Lessons from Club Mumble

Or maybe not lessons but inspiration. Or something. I’m not sure yet.

I stumbled across Club Mumble yesterday. I’m not quite sure how/why but I’ve been looking at doing a new project and have been finding all sorts of interestingness. Mumble’s fantastic – a rambling great big group blog with contributors chipping in posts around the themes of contemporary art, skateboarding and street culture. Apparently it wasn’t always thus.

I was looking for an ‘About’ page, probably to see how the site self-identified or some such. The closest match was the Masthead/Mission link so I followed that.

I’ll liberally quote what Bob Kronbauer, the founder of the site, has written there because I find it just so fascinating:

Originally dedicated to bringing what I perceived to be “real” content back to the internet following “the stranglehold that blogs [had] taken on it”, I produced two actual features every week for a year and a half on my own, and over this year and a half I slowly came to the realization that those blogs that have taken a stranglehold… well… they’ve done so with good reason. They’ve taken over because blogs are awesome, and it’s the community and the sharing of ideas and information that makes them so awesome. The idea of a lone dude sitting in front of his computer filtering all of the information that he receives and then feeding you his singular opinion on what’s cool and why it’s cool got tired after a minute, and the idea of “real” content changed in my mind from magazine-quality articles into just real stories about real things by real people. So I switched it up, re-launching Mumble as a contradiction of itself, bringing along 99 people who “really” inspire not only myself but our culture as a whole.

There’s more so go have a read if you found that interesting. The emphasis is Bob’s btw.

Blogger-in-residence

The concept of the artist/writer/poet/dancer-in-residence at museums, art galleries, exhibitions and, occasionally, corporate environments is pretty much part of the artistic landscape now.

I’d like to put forward the idea of the blogger-in-residence.

I’ve been thinking about this for a little while and, especially when compared to the role of the writer-in-residence, it makes a certain amount of sense.  The writer-in-residence schemes I’ve looked at vary wildly from place to place but the core aims often include one or more of the following:

• A piece of writing (or similar tangible outcome)
• Education – tuition and mentoring
• Events – readings, workshops
• Community outreach to widen the host venue’s audience
• Institutional cohension – providing a focal point for staff members and their families to interact around

It seems to me that a blogger, especially a community-minded one, could be given many of the same objectives. In fact, the position could have parallels with that of:

• the common or garden writer-in-residence
• an embedded journalist (as seen in the military)
• the newly-emerging concept of the ’social reporter’

What I don’t see this as, is an add-on to a marketing/public relations department. That sort of role carries a very different set of motivations and expectations. It may be necessary to delineate some boundaries but a certain amount of independence and freedom would be required.

Your run-of-the-mill blogger may lack the literary standards you might expect of a professional writer (please excuse the generalisms) but instead they would be comfortable working with an online network, fostering/interacting with a community and working with a variety of media. Over the the period of a residency I think you could see some interesting results.

I’m sure this isn’t an original idea and I’ve been looking for examples of people who have been taken on in this role already. However, all I’ve been able to find are media outlets taking on guest bloggers (not quite what I’m talking about) and bloggers-in-residence at tech companies, seemingly hired for marketing/PR reasons.

The only one I’ve found that fits the bill is the Art Gallery of Ontario who invited Shawn Micallef to blog about the gallery’s recent renovation:

There is simply so much going on around here as Transformation AGO nears completion that we want somebody to cover the events and details around the opening of the New AGO… The best part about running a blog like this is we can explore all this from a whole bunch of angles — inside and outside the building — and invite you, our readers, to join in the discussion

Shawn’s posts on the gallery’s Art Matters blog make for interesting reading as he mixes up news, profiles, snippets of overheard conversation and news round-ups.

That’s one approach, I’d like to hear about others. Similarly if there’s anyone who’d like to explore something like this (or knows someone who might be open to it) then please get in touch.

