Tag: Audioboo

Yes, I know.  It’s a bit slipshod to be writing a “2013 Projects” post when a 1/12th of the year has gone already.  But hey, you know, there’s been stuff on.  The good news is that I’ve started doing some of the things already, so I haven’t lost all that time.

NB: If there’s a balance to be struck, it’s probably to lean more towards doing things rather than writing about them.

Firstly, let’s consider the bigger theme.

Last year’s projects were all about MAKING, in a mostly explicit ‘tinkering with atoms which surf in and around the pixels’.

And whilst I’m not going to stop making things, it feels these annual studio projects should have a different slant every year.

Plus, I get the sense you’ll all be bombarded with stuff about making projects about physical stuff  from folk this year, so I shall refrain from adding too much to the cacophony.

Instead, I’d like to concentrate on MEDIA.

Which, given my background at PHD that might seem, well, predictable.

But I now feel I’ve spent long enough away from a media agency to objectively examine media in its very broadest sense.  As I talked about in the Hollow Factory talk in Paris at the end of last year, we need new metaphors for media.

The metaphors I’m most drawn to are these; they’re the ones that over the last few years have stuck with me the most, and hang together as a threesome too:

“Media is the Connective Tissue of Society” – Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 2010

“Media is a vehicle for knowledge” – Cesar Hidalgo, MIT Media Lab, 2011 (?)

(I think I got this via a talk Graeme circulated and may have been at… I can’t find it referenced anywhere else, though)

“Now, nothing is all-digital any more than it’s all-physical.  Media is hybrid, just like buildings, devices, spaces, events etc.  ” Dan Hill, 2012

Media at its broadest is everything that connects us with others, that carries knowledge back and forth, and has transcended that initial, reactionary digital / physical division…

…yes, it’s a work in progress, but it’ll do for a fast, functional definition of what media might be in 2013.

Which is important, because the Labour Theory of Brand Value philosophy (which I’m developing further this year) demands that you demonstrate every single last piece of work that you and your company puts in to a product or service…

You’ve got to consider every piece of media possible as part of the perception of your company, not just the top ten statements that come out in research, or where you decide to spend the vast majority of your media budget.  Which means going far beyond the old comms planning thing of “oh, we could use packaging too”…

If anything, a brand nowadays is like a BitTorrent file of a film; it’s a complex, granular entity which is pulled together from a million different locations, without any one of which, no matter how small, the film is incomplete and won’t work properly.

The media grains of the BitTorrent brand of course include every single last tweet, Facebook comment, check-in and so on.  And remember, it’s not just the stuff you can see, it’s the stuff you can’t, because it’s not public (email, for instance, and anything else which people started calling ‘dark social‘), or because it’s just not happening somewhere that it’s captured digitally (hello, word of mouth)…

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…I’m just going to stop that there, and get back to the actual projects… more on all the Labour Theory of Brand Value and BitTorrent Brands and the like another day…

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So, what are the three media projects?

Well, there’s an audio one, a video one, and a platform one.

A few things over the last month or two have made me think that there’s a sea-change in the way people make and share stuff, which will change the makeup of the brand BitTorrent.

Previously, to be good at sharing things on the Internet, it was about writing and images.  Anyone can type into a blank box, and as more and more photo apps emerged, everyone began to see that they could take and share good pictures (not great, just good enough).

But as device storage gets bigger, broadband, wi-fi and mobile signal gets faster, and the costs gets lower, the capacity is there for more rich-forms of media to be shared with increasing regularity.

So I’ve been wondering if there’s going to be a new phase in the creation of audio & video by  people who’ve been taught that media doesn’t have to be great, it just has to be up.  You can worry about making it great later.

An example of this is, of course Instagram in relation to Flickr.  The quote I always come back to is the one I read in this post by Dan Catt last year, which is originally from Aaron:

“We did a lot of stuff wrong during my time at Flickr but if I had to highlight one thing we fucked up it was somehow creating an environment where people started to believe that their photos were not good enough for Flickr. I mean, really, how did we ever let that happen?”

Flickr used to feel like a place for ‘proper’ photos.  So if you didn’t take proper photos, why would you use Flickr?

Instagram came along, and that wasn’t for ‘proper’ photos.  In part, it felt like cheating, but a kind of cheating that was ok because everyone was doing it.  And in part, it was pretty hard not to share photos with Instagram once it was on your phone, because of the wonderful experience facilitated by what I’d argue was the first amazing social sharing app for mobile.  It just worked.

