Electrofringe is part of Newcastle's annual This Is Not Art festival, held over the 5 day September/October long weekend. Electrofringe is about experimental electronic media and culture, and looks for emerging forms, innovative work and new creative uses of technology.

The festival's organisers are currently looking for electro-online and electro-projection works. This includes online network collaborations, sound, music, video, film and digital video installations. Full application details can be viewed on the festival's proposals page.

Applications are due 31 May, 2008.

Traditional media sources

Reading the Straits Times is like eating salad (the #2 lunch meal of choice for white-collared ang mohs) - it's overpriced, it makes my bowels churn, but I don't have a choice after binging on good food after the weekend.  ST has no real competition except Channel NewsAsia's website (which is free), but similarly, reading that is like licking a toilet seat, albeit a clean, sterilized one.

Tomorrow.sg

Tomorrow.sg is an aggregator of Singaporean blog posts.  Singaporeans nominate blog posts or articles to be featured on the website, and a panel of bloggers choose what to be featured on Tomorrow.sg.  Unfortunately, I've come to find them rather biased towards featuring the same old bloggers again and again, which is rather annoying when it's meant to provide broad coverage of the Singaporean blogosphere.   Even Fabian Lua doesn't think much of them as an aggregator of interesting stories about Singapore.  It's a microcosm of Singapore's electoral system, with the Tomorrow.sg editors working like a GRC.  In the interest of full disclosure, Tomorrow.sg did not "tomorrow" our DiaS'pura website last year despite Fabian's and my recommendation, which explains why I think it's become crap.

Google Reader ("GReader")

A lot of people I know who read blogs still don't use RSS feeds, which have simplified blog reading so much.  Now I no longer have to check for updates - the updates are automatically fed to your GReader as and when they arrive.  After reading the updated posts, they're discarded from the system.  News sites, personal blogs, professional blogs - all of them can be read in the minimalist white-background format of GReader, thus removing all the irritating quirks of each blog (like how Dawn Yang's blog had some emo-rock music embedded in the background for a long time).  Content, stripped to its bare essentials, delivered to you everyday.  I scroll through Gizmodo and Gawker to get daily fixes of gadget and media/starfucking news respectively, the headlines on Channel NewsAsia are fed to me daily, so I always have some sense of what's on the headlines in Singapore, I read about the latest news in film on /Film, I get my occasional inspirational quote from Sanctuary For The Senses, etc.

The word "Animateur" is certainly a new one on me.  I barely got through two years of high school Spanish and, quite frankly, don't remember my first two years of college.  So, needless to say, my French is completely non existent outside of being able to order a filet mignon.  The word is one that my school advisor put me on to and I think it deserves a lot of attention from us social media types.  

Animateur: to animate, to bring to life, to enliven, to spark, to create, to produce

This is the definition according to an article on the orchestra musician's website Polyphonic.org.  The article, entitled An Animateur's Journey: A report from the field, describes the work that the Philadelphia Orchestra does to bridge the gap between the orchestra and its audience. Each experiment in bridging that gap described in the article is nothing more than social media marketing.

I have witnessed a great deal of discussion as of late on Twitter about "community managers" and what their roles should or shouldn't be within organizations. Social Media Marketing rockstar Jeremiah Owyang even lays out what he feels to be The Four Tenets of the Community Manager. As I observe the twitter discussions and read Mr. Owyang's blog post, I am tempted to say that social media marketing types need to abandon the term "community manager" in favor of the term "Animateur".

I say this for two reasons. First, the word "Animateur" seems to better capture the essence of what everyone seems to want in a "community manager." Secondly, "Animateur" carries with it more passion and zest than the term "community manager". Ultimately, I believe it will be easier to inspire a CEO, Board of Directors, Executive Director, VP of Marketing, etc., to fully buy into the benefits of social media marketing with a position that doesn't sound as sterile as "community manager".

If you are looking for an example of an "Animateur", look to Stacey Monk of Epic Change. From the standpoint of social networking and social media marketing, Stacey is doing far more "animating" and "bringing to life" than "managing". As a result of her role as "Animateur", her organization has hit the radar of a huge number of people in a short amount of time.

For more info on Stacey and Epic Change, click here to listen to episode 2 of the Marketing 4 Change podcast.