Where I’m blogging these days

I’ve been sorting this out a bit recently and really this post is for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s – kinda like putting a marker down and giving myself a structure to work in. Here’s what I’m putting where:

• Here – ok, so I can’t say precisely what’ll go here. Potentially anything and everything. Maybe bits from elsewhere. I’d like to keep things interesting and/or useful although of course that’s awfully subjective
• Meshed Media – strictly business. This is what I’m doing, what I’ve done, what’s coming up, who I’m working with and who I’d like to work with (site is a WIP for now)
• Osiris Licensing – where I tout my wares and blog about things relevant to alcohol and entertainment licensing. Did someone say ‘niche’?
• Twitter – day-to-day mutterings
• Chrumblr – personal bits and bobs. I’ll just throw things at this.  I’m really starting to enjoy the Tumblr community/aesthetic – if Flickr did blogs I suspect it’d be like this. Speaking of which…
• Flickr – where my photos go
• Vimeo – where my vids go
• Delicious – where I collect links to things

Incidentally, this site is getting a makeover so don’t be surprised if you see the theme and sidebars chopping and changing.

Twitter stat visualisation by Xefer

Of all the Twitter visualisations I think this is my favourite so far.

It’s a Yahoo! Pipes/Google Charts mashup made by Xefer which plots the frequency of tweets and replies by day and hour. More importantly it looks kinda cool.

You can see my original and/or make your own here.

(via Mediaczar)

Thinking about my top 10 blogs

A couple of days ago I had an email from someone asking me to name my top 10 blogs for publication on their website.

Ordinarily this would be flattering enough. However, this request came from the Editor in chief of Blogs.com – a property of Six Apart who also own TypePad, Moveable Type and Vox – and previous guest contributors include:

• Craig Newmark (Craigslist)
• Chris Anderson (Wired)
• Gina Trapani (founding editor of Lifehacker)
• Marc Andreessen (Ning and Netscape)
• Sarah Lacy (tech journalist)
• MC Hammer

Naturally, I jumped at the chance.  I’ve been told I can either make a list of 10 blogs on a subject I know something about or I can make a general, possibly more eclectic, list of favourites.

I’ve got a few ideas about what I’d like to put together but am going to mull over for a day or two. When it’s done I’ll post my explanations of why I think each blog is so great.

How to write a ‘thank you’ post (or a collective memory)

As you may have heard the blog I run, Created in Birmingham, won the award of Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards.

As well as being pretty pleased with the outcome I also found the whole thing fascinating. I’ve got a list of blog posts I’d like to spin off but I thought I’d start with something that only ocurred to me because of this tweet from @anne_brand:

Anne (who I’ve never met) is linking to this thank you post on Created in Birmingham in which I thanked the usual people, mentioned one of the other blogs that I thought was particularly worthy of attention and listed everyone who had given their support online.

I’m guessing her tweet referred to the list of supporters, which ended up being rather long. Over 200 individual Twitter users mentioned CiB, as did 80-ish blogs/forum posts/organisations/etc. Keeping track of them all and compiling a post with links cost me a few hours sleep and a little piece of my sanity. It was important to do it though.

Why do it?

Here’s the thing – it didn’t occur to me to not do it. CiB won the award thanks to the efforts of the community around the site. It’s only right to thank everyone and the way to do that in internet-land is to link to them. So that’s what I did.  It took ages keeping track of everything and writing it up but it’s such a small price to pay really.

I have previous in this regard though – I did a similar job after the 2008 Supersonic Festival and Birmingham Opera Company’s ‘King Idomeo’. These ‘collective memories’ end up being an interesting document of who said what and I’ve always meant to write up how I go about collecting all the links.

How to do it

Twitter

I discovered the tweets using Twitter searches of the following keywords – ‘Created in Birmingham’ CiB’ ‘#votecib’ and ‘http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl’. By way of explanation:

• #votecib is a ‘hashtag’ – a unique identifier to attach to a message on Twitter. Messages on a similar subject can then be more easily found with a search (as long as people use the tag).
• http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl is a shortened URL which stands in place of a longer one – when you’ve only got 140 characters to use in a message, characters are at a premium
  

To track these in real time, and respond with a thanks if/when necessary, I used Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a desktop-based Twitter client (that is to say it’s a little programme that you can use for reading your Tweets) which has a large panel display and allows separate panes for searches. It’s a bit industrial-strength as Twitter clients go but it doesn’t half get the job done. Heres what it looks like (click to enlarge):

It’s not quite as scary as it looks but it was a bit of a distraction. Whenever someone tweeted using one of those search terms I recorded their name in a text document I kept handy. That’s all there was to it.

The other links

I did a Google blog search and sorted results by date to see if anything relevant had been posted. I did that fairly regularly to keep up with any ongoing conversations and to see who was talking about us. I bolstered this with the odd search on Twingly and Icerocket too.