Now, as more and more things likes Vine emerge, Flickr then is YouTube now (and most certainly Vimeo, the home of artfully prestige videos).

The vast majority of people don’t shoot videos and upload them to YouTube, despite carrying the tools to do so everywhere they go, because there’s nowhere to hide behind in unedited, raw footage.  There’s no way to cheat.

Yet as start-ups and app developers turn their attention to different forms of sharable media (because that’s what brings users, and users are what brings attention, suitors and dollars), there will be increasingly more ingenious ways to cheat audio & video forms.

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…sorry, yes, I  know I’m off at another tangent… what the FUCK are these three projects then..?

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To the point; an audio project, a video project, and a platform project.

1.  The Sound of Smithery

Christian Payne, AKA Documentally, introduced me to Audioboo at the end of last year.  It’s been around for EVER of course(since 2009, that is).  In short, it gives you a platform on which to record and upload audio through your smartphone (or whatever device, of course, but I’m focussed on using the phone), and then curate in a variety of different ways.

I want to try it for a fast form of blogging; either initial ideas that seem too informal to write properly about (yet), but that I want to capture, or in-the-moment pieces (at conferences and the like) where a fast turnaround piece might be useful.

Here’s the first week’s worth of stuff.  I am slowly getting into it, but enjoying the challenges.  My audioboo profile is here, and there’s an iTunes link is here.

WBB (Why Bloody Bother?) Sound recording has always fascinated me, from being in Gamages Model Train Club and the like, and I’m curious to find out if making media in this way is something that’s pretty niche (making, listening, sharing), or if it has broader possibilities for people and companies.

WDG (Woolly, Doable Goal) Do a weekly “podcast” thing here on the blog, as a post, and see what people think, if people listen, and what they do as a result.

2. View From The Desk

Video is becoming increasingly important in all sorts of ways for companies, but rather than learn about it top down, I thought it’d be better to start bottom up.

My son is fascinated by Youtube, and more specifically unboxings.  He’s only three, but he’s clearly developing that geek gene already.  But he’d rather watch people talking about stuff, how it works, and how good or bad it is.  Especially when it’s other kids:

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about doing videos for a while; I was in Oslo in 2011 and a nice guy called Chris Brogan kept telling me that I should, I think largely because I have a Scottish accent. I couldn’t work out a way that I wanted to do it though.  Until I saw this:

It’s an instructables project, where you can build your own webcam on a lampstand.  I used it to shoot this test video (but that’s all so far).

So the plan is to now use it to shoot and share more videos, and tell stories on the desk, as if we were doing it over coffee. My gut feeling is that it will be a bit more work to prep than the audio, but maybe less than writing long blog posts (like, you know, this one?)

WBB (Why Bloody Bother?) Because if I shoot more videos, and get into it, I’ll start to build up a better understanding of how small , inexpensive videos might be used in the future with the same regularity as written content and images might be now.

WDG (Woolly, Doable Goal) One video a week.  Starting this week.  With some time off for holidays and the like, let’s call it forty videos this year.

3. Capturing the BitTorrent for Artefact Cards

Lastly, a really ill-defined project.  The Artefact Cards project in particular is growing into a really interesting platform and community, but the two things I’ve learned about them come down to this:

i) People really only understand them when they use them for the first time

ii) People get better at using them when they see other people using them

And seeing both people using them, and talking about using them, is really helping me understand more about the cards themselves, but more broadly about how people work best in the modern ‘workshop’ (a wee nod to Sennett there).

In short, I started out looking at Artefact Cards through the lens of the work I do.

But now, quite by accident, I’ve found I’m looking at the big themes in modern working practices through the lens of the Artefact Cards…

So I’d like to have a proper infrastructure in place to capture all of the things that happen around the cards (as much as possible), and help people put in and take out from the communal knowledge base.  It might be wikis, apps, YouTube channels, whatever… I don’t yet know yet.  It’s the engines that help power all the granular media around though.

WBB (Why Bloody Bother?) Because introducing people to a new way of working, then leaving them on their own to figure it out seems, well, a bit on a 20th Century way to do things.

WDG (Woolly, Doable Goal)  I have absolutely no idea… let’s call it “three ways in which people can put in and take out from the communal pot”.  That’s super-woolly, innit?

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So there we go, folks.  Here’s to 2013 (or at least, what’s left of it… if you’ve finished reading this, it’s probably March already…)