I think it is time to switch not only programs, but also the concept of office Apps. With on-line apps maturing into full fledged office suites they offer some very appealing incentives. Most are free or have some ad placement, they can be accessed from any computer, you can save files in any major traditional office suite format and if you bundled them with flikr, picasa, google maps, skype and youtube you can have full fledged social media publishing system. They require little if any hard drive space, don't require a uber-powerful computer to run on and because they are web based, don't care what operating system you are running. Sites like ZOHO and Google Apps are good places to start if you want to see what some of these online apps can offer. If your not quite ready to put you faith in the cloud computer, try Open Office.org the best free office suite available, it will do everything you need and then some.

172.18.05.08

Though new, the blog already has some other excellent posts on the intersections of information and conflict. 

Get a glofish for your desk.

Like much of his more recent bioart, Kac's earlier forays into telepresence art embrace emerging anxieties around the power of current technology to restructure life. As with Alba, the once mystifying quickly becomes the mundane. Here Kac is concerned with how communication technologies are rearranging dominant conceptions of time and space, where distance is temporally instead of spatially determined in a superconnected universe.

The image has taken a new form, distinct from other more inflexible representational means of architecture, painting, photography and film. We now see a representation as it exists in time rather than space per se. It's a contentious notion, because surely space is not going anywhere, but Kac is a provocateur worth engaging with.

I think the difference here is a matter of "flow." Whereas the first and second kind of image logic required a sense of finalized production, the third type of image logic is one constantly in flux in that we are seeing an evolving flow of information and not necessarily the discrete instances within that flow. We are seeing something perpetually in process, forever in the midst of becoming itself.

So how does this concept of "flow" impact documentary?

Documentary becomes a process instead of a product. It becomes something perpetually occurring instead of something looking to be resolved. We still collect information and documents from reality in an effort to gain understanding and communicate, but we're talking more about how the world unfolds "right now" and less about how it used to seem "back then" when that document (be it photographic, filmic, textual, etc.) was generated.

It's the difference between having done and doing, being and becoming. And maybe that's a fine line.

Amsterdam - 16/05/08

Visie op social platforms en data portibility

"Mijn leven is opensource en aan mijn intieme netwerk (social  vraag ik om feedback om de structuur in mijn leven te optimaliseren. Door mijn leven dat ik offline leef online te documemteren, te delen en te herbeleven wordt iedere ervaring, goed of slecht, kennis die ik deel met anderen. Internet wordt weer een middel waarmee het echte doel wordt gerealiseerd. Namelijk, living life experiencing things, sharing, learning evolving with focus.

INTERMIC

Kennisplatform waarin specialisten tesamen als transformer zich als een entiteit naar de markt presenteren. Door de hetrogene samensteling van het team en de complementairheid aan kennis, zijn wij in staat om vraagstukken op macroniveau in te vullen. Dit platform verbindt kennis mensen commerce visie en biedt draagvlak.

De mensen die onderdeel zijn van interimic zijn actief online, publiceren, lezen, delen; hebben visie binnen hun kennis gebied. Mensen met passie en met ambitiue om autoriteit op het eigen kennisgebeid te zijn.

MUSICVIDEOPORTAL

De opzet van de site moet minimalistisch zijn.  De focus moet liggen op de videdeoips die worden aangeboden.

So what lessons can we draw from this?

The Art Directors Club in New York is on a mission to find the brightest young creative professionals around the world. But only those under 30 and working in advertising, animation, architecture, environmental design, fashion, film/video, graphic design, illustration, interactive media, object design, packaging, photography, publishing, typography, or web design.

Fifty winners of ADC Young Guns 6 will have their work showcased in a gallery exhibition in New York later this year, and will be published in a limited edition ADC book. The deadlines for submissions in June 2, 2008 and costs $125US to enter.

Turn it up is a joint project between SBS's Alchemy and Noise. Australian artists under 28 are invited to submit images, audio, words or multimedia about living in a multicultural community.

The winning entry in each category will receive a cash prize of $2,000, while the overall winner will be awarded with a $4,000 cash prize and an internship with SBS.

Entries close July 11, 2008 and can be submited through Noise's online portal.

Now some would dismiss this, as a marketing ploy by the editors at WorldNetDaily, to promote their upcoming cruise. But there is some very interesting stuff on this recording, I very highly recommend that people give it a listen and hear what is happening on the ground, in the Conservative movement.

Enjoy...

[audio http://ds1.downloadtech.net/cn1086/audio/4516724351661-001.mp3]

I hope that you will enjoy this video and possibly tell others about it.