It can be quite hard to search for a post or comment left in a forum but I tried Boardreader, Boardtracker, and Omgili. The results were better than nothing, but only just.

At the end of the voting process I did a couple of regular Google searches (mainly combinations of the keywords ‘CiB’, ‘Created in Birmingham’, ‘ Best UK Blog’, ‘Weblog Awards’ and ‘vote’). Working up to page 20 of the results I came across a few new items.

Again, I recorded the URLs of any blogs I found in a text doc to be written up later.

Simplifying the process

A couple of things I could’ve (should’ve) used to lighten the load:

• Google Alerts (searches of blogs, news, the web, video and groups) delivered by email or RSS – there was really no need to keep searching when I could’ve just taken a sec to set this up and waited for the updates to roll in
• Social Media Firehose – a Yahoo Pipe that searches a swathe of sites and presents the results saving you the legwork

If I was monitoring these terms for longer than a week I’d have set these up straight away.

Any help?

This sort of thing can be applied to whatever you’re interested in. It would make sense (and is not at all egotistic) to have some sort of automated search set up for your name, although bad luck if your name is John Smith. Ditto for your company name and any topics of particular interest.

However, I’m sure there are easier and more comprehensive tools/techniques that I’m not yet aware of. Any suggestions would be welcome.

My standard changes to a free Wordpress.com blog

Every time I set up a new wordpress.com blog I make the same changes before I even start thinking about writing a post.  The following is really just a crib sheet for myself, but someone may find it useful.

A couple of notes first:

• There’s no single ‘right way’ to set up a blog.  If you do things differently then great – who wants homogenity?
• This is for the free Wordpress.com, not the self-hosted version of WP
• I’m posting this in Nov 08.  Sorry if the layout and features have changed
• I’ve assumed that you’ve signed up and got yourself a blog

Ok, on with it…

Quick list of changes

• About page – update content and disallow comments and pings
• Delete ‘Hello World’ post
• Links – delete Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org and add a couple of my own (if relevant)
• Change blog tagline
• Add Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit icons to posts
• Free up comment publication
• Disable Snap Shots
• Hide ‘related links’
• Update profile details
• Choose a theme and some sidebar widgets

Making the changes

I’ve ordered this part as per the tabs at the top of the Wordpress dashboard, only I’ve gone right to left (NB – no need to change anything under ‘Comments’). There’s method to my madness though.

Users

• Click ‘Your Profile’ (just above where ‘Manage Users’ is in big letters)
• Enter your name (unless you want to be anonymous) and nickname.  Choose what you want your name to be displayed as (at the bottom of posts and in comments) from the drop down menu.
• Click on ‘Update Profile’ at the bottom of the page

Settings

• General – delete the existing tagline that says ‘Just another Wordpress blog’ and replace it with something more suitable (or just leave it blank)
• Reading – tick the boxes to add Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit icons to posts
• Discussion – untick the box that says ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’

Remember to click ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom of each page where you alter settings.

Design

Themes and widgets are really a matter of personal preference, although I’d always recommend getting rid of Snap Shots (the link previews that pop up when you hover a cursor over some anchor text) and ‘related posts’ (the rarely relevant list of posts on other wordpress.com blogs). They’re both irritating.

• Themes – scroll through and pick something you like.  Click on it to preview it and click ‘Activate theme’ in the top right of the preview window to, well, activate it.  The look of your blog will change straight away.
• Widgets – these will be dictated by personal preference and the particular aims of your blog.  As a basic layout I’d suggest (from top to bottom) Pages, Text (with a brief explanation of what the blog is about), Recent Comments (apparently placing this high up encourages commenting), Categories, Links and Search
• Extras – untick ‘Enable snap shots on this blog’, tick to ‘Hide related posts on this blog’

Manage

• Posts – tick the box next to ‘Hello World’ and click delete
• Pages – click on ‘About’ and change the text to something more relevant. Also scroll down, click on ‘Comments & Pings’ and untick both boxes to disallow them both
• Links, tick the boxes next to the two existing links to Wordpress websites and click delete.  Then click on ‘Add link’ to insert a link of your own

Write

• Pages – add any extra static pages that are needed
• Posts – finally, time to write that first post.

