Inside the Hive

NORMALLY BERNIE GOLDBACH writes on this blog but I have his Nokia E90 phone and that means I have direct access to Typepad. I'm Laura Hobson and I thought it would be good to inform readers what's happening in part of the afternoon during Media Writing with @topgold. We have discussed topical news, mainly the education grant system or the lack of it. We have also discussed the relevance of hash tags when writing mutimedia content, we are focusing on the creative hash tag and we will be trying to extract noises from our environment that could be associated with creativity over the coming weeks. I had better not write much more as Bernie is having withdrawal symptoms over the loss of his phone.

Twitter Inside LinkedIn

AS MARK FULTON points out, you can use Ping.fm to update your LinkedIn status from Twitter. His idea is better than the new LinkedIn application because you can squelch the noise better with Ping.fm than you can with the LinkedIn application. Here's how you do it. First, sign up with Ping.fm. Second, create a group called something like #NotTwitter and let it ping everything but Twitter. Then create a group called #NotLinkedin that pings everything but Linkedin, and so on. Ping.fm is handy because you can selectively update all sorts of networks.

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Learned While Filming

WORKING WITH YOUNG film makers gives me the opportunity to learn shortcuts. The biggest shortcut I've learned is trusting 14-16 year olds with caring for DV cameras because that trust has resulted in the camera operators telling me how they're able to record for up to six hours on a single battery. We've also learned there's value in making scratch work and we're doing that with the help of Qik.com. The singlemost important factor we've faced is weather. Today's shoot happened under clear skies and that's a problem because the earlier shoots were overcast. Ah sure, that's what post-production is for!

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Qik Essential Reading

SEVERAL ITEMS IN THE Sunday Business Post hit home with me this week and I've made a five minute Qik clip to illustrate the point. Along the way, I hear the voice of Dean Whitbread reminding me that Sennheiser earbuds would improve my audio levels. On the front page sits Michael O'Leary with a plan to pocket an easy EUR 100 from every passenger who forgets to print a boarding card. This is happening at the same time other passenger carriers accept bar codes on phones as proof of purchase. Inside the paper, Richard Curren traces Ireland's current economic problems back to 2003 levels. Pat Leahy thinks, "We need a complete end to crowd-pleasing campaigns based on local issues and satisfying sectional interests." Amen, Brother. Meanwhile, in the Opinion section of the Irish Times, Dan O'Brien argues the problems go back to the 1937 Constitution and how Ireland is now a victim an undemocratic voting system coupled with unqualifed ministers who are members of the Oireachtas. Inside Agenda magazine, Catherine Cleary points to one of the side effects of Irish governance gone wrong. One could say that the current decrepit system is now imposing depression, fear and social stigma on children of the Irish recession. Adrian Weckler gives an excellent quarter-page review to Vodafone's new 360 operating system along with a cautionary note about buying a netbook. As I type this, I realise it's not really a good news week. So I'll stop right here and pack for my day in the woods with teenaged film makers.

Qik Essential Reading

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Direct link to Qik clip: http://qik.com/video/3473023 and to audio file: http://podcasting.ie/qik/091108_sbp.mp3

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When Active Citizens Spark

THE CONTINUED RESISTANCE of traditional managers in a wide cross-section of industries to ignore vibrant online social networking amazes me. At the highest levels of Irish government, the dismissive attitude comes close to incompetent public representation. Some managers, CEOs, and politicians don't think that hyper-connected snappy exchanges count in the matrix of public communications. In fact, they often want to use tax money to block, throttle or censor the avenues used by active citizens online. This is so wrong on some many levels. It's pig-ignorant and an example of professional misconduct to ignore active citizens who express themselves in online social networks.

Three years ago, when I first started poking around on Facebook and skimming through Twitterstreams, I heard the first snide comments about both of those social networks. Two years ago, when Tipperary Institute first started weaving social networking into an accredited creative multimedia degree, I had to defend my choice of networking tools (i.e., Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Flickr, Google Documents, Last.fm and Blip.fm) to students who were happy to live in a world of irregular e-mail. By mid-2009, only students older than 35 needed convincing about using community zones online. Most of them become avid members of online communities within a few weeks. Today, a third of new students check into their social networks on their phones.

Cracks in the Wall

IN NOVEMBER 1989, I WORKED in a bunker filled with special phone lines that started ringing with message traffic about cracks in the Berlin Wall. By the 9th of November 1989, the border separating West Germany from East Germany was peeled back. In my work position, the wire traffic between the Department of State and American Embassy officials was more like a low-threat war exercise. If I had blogged about the events I would have lost my job. Twenty years ago to the day, the colonels and generals above me were more interested in articulating policy regarding ground transportation to Berlin and offering command guidance about the severe strain on accommodation that a widespread influx of Americans would create in Berlin. As soon as CNN started reporting the breach in the Wall, I asked for time off from the 23rd to the 27th of November. With the request honoured, I pushed off for Berlin with my family, including Kitty at left. We had a lovely time walking along the killing zone, eating French Onion soup at Checkpoint Charlie and returning home with chunks of the wall. A year later, I would discover that our departure from the West and travel to the East was monitored by US intelligence agents who were preparing a dossier for action. My journey to East Berlin would form part of a story that seems incredulous now but in the paranoid minds of counterintelligence, the way I traveled and the contacts I would form a body of evidence that would cause my world to come tumbling down.

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Berlin in my Flickr photostream.

Dan York -- "Die Mauer ist weg."

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Through Others' Eyes

bernie
Originally uploaded by the boy who loved the moon

THIS IS THE FIRST semester I've started ego alerts because it's one of the ways I've discovered some of the most difficult students to locate. We have an effective e-learning system powered by Moodle, an easy-peasy LDAP log-in screen to avail a dashboard to students, free wifi through the campus and good craic in smoking corners and blue couches. But there remains 10% of students who are difficult to contact because of one snag or another. It's handy to look for myself and discover people who have viable online identities on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr with avenues I can use to contact them. I'm doing that on Flickr and Facebook now by internal mail s systems on those sites. With future classes, I'm going to make new students talk about me by name on social networks because it's now proving to be one of the most reliable ways of welcoming people into creative multimedia spaces.

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Back to Live Audio Recording

BACK INTO THE RECORDING groove with creative multimedia students after a long hiatus, I'm giving control of my Inside View blog to Mark Fitzsimons (audio) and Shane Egan (his photo at left). I spend six consecutive hours in front of students on Wednesdays and have always wanted to record live audio extracts. This is a first attempt at seeing how college students can grab a classroom conversation by themselves, tag the MP3 file and then add it to a draft blog post on Typepad. If all things work correctly, a blog post will appear before 5PM that absent students can download and review as part of a lecture on genre. It's one of 12 topics we cover in the Media Writing curriculum and made all the more relevant when students can produce multimedia content on the fly. Here goes the first sample:

Educast 156

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Relaunching podcasting.ie and starting the Media Writing Flickr group too.

Direct link to MP3 file: http://podcasting.ie/podcasts/educast_156.mp3

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FourSquare Dublin

AFTER A FEW DAYS OF using FourSquare, it's really obvious that its list of known restaurants, bars, and nightclubs should be seen through the iPhone app because that's the only way you can get a wider cross-section of reviews from Yelp and Google Maps. That said, Foursquare really offers quality suggestions when coming up from the subway in Manhattan. In my mind, it Foursquare linked into LouderVoice, it would be one of the most compelling handheld intelligent tourist informaton services. I'm having fun following people in Dublin, discovering the mayor of Google and the mayor of Connolly Station along the way.

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