The biennial Next Wave festival is back, taking over Melbourne with "genre-busting new work by the next wave of Australian artists". Running from the 15-31 May 2008, the festival will present over 60 projects revolving around the theme of 'Closer Together'.

Artistic Director Jeff Khan shared that, "the works presented in the 2008 Next Wave Festival are an open invitation to connect – with artists and punters alike – in multiple ways, from the humorous to the confronting, the provocative, inspirational and the downright messy."

The boundaries between media types have been pushed and blurred and new performance spaces established, from a Brunswick laundromat in Agents of Proximity, to outer space in Yelling at Stars.

View events by day or take a look at the whole program, which you can filter by genre.

Taken from Alexa.com, this graph (click on image for larger version) clearly shows that over the past six months, Lankaenews is the most popular amongst other well recognised Sri Lankan web media. None of these websites is a broadsheet or has a print media presence in Sri Lanka. Lankaenews gets significant higher pageviews than Infolanka, which in second place is in turn well above the rest. Lanka Dissent in third place seems to be tied with Tamilcanadian. In fact, Lankaenews gets even more pageviews that the Daily Mirror website, which I found very surprising (click image below to enlarge).

This is no mean feat, since the Daily Mirror website has a commanding lead over all other well read English news dailies in Sri Lanka (click image below to enlarge).

What would be interesting to gauge, impossible using Alexa, is the breakdown between domestic and international traffic on both Lankaenews and the Daily Mirror. I have a hunch that it may be in the case of both around a 60 / 40 split, with 60 percent coming from abroad and 40 percent local. 

In any case, what this clearly demonstrates is that in terms of readership, purely web based media can and do compete well with the traditional print media presence on the web. With its influence, reach and readership growing, small wonder that a repressive regime is getting worried about that which is published online.

With the Daily Mirror introducing citizen journalism aspects to its reporting and a revamped website along the lines of a blog, it's quite clear that traditional media is learning from new media upstarts on the web. 

Where do you think this will all lead in Sri Lanka?

On the same day The Island newspaper cited net terrorism (sic) as the cause for an outrageous gaffe in its Children Section came news that the Lanka Dissent website had been hacked into. I don't for a moment believe that The Island was a victim of Internet "terrorism" but as an excuse it's credence was strengthened at a time when questions are being increasingly posed as to whether the government of Sri Lanka is actively targeting independent media on the web. 

The Lanka Dissent website makes a rather serious claim in this regard:

The Defence Ministry recently set up an electronic media observation unit at a building adjacent to Standard Chartered Bank in front of the President's House in Colombo to monitor websites reporting on the situation in Sri Lanka.

LD learns through reliable sources that this particular unit staffed with electronic and IT experts, is experimenting on how to disrupt websites.

It gives no further sources or proof to back up this claim, which if true is very disturbing. Further, the LD letter isn't very well penned, shows no real understanding of the term "hacking" (it's not always a pejorative term) and the four key points it makes can be seriously contested.

Point #1 on the Outreachsl.com website is conjecture and just conspiracy theories. Tissa languishes in jail, but his website is still up on the web, though its (for obvious reasons) not been updated from early March. I don't know enough about Point #2, the "hacking" of the Daily Mirror poll, to comment. However, online polls unless carefully setup are often the targets of those who wish to skew the poll in their favour by repeated voting. So this may not have been "hacking" at all. Point #3 is so convoluted that it barely makes any sense. Point #4 on the alleged travails of The Island to wrest control of its emails from "hackers" is to me very suspect when juxtaposed against the incident that brought this supposed case of "net terrorism" to light. 

Anyway, LD's emails have been broken into and it sees this as signs of growing web media repression. 

We wish to stress that this cannot be a ‘lone hacker’ enjoying his/her exploits. We have reason to believe this is an attempt in blocking local news going out into the local and the international community. This is an attempt at suppressing the remaining independent part of the Sri Lankan media and thus a serious infringement on the right for information and expression. Perhaps the beginning of official hacking in suppressing total dissemination of information.

There's an element of hyperbole there, but as the Free Media Movement notes in a statement released today, LD's concerns must be taken seriously in the larger context of media censorship and attacks against the press in Sri Lanka. It warns that if true, web censorship places us in the same league as China and Russia, which ain't a place we want to be at or descend to. 

The FMM urges the authorities to immediately clarify the existence and nature of the electronic media-monitoring unit by the Ministry of Defence as noted by Lanka Dissent.

