YouTube – TAT augmented ID – With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you
Podcast | dConstruct 2009 – “All the sessions at dConstruct 2009 have been recorded and are being delivered via the magic of podcasting”
Mockingbird – “an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application”
Frankenlab – “This is the home of Dr. Victor Emelius Frankenstory, eponymous inventor of the world famous writing game, and a place where he will be regularly displaying and dissecting his favourite stories”
CultureLabel: an aggregator for the arts – “Essentially, CultureLabel enables the online purchase of products that were previously only available from each institution’s in-gallery store on the way out”
The App Garden on Flickr – “Here you’ll find home grown applications created by Flickr members (like you!) using the Flickr API. The garden continues to flourish so go forth and frolic amongst the apps!”
Digital Theatre – ‘working in partnership with Britain’s leading theatre companies… to capture live performance authentically onscreen’. Interesting this. Presumably there’s much more to come – it’s launched with just one production available (despite apparenty having several partners) and the website itself is currently missing a whole host of tricks
Michael Bierut: 5 Secrets from 86 Notebooks – “Digging into the 86 notebooks he’s kept over the course of his career, Bierut walks us through 5 projects – from original conception to final execution – extracting a handful of simple lessons (e.g. the problem contains the solution; don’t avoid the obvious) at the foundation of brilliant design solutions”. I haven’t watched this yet, but I fully intend to
Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – “You can write iPhone apps quickly and efficiently using your existing skills with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This book shows you how with lots of detailed examples, step-by-step instructions, and hands-on exercises”
I was on holiday last week (it was lovely, thanks) and was uploading pictures every couple of days to Flickr. When I spotted a spike in the number of views my photos had had I assumed it was someone subjecting themselves to my holiday snaps.
In fact one of my photos (below) had received around 5,500 views having made it to the homepage of Digg.
Yeah, I was surprised too. I took that photo as an afterthought at the end of the January Birmingham Social Media Cafe. Jon Bounds had ordered a batch of orange RSS badges to hand out to people and I was handing out the CiB badges Pete Ashton had left me back in May.
Of course, I’d heard about the effect Digg can have but having some stats to mull over is a different thing entirely. Flickr’s stats are pretty good so I thought I’d share a few.
This shows daily views of all of my photos which usually dither around the 0-10 mark. Spot the spike:
These are the sites that referred the most traffic:
Clearly Digg sent the most traffic, so here’s which pages on that site