administration.’ The article “Who will blow the whistle” by Mary Riddell of The Telegraph focuses on Russell Crowe’s performance as a charismatic ‘downtrodden journalist’ in State of Play. Riddell describes it as a ‘lament for truth, honesty and courage’ and a ‘death notice’, although she acknowledges there are ‘sceptics’ who see these qualities as redundant in modern journalism. It talks of papers’ leading role in democracy; at a time where ‘amazonfail’ speaks volumes about the power of numbers to check power bases.

In another excerpt from The Telegraph Insight looks at ‘death on the net’ and three new websites looking at the implications of death and ‘bequeathing your digital footprint’. The principal one under discussion is legacy locker which works by holding and supplying information including usernames and passwords to be made available your ‘family’ after you have passed on. It raises the question how well do you trust the supplier to be repository of accounts, perhaps, but passwords and PIN etc.?! keepyousafe is a safety deposit box online designed also for travellers which raises similar concerns, and deathswitch acts like a ‘pre-scripted’ advisory service to a list of names – of automated messages including passwords when you stop entering your password at prompts and the computer ‘deduces you are dead or critically disabled’.

Meanwhile my attention has been drawn to a lighter subject, magician and ’unusualist’ South Australian Raymond Crowe, who thanks to a chance YouTube video of his low-tech magic in August 2007 (see Sydney Morning Herald report) was featured on David Letterman (YouTube video) early last year, and has succeeded in developing a one-man show premiered last week at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival for broad international touring.

Street Tweets

2009-04-20T00:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison’s intelligent “Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship”, I am now basically conversant with SNSs and would like to share a satirical response to Twitter, which came to my inbox via a friend in the offline social hierarchy here.

Bloblet's 2014

2009-04-17T00:07:00.000-07:00

Bloblet’s take on EPIC 2014 reflects much of my response to the piece. I too find the 'doomsday' tone of voice and music irritating but apt for the post-apocalyptic setting in which it posits the world of journalism.

And as Sloan would readily accede this is not a so much a prophecy about an all-encompassing online world information system as a tool to engage consideration of journalism in a state of flux. Google’s extended reach is clearly topical – renewed talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide a viable alternative search engine were reported in this week’s Age Business section syndicated from the Guardian.

In these critical economic times, with media monopolies contracting and carrying more organisational-biased comment, and diversifying if they’re savvy – online media needs to be seen as a serious route. Moby Capital, which owns Tolo TV Afghanistan’s most popular television station, is an example of ‘independent’ media (since last May broadcasting also to North America and Europe) increasingly present online (ironically thanks to aggregation) and further diversified into a growing chain of internet coffee shops.

The New York Times example may illustrate that speculations like EPIC 2014/2015 are necessarily simplistic, but the growing collaborative media model is not.

In the global environment, Google aggregated news is usurping control and power of print media ironically while engaging print media content and 'traditional' print advertisers to do so. Print media’s tardiness to embrace the potential of the internet and to realise income opportunities (combined with the unwieldy and often localised pathway of copyright law) has allowed the information superhighway to increasingly displace print media.

In perhaps the greatest irony Rupert Murdoch, one of the world's biggest media moguls, argues that content is becoming more 'quantitative than qualitative', meanwhile shrinking newsrooms of his dailies and Fox News in a formalised content sharing portal that will see copy 'shared' from New York to London to Sydney. Certainly newsprint is becoming leaner with the global push for free content.

Like Wikipedia, content may be largely user-generated with abundant resources but a paucity of focussed research/rigourous editorial processes leading to questionable accuracy and to the infiltration of bias. If content is paid for according to demand i.e. popularity (GoogleZON) and customised to demographics, preferences and interests it has potential to become incredibly insular and trivialised as well as unimaginably powerful and nuanced for those prepared to sift and scrutinise voluminous content from a range of sources. It may also be susceptible to 'technical glitches' and/or 'hoaxes' that skew rankings.

EPIC is a very credible paradigm, if a little too easily bought into.

Adventures in Cyberspace

2009-03-31T15:25:00.000-07:00

I have only recently analysed my disenchantment with the Arts Hub site, which Gemma discussed in our first class website briefing. I have never really taken to the facelift which was voted most popular in a design contest, particularly for a vehicle purporting to represent the ‘creative career community’. But it is the design and navigation of the site that I find cumbersome. From the home page it requires two clicks to reach a story which we may or may not be really interested in after the abbreviated introduction.

A large advertisement on the front page for a degree in arts and entertainment management takes you off-site to Deakin University’s site. This is a distraction.

When you enter ‘latest news’ there is a useful function ‘browse by sector’ which allows you target the kind of news you’re looking for but still you have to enter two clicks to reach the news, and consider an in-your-face comment function before actually reading the article.

And something which is inexcusable online is having outdated copy under ‘latest news’ and ‘profiles’.

News is a mixture of RSS feeds from different national and international newspapers, press releases and arts hub articles. It is impossible to decipher the source on first viewing the link, which might be sourced as e.g.(Australia). Members are emailed a weekly e-bulletin “The Front Page” which is much simpler to navigate, once you’ve scrolled through the ticket giveaways, you can click directly through to articles of your choice. Reviews of mixed quality precede latest headlines.

The drop down menus are an irritating feature though, here they are not cluttered, relatively clean and clear and not too difficult to navigate.

Events are classified by sector without much art in presentation and do not indicate the paucity of content available, mainly only advertised events seem to get listed.

At least the advertising is generally well connected to the intent of the site, although printing deals on the home page represent a more tenuous connection.