Thwarting independent media especially on the web and Internet is brings us in line with the reprehensible censorship and thinly veiled government sponsored hacking of countries such as China and Russia, now friends of Sri Lanka. Further, it is simply not possibly to shut off access to independent journalism unless like Myanmar after the Saffron Revolution, Information and Communications Technology in the entire country is shut down.

Though Tamilnet is still blocked and high powered members of the Government have called for outright bans on independent media, there's a very active SL blogosphere and other independent media websites don't seem to have been touched. Yet. Anyway, wouldn't it just be more effective for a Government that certainly has no qualms in doing so to just physically roughen up or kill journalists it doesn't like with a view to silencing dissent? Plausible deniability doesn't work with IP blocks. 

As the FMM points out, it's really quite difficult to shut down information flows and ICTs today. It's easy on one level - a Government can just pull the plug - but it's impossible to hide that you've done it. Every citizen is a potential reporter today. You'll have to go down the path of Myanmar and shut every cellphone, ISP and shoot every carrier pigeon to completely halt information flows. Hell, even then information will get out. 

I may be very wrong, but I don't think this regime is foolish enough to block websites on a large scale. Not because it doesn't want to do it, but because it's got more effective means at its disposal against those who promote inconvenient truths.

For starters, just ask Iqbal Athas or J.S. Tissainayagam.

In the Red corner: Final year advertising student Jake (or was it John? perhaps Jack - lets call him J), arguing that advertising owned the social media space.  

In the Blue corner: Yours truely - Miss argue-all-you-like-but-I'm-right PR honours student, asserting that PR owned the social media space.

A large element of PR is segmenting the 'mass' into groups with a common stake or interest then targeting these individual groups with a tailored message. To my understanding social media is about allowing people to segment themselves out of the mass into groups. Melbournians are no longer classed as 'Herald Sun' readers or 'Age' readers' they can now choose to personalise their news getting updates and stories from across the world on subjects that interest them. Kath wants to know exactly what Britney did next. Ken, however, doesn't give a flying...he is much more interested in the commentary for next weeks Collingwood/Geelong Clash. Kath gets an update from Hello! Ken gets an RSS feed from Fox sports. 

Facebook is a perfect example of this. My friend recently got engaged - she now has adds pop up on her page for 'win a naughty hens night' and 'bridal boutiques'. I argued this was PR, it is targeting an appropriate message to a very niche audience. J disagrees, 'Advertising - blatant bloody Advertising' afterall they did pay to appear on Facebook.  

The more I think about this the more I wonder...

• Are the two disciplines converging?
• Will there be a new hybrid communications disciplines (Pradvertising)?
• Is there a difference between PR and Advertising in social media?
• Is the Internet simply a new canvas to paint ideas on?
• Are bloggers the new Journalists awaiting our pitch?

I understand that in any communications plan social media is only one element of a wider strategy. However, I think it has become somewhat of a buzz word. Where in the not to distant past organisations were cautious about social media and its participatory nature - now they can't get enough of it. Even if they don't exactly know what it is or the implications of using it - everyone else is doing it and god forbid we fall behind the spam filled web 2.0 8ball. Its like the new media 'I'll have what she's having' diet - serve me up an ad on MySpace with some of that pop-up pie on the side...

Arrrgh I'm confused and have to stop procrastinating and write my essay but I will think about it more and finish this post...To be continued

News Release 

May 17, 1999

CRTC WON’T REGULATE THE INTERNET

OTTAWA-HULL — The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced today that it will not regulate new media services on the Internet*.

After conducting an in-depth review under the Broadcasting Act and the Telecommunications Act beginning last July, the CRTC has concluded that the new media on the Internet are achieving the goals of the Broadcasting Act and are vibrant, highly competitive and successful without regulation. The CRTC is concerned that any attempt to regulate Canadian new media might put the industry at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace*.

"By not regulating, we hope to support the growth of new media services in Canada," says Françoise Bertrand, CRTC Chairperson. "The CRTC is one of the first regulators in the world to clarify its position on the Internet."

(*BRASSmedia's highlights)

 

What's happened since then? In a news release from May 15, 2008 . . .

News release

May 15, 2008

CRTC launches consultation on broadcasting
in new media for future hearing

OTTAWA-GATINEAU — The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today launched a consultation on broadcasting in the new media environment for a public hearing to be held in early 2009.......