Blogging for the man

A couple of interesting things have been flung my way in recent days.  First up there was the invitation to the mobile phone-sponsored secret gig that I went to (and indeed blogged about) a couple of weeks back.  Now I’ve been invited to the Tory Party Conference and the filming of an advert for the O2 Arena.

The Tory Conference

This is a funny one.  PR Week’s main story is about Labour & Tory plans to ‘dominate the blogosphere’:

it emerges the Conservative Party is trialling a local blogger charm offensive at its annual conference in Birmingham next week.

Head of new media Rishi Saha has worked with regional organisation Screen West Midlands to identify ten influential bloggers in the area, who have been given free VIP passes to the conference.

Caroline Spelman, Conservative Party chairman, told PRWeek: ‘As a West Midlands MP I am delighted to be engaging with leading voices in Birmingham’s new media.’

Which, slightly hilariously, makes me an influential blogger (thanks CiB) although I can’t remember ever mentioning politics in a post and there have been a lot since I took over in May.  Mark Hanson at the PR Media Blog has picked up on this and suggests that:

What’s fascinating here is that they have chosen non-political blogs to take part in this. The guests are blogging in the arts, culture and entertainment spheres. The aim is to build a groundswell of support amongst general opinion formers who may be persuaded to engage and debate Tory policies as opposed to rabidly backing or attacking.

Interesting.  I particularly like this:

The danger is that the bemused bloggers are hurded into a backroom in Birmingham for tea and buscuits, have an awkward Q&A with a bemused shadow cabinet member and then having ticked a box forget all about it

Anyway, we’ll see how that one pans out.

The O2 Arena

The invite to the O2 Arena was a surprising one.  I guess I might have popped up on their radar when I covered the Unlit thing the other week.  All I know about that one is that there’ll be some unsigned bands and some ’spectacular acts’ to give a flavour of the sort of thing that happens at the big tent in Greenwich.  I’m allowed to Tweet, take photos and blog whatever I like so expect some of that in the next day or so.

Incidentally, my initial wariness over the approach from the PR guy was tempered by the person in question being Ben Matthews, one of the organisers of tonight’s Twestival (an event what has got me thinking interesting thoughts).

A WP plugin post. How lovely.

It’s a bit navel-gazing but, in answer to a request, here’s the list of plugins used on my blog.  Or at least hoarded just in case I need them one day.

• AdSense Manager
• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• Audio Player
• cformsII – contact form
• FeedSmith
• flickrRSS
• Google Analytics
• Google XML Sitemaps
• InlineFeed
• My Page Order
• One Click Plugin Updater
• Postalicious
• Seesmic Wordpress plugin
• Sociable
• Twitter Tools
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
• Wordpress Database Backup
• Wordpress Reports
• WP-o-matic

I grabbed most of these by trawling through the most popular ones on wordpress.org and the rest have been recommended by various people over time.  I’ve also added a couple recently and thanks for that go to Paul Bradshaw for this tweet and his delicous taggings and also Joanna Geary for this recent blog post.

Are there any that I’ve missed that’ll reinvigorate my life and have me earning MILLIONS from the internet TODAY with NO EXTRA WORK?

Better living through commenting

Not many people, percentagely-speaking, comment on blogs.  A bit of Jakob Nielsen research showed that:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

I write a lot of blog posts every week and it’s nice when someone leaves a comment – whether it’s someone agreeing, disagreeing, adding their own info or correcting my latest balls-up over Capsule’s listings.

It starts at home though, doesn’t it?  Do unto others and all that.

So I’ve been making more of an effort to comment on other blogs.  Taking that a bit further, what I’d like to do is have a weekly round-up of blog posts that I’ve commented on generated automatically.  Kind of like the link-posts that many people do but slightly different.

I’ve been trying to find the best way to do that:

• Turns out Backtype isn’t anywhere near useful enough
• A fall-back option is to tag posts with Delicious and use the Postalicious plugin to round them up
• But I’ve decided to give the comment-tracking service co.mments a spin and find a way to use the RSS feed it produces to generate a weekly round-up of the posts I comment on. Easy

Although if anyone has any better ideas for how to do it then I’d be pleased to hear them.  Otherwise, hold tight for the first thrilling instalment.

**Update** – co.mments seems to have gone down so I’ve switched to coComment who I originally discounted cos they looked like they were trying to do too much.  Still, as long as they function, eh?

Still no joy automatically compiling the weekly round-up.  I’ll get there…