Profiles are a good way of recognising some of the performers who are doing good work but are scarcely visible in mainstream media. Again the selection and quality of these profiles varies and they are left online after their currency e.g. a forthcoming season has ended.

Of course, for the subscriber the jobs listings are an important feature, but while you can browse by category and location there seems to be no distinction in job coding between opportunities, volunteering and paid jobs.

When this service was conceived by David Eedle and Fiona Boyd nine years ago it was a break through in communication for the arts and creative services community. Although its content, particularly free content, and collaborative opportunities have grown and developed and its services have increased in reach, the accessibility of valuable information for arts workers seems devalued by a sprawling focus.

This leads me to a question: why is Arts Hub currently targeting lapsed subscribers with special deals?

Another website I’ve been looking at is www.cvent.com/. With the proliferation of event management companies in Australia, it takes a focussed approach to cut through the clutter.

This US based company emailed me a lunch invitation to a demonstration of Cvent event management prowess and a colleague a meeting request to a webinar to discuss web survey best practice. The slick website (which unfortunately does include some drop down menus, but uses a variety of techniques to sort and semi-customise information) relates to a suite of integrated web products from a ten year old company, including event management software and supplier network, as well as web survey software and strategic meetings management and email marketing.

Their recently launched freely available database of US and more locally based meeting suppliers is surprisingly impressive. I wonder what the cost is to the ‘supplier’ They also make good use of YouTube and have made some provision for collaborative content inviting comments in response to self-promotional blogs and a Twitter following. They claim to have helped diverse customers manage over 150,000+ marketing campaigns, events and web surveys. Of course, this statistic glosses over the nature of the ‘help’. Perhaps they should be the subject of a web survey.

It is interesting that both these websites have evolved over a similar timeframe (one fundamentally product based and the other services based) originating in different countries. Both have expanded on a global scale – Arts Hub has expanded into the US and the UK and Cvent is now multinational in its reach. They have utilised different approaches to expanding technology towards the creation of free content and a dynamic user interface.

A Flattening World

2009-03-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

“The Ten Forces that Flattened the World” in The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman has given me a context for the Web 2.0 platform and a growing understanding of the history of the internet and worldwide web. I found the analogy to panning for gold particularly salient pre dot.com bubble bust.

This historical perspective explains how this collaborative, inter-connective approach to the creation of software applications and content came into being. The book, written in November 2005, anticipates the kind of developments we are currently experiencing, for example, an environment where open-source software namely Mozilla Firefox has become the most popular browser, overtaking Internet Explorer, some three months ago (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).

The discussion of Wikipedia just touches on some of the contemporary issues. Obviously its ‘open architecture’ can be misused, but it has facilitated a library of researched information previously unimaginable in scale. Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner updated last year has helped to uncover controversial edits, usually by insiders in relation to their own company. The idea of IBM ‘safeguarding’ information on itself could lead to conflict-of-interest information, as seems to have been the case with organisations spanning the CIA, the Vatican and Diebold, an American supplier of voting machines and the Australian government in 2007, all accused of editing Wikipedia entries to improve their public image.

Scoping a website

2009-03-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

I would argue that Jonathan Lane in "Information Architecture - Planning out a website" misses some of the main points about creating a useful website. The first decision you need to make is to decide on the purpose and context of the site. It’s fundamentally a publishing project in a dynamic environment enabling added functionality.

Design and functionality are necessarily interrelated, (they shape the look and feel of the site) and are driven by the motivations for the site and what you want it to do. You cannot determine the functionality of the site without understanding the reason for the site. Back to the purpose and context of the site, including its potential audience.

Clarifying the purpose of a client can be a challenge. You need to define the scope of the project and to work with this expression of purpose and manage it in both a financial and technical way. You also need to manage a client’s expectations.

In his diagram, Jonathan Lane is confusing the mind map of the purpose with how to structure the site. For example, there is an underlying assumption that there is only one entry point to the site. “The Dung Beatles” would want fast easy entry into dates, store or discography. Just as abc.net.au/news takes us immediately to breaking news, or the Encyclopaedia Britannica has multiple entry points, we need to be able to enter /store /tours /forum /music. The “Dung Beatles” would probably also require a good interface with social networking such as Myspace and Facebook. Structure is integrally related to clarity of purpose and a good understanding of context is crucial.

Jonathan Lane has designed static pages and the high level business needs, could best be represented with bits of content in different places, some of that dynamic e.g database powered. Is international touring in their sights, do other languages need to be considered? General accessibility including disabled access needs to be considered.

If you begin with a scope, design and content emerge from that.

For example I worked on a site for an Australian media commentator and as part of the briefing we analysed 11 comparable (some potentially ‘competitor’) sites in terms of content and design. The purpose was to review baseline sites and understand the purpose and content and points of difference of the site being built.

I believe Jonathan Lane’s article is simplistic in its approach.

Made It

2009-03-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

Given my tardy entrance into cyberspace, I think my crafty friends will understand why the first site I reference is Made It – an Australian handmade site, not quite as sexy as Etsy. A bit more cool is Geeorgie Love. One of my favourites sites michigirl is embarking on a technofashion venture on michigirl.tumblr.com.

Check out the knockout world of wearable art at worldofwearableart.com.

Some of the world's leading photographers are posting at black star rising. Probably more powerful in terms of popularity though not imagery is Delta Goodrem's forum.

Closer to my dramatic sensibility is Alison Croggon's wonderful blog Theatre Notes or for dynamic entertainment look up thevine.com.au

Welcome

2009-03-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my first blogging venture.