“The Commission has a responsibility to ensure that the broadcasting system is in a position to achieve the objectives of the Broadcasting Act, today as well as in the future,” said Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C., Chairman of the CRTC. “New digital technologies and platforms are creating opportunities for the broadcast of professionally-produced Canadian content that simply didn't exist a few years ago. Our intention is not to regulate new media, but rather to gain a better understanding of this environment and, if necessary, to propose measures that would support the continued achievement of the Broadcasting Act's objectives.*”

There is a mention of another document further into the news release ... Perspectives on Canadian Broadcasting in New Media- a compilation of research and stakeholder views -May 2008. It's a big one you can read it if you want or if you care about what may happen to Canadian new media in the years to come. The big question is why is the CRTC so interested in new media now, compared to an apparent lack of interest back in 1999? Maybe this data from the report:

• While tuning levels in radio's core 35 to 54 demographic have remained fairly steady, overall per capita weekly radio listening levels decreased by 1/2 hour from 2005 to 2006 (from 19.1 to 18.6 hours.) and experienced a continued decline in 2007 (to 18.3 hours). Since 1999, per capita weekly radio listening levels have decreased by more than two hours (from 20.5 to 18.3 hours).
•  In 2007, over 50% of Canadians with Internet access downloaded videos from the Internet (23% at least once a week) and over 56% of Internet users downloaded or listened to music online.
• All major mobile providers offer broadcasting content to their subscribers.

This is one stat I like.

Question: "Please tell me how frequently you use the Internet for the following activities...Download or listen to podcasts"
Source: CIP2, 2007.

 68. Downloading podcasts occurs among 9% of Quebec respondents, while 18% of respondents outside Quebec report podcast activity. In total, 16% of Canadians reported that they download podcasts according to the same survey.

 

Who's watching and how much?

72. Younger Canadians lead the way in use of new media platforms, potentially at the direct expense of traditional media consumption:

 In 2006, 91% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 accessed the Internet, compared to only 69% of Canadians aged 55 or older.17

 

Canadians under 18 now spend roughly the same amount of time online (watching videos, exchanging emails, participating in social networking sites, etc.) and watching TV (15 to17 hours).

There's lots more in this report but the general trend is this.....Canadians are consuming less traditional broadcasting (TV and radio) and turning to the internet for their entertainment, news and information. Surprise! Traditional broadcating is nervous and they should be.

The CRTC is asking for public input so get involved and give them your two cents worth. We need to make sure that the choices the web gives us continue and let the CRTC (and traditional broadcasting) know that we won't let them stop it or control it or twist into what we are turning our backs on.

Dean

Starting Out

There are a lot of good books out there on the new media, web 2.0, building web platforms, etc., but no book has challenged my thinking, and convinced me to turn in certain directions as did the "manifesto" Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals, when it comes to the issues of simplicity, flexibility, cost and speed. I consider it a must read in this area.

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that's not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn't).

Getting Real is staying small and being agile.

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching, tweaking, and constantly improving which makes it a perfect approach for web-based software.

Getting Real delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don't.

When a college ministry decides to have an online presence there are a few things to keep in mind. Some of these things are:

• student participation
• the fast changing culture of college/university life
• finicky tastes/styles
• revolving body of students and leaders
• budget
• access/control
• etc. (these are just a few)

So because of these issues and many others, ministries need to keep in mind several things before they decide to develop and build a website, or some other form of online presence. They need to be asking the question of whether or not the investment in the product (i.e. time, finances, people power, etc.) is worth the end product? Primarily because the end product of what students want will often change very quickly, and most likely from year to year. What's necessary, practical and cool to students in the Fall, may be out of date by Spring.

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? (Luke 14:28)

Now that verse wasn't written about online media, but I think there are some important principles to take away, mainly:

1. What do you want to build?
2. Have you sat down to think about what it will cost? (time, money, resources, etc.)
3. Why are you building it?
4. With what you have, can you effectively accomplish what you are wanting to set out to do?

Key Ingredients

Simplicity: What you set out to design should be simple. We live in a culture that says more is better, and so you find products with tons of bells and whistles that not only will no one ever use, but they don't even know how to use it. Students don't need an owners manual to access your online ministry and use it effectively. Keep things simple. Think of the i-Pod/i-Tunes, Facebook, Tivo, etc. Because of their simplicity they have won over the market in many ways. The best web sites are simple. When you go to that page you know how and where to navigate. Simplicity can be from an aesthetic design viewpoint, to keeping things simple with less tools, buttons, forms, coding, etc. One of my favorite church websites is Mars Hill in Michigan. Simple, clean, easy to navigate.

Flexibility: Your website or online tool must be flexible. I cannot stress this enough. You need to build something that has a strong ability to adapt and be flexible to changing trends in technology. What is cool with a website one year, can be totally out of date the next. Or, why spend tons of money on a site, that once it loses its effectiveness and everyone moves over to social networking, it no longer has the ability to adapt and meet the needs of those in the community. For example, our college ministry spent a lot of money on some websites early on in my time here, and I created things on the site that I though students would love. But when students migrated to MySpace and Facebook, our website wasn't flexible and adaptable enough to meet the demanding needs of the group. We didn't even have the capability to integrate these new tools on our site because we weren't thinking ahead. Also, when it comes to this issue, are you building a site or presence that allows others to use it effectively? Does your coding or template allow you to change the data, or does it require bringing in a designer everytime you want to tweak it....slowing everything down, limiting the access to most of the group, and driving up costs.

Cost: The best thing about the new media and web 2.0 is that you can find hundreds of online tools and platforms with little to no cost. So should you spend $3,000 on a website, when you can get the same functionality or better with an online free platform? A question then arises about good stewardship. I'm a big fan of good design and coding, so I think they are worth paying for to a degree. But at the end of the day a ministry needs to ask themselves questions regarding what they need, and is it wise to spend money on it. In my 7 years at Bel Air I have seen the evolution of cost. We started off paying a top of the line designer for a website that was out of date about a year later. We then moved to a free template and I paid a student to code it. We now find ourselves operating almost exclusively on Facebook. I'm not against paying for good tools and design....but there are alternatives. I paid for someone to code and design my blog, but I have the freedom to change it.

Speed: How fast can you change things on your site? Do you have to call up the programmer, or do you have immediate access? Can a student put in an announcement whenever they want, or do things have to go through you? When tasks are funneled through 1-2 people, speed is slowed, and information and participation among students drops off. Have you designed a site, where if you wanted to make some major overhauls, you can do that very quickly? Or are you tied to high costs, bulky tools, etc. I know that the needs of my college group this year will probably be different next year, so I need to have the speed to adapt to that.

There is a lot I can talk on, but I just want to begin there. Over the next few weeks I will post on the following:

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry

• Part 1--Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed.
• Part 2--The Purpose of Your Website
• Part 3--Using Facebook Effectively
• Part 4--How Twitter Can Catalyze Your Ministry
• Part 5--Using Social Network Platforms as Your Central Hub
• Part 6--Flickr, YouTube and Other Forms of Sharing and Streaming
• Part 7--Ministry Collaboration Using Wikis
• Part 8--Opening Up Your Ministry's API

Starting Out

There are a lot of good books out there on the new media, web 2.0, building web platforms, etc., but no book has challenged my thinking, and convinced me to turn in certain directions as did the "manifesto" Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals, when it comes to the issues of simplicity, flexibility, cost and speed. I consider it a must read in this area.

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that's not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn't).

Getting Real is staying small and being agile.

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching, tweaking, and constantly improving which makes it a perfect approach for web-based software.

Getting Real delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don't.

When a college ministry decides to have an online presence there are a few things to keep in mind. Some of these things are:

• student participation
• the fast changing culture of college/university life
• finicky tastes/styles
• revolving body of students and leaders
• budget
• access/control
• etc. (these are just a few)

So because of these issues and many others, ministries need to keep in mind several things before they decide to develop and build a website, or some other form of online presence. They need to be asking the question of whether or not the investment in the product (i.e. time, finances, people power, etc.) is worth the end product? Primarily because the end product of what students want will often change very quickly, and most likely from year to year. What's necessary, practical and cool to students in the Fall, may be out of date by Spring.

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? (Luke 14:28)

Now that verse wasn't written about online media, but I think there are some important principles to take away, mainly:

1. What do you want to build?
2. Have you sat down to think about what it will cost? (time, money, resources, etc.)
3. Why are you building it?
4. With what you have, can you effectively accomplish what you are wanting to set out to do?

Key Ingredients

Simplicity: What you set out to design should be simple. We live in a culture that says more is better, and so you find products with tons of bells and whistles that not only will no one ever use, but they don't even know how to use it. Students don't need an owners manual to access your online ministry and use it effectively. Keep things simple. Think of the i-Pod/i-Tunes, Facebook, Tivo, etc. Because of their simplicity they have won over the market in many ways. The best web sites are simple. When you go to that page you know how and where to navigate. Simplicity can be from an aesthetic design viewpoint, to keeping things simple with less tools, buttons, forms, coding, etc. One of my favorite church websites is Mars Hill in Michigan. Simple, clean, easy to navigate.

Flexibility: Your website or online tool must be flexible. I cannot stress this enough. You need to build something that has a strong ability to adapt and be flexible to changing trends in technology. What is cool with a website one year, can be totally out of date the next. Or, why spend tons of money on a site, that once it loses its effectiveness and everyone moves over to social networking, it no longer has the ability to adapt and meet the needs of those in the community. For example, our college ministry spent a lot of money on some websites early on in my time here, and I created things on the site that I though students would love. But when students migrated to MySpace and Facebook, our website wasn't flexible and adaptable enough to meet the demanding needs of the group. We didn't even have the capability to integrate these new tools on our site because we weren't thinking ahead. Also, when it comes to this issue, are you building a site or presence that allows others to use it effectively? Does your coding or template allow you to change the data, or does it require bringing in a designer everytime you want to tweak it....slowing everything down, limiting the access to most of the group, and driving up costs.

Cost: The best thing about the new media and web 2.0 is that you can find hundreds of online tools and platforms with little to no cost. So should you spend $3,000 on a website, when you can get the same functionality or better with an online free platform? A question then arises about good stewardship. I'm a big fan of good design and coding, so I think they are worth paying for to a degree. But at the end of the day a ministry needs to ask themselves questions regarding what they need, and is it wise to spend money on it. In my 7 years at Bel Air I have seen the evolution of cost. We started off paying a top of the line designer for a website that was out of date about a year later. We then moved to a free template and I paid a student to code it. We now find ourselves operating almost exclusively on Facebook. I'm not against paying for good tools and design....but there are alternatives. I paid for someone to code and design my blog, but I have the freedom to change it.

Speed: How fast can you change things on your site? Do you have to call up the programmer, or do you have immediate access? Can a student put in an announcement whenever they want, or do things have to go through you? When tasks are funneled through 1-2 people, speed is slowed, and information and participation among students drops off. Have you designed a site, where if you wanted to make some major overhauls, you can do that very quickly? Or are you tied to high costs, bulky tools, etc. I know that the needs of my college group this year will probably be different next year, so I need to have the speed to adapt to that.

There is a lot I can talk on, but I just want to begin there. Over the next few weeks I will post on the following:

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry

• Part 1--Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed.
• Part 2--The Purpose of Your Website
• Part 3--Using Facebook Effectively
• Part 4--How Twitter Can Catalyze Your Ministry
• Part 5--Using Social Network Platforms as Your Central Hub
• Part 6--Flickr, YouTube and Other Forms of Sharing and Streaming
• Part 7--Ministry Collaboration Using Wikis
• Part 8--Opening Up Your Ministry's API

So what is a discerning font fanatic to do? In the old days we had Adobe TypeManager. But now? Enter Linotype FontExplorer X from Linotype, and old company in the world of typography. It is a comprehensive organising tool for fonts, and as an added bonus it connects directly to the Linotype font store. They have an amazing amount of pro fonts that you can easily purchase and download to your Mac. The app and the account (optional) is free, and you can just use it to organise your fonts in a very iApp sort of way. But it can also offer an easy access point to a very comprehensive font library for professionals.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Thobias

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It's pertinent to discussion of community-augmented content, and a good reminder that any traditional journalist who isn't already nervous or getting up to speed on how journalism is evolving (or morphing, mutating — pick your own term) certainly should be.

This changing world brings to mind a scene from the film "Sneakers," in which bad guy Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) explains the new facts of life to Martin Bishop (Robert Redford). I can't swear that the quote is accurate, but here's how I've found it reconstructed in various web sources.

"There's a war out there, old friend. ... It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think.... It's all about the information, Marty!"

The thing is, nobody controls the information. Someone may be able to organize some of it to increase its usefulness and value, but from here it looks like it's way, way, way beyond control.

Hierarchy vs. Democracy.

Even the most cursory attempt at putting a box around "new media" immediately plunges the conversation into some of the most enduring discourses of art theory and social organization. Long-standing binaries vibrate against each other and start to unravel. However, the difficulty with the term "new media" goes beyond the inadequacies of existing taxonomies. It has less to do with what you make, and more with how you think.

For me, new media is a question of ideology.

Coming from a background of cinema studies, the auteur is paramount. Hitchcock, Scorsese, Herzog. Of course filmmaking is most often a collaborative process, the product of a large series of concessions and compromises between individuals, resources and the circumstances in which the two meet, but the desire to see a film as the result of a single visionary, the cinematic "genius," remains strong.

The reasons for this hero-worship are complex and multifaceted (film financiers/studios and theorists/historians both have a stake), but it permits the filmmaking discipline to fit nicely into enduring conceptions of the individual artist that complement ideas of competition and capitalism so integral to the organization of Western society.

With new media, the artistic means of production have exploded, and the existing hierarchal structures imposed by the necessity of technical training and expensive equipment are being dramatically undermined. Of course, this is not to say these don't have their place in a new media environment, and even access to a working power outlet and an internet connection can be an insurmountable obstacle.

But new media is intriguing for how it whispers "counter-culture." Moving from a competitive hierarchy to collaborative democracy is a truly profound shift that will require a rethinking of what all those terms above mean. It's more than working together or giving up control to process.

It's seeing the social world and the individual within it differently. It's taking the leap of faith that one paradigm can be left for another. And this is at once terrifying and liberating. But not to fear, the realist in me knows that new media will end up in a middle ground, where we can have our geniuses and eat them too.

As the big music labels continue to complain that the internet is killing the music business, independent record companies and artists are reaping the benefits of a democratised playing field. Who needs a studio when you’ve got Fruity Loops on your computer? Who needs MTV when you’ve got YouTube? Who needs Planet M when you’ve got MusicYogi? This might be the most exciting time to be a musician. Tabla star Aneesh Pradhan, who set up Underscore Records with his wife, renowned vocalist Shubha Mudgal, tells us how they have successfully marketed non-mainstream sounds. Thermal and a Quarter tell us how they’ve managed to have three hit albums without being signed up to a label. We also profile the new releases of three recently formed independent record companies and speak to their founders about how music labels can thrive in today’s download-happy universe.

Read it all here (free registration).

Corrections and suggestions are welcome.

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{Cue obnoxious tutorial mode music}

A common ritual on the Megatokyo Forums, and many other boards, for that matter, is owning landmark posts. This simply means that a particular person has the honor of having, for example, a forum's thousandth post, an individual's 500th post, or something else of that nature. This page is concerned with the second example, and there are three methods by which one may "claim" a post:

First, a person receives ownership if he is quoted in the landmark. For example, if MajorGeneral quotes Todd P. in his 500th post, Todd receives that post. If Major also quotes Pokeball, then both Pokeball and Todd receive partial ownership. This is the oldest and most widely accepted method of receiving ownership of a post.

Second, a person may give his landmark to someone as a gift. For example, if WyndyDay reaches her 500th post she has the option of giving it to a particular person or putting it up for grabs. The first simply involves saying either within or shortly after the landmark that it's given to a particular person, perhaps a friend or as an exchange for a favor. By the second option, whoever asks for the landmark first receives ownership. If two people claim it, the person who posted first receives it, unless he decides to be nice and let the second person have it. Disputes are settled by the poster of the landmark. This method is newer and less accepted than the first, and should generally be used only if nobody is quoted in the landmark, or if the person who is quoted doesn't care about such things.

Third, a landmark may be given to someone in advance of its posting. If Palad1n notices that he is approaching post number 500, he may offer it to whomever he wishes. This is the newest and least accepted method, and takes some of the fun out of it. Do this, and _Ocelot will hunt you like a wumpus, so don't do it, foo'.

Finally, what constitutes a landmark post? A few things:

First, posts that are multiples of 100. Special value is given to posts that are multiples of 500 and 1,000. As one would expect, higher numbered posts are the most valued.

Second, posts that have numbers in some way considered cool. For example, posts allowing a change in title, post number 12,345, or 1337, etc. This isn't an exact science, though - any number could be considered a landmark for almost any reason, but it's best to be conservative.

Third, multiples of smaller numbers. In a small forum, or if a person is not prolific, one may consider a multiple of 50 or even 25 a landmark. Again, be conservative about this - past post 200 or so, it's best to stop considering these multiples to be landmarks.

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Note: This information is based primarily on personal observation, but also with comments from Izuko and SpyderGreywolf over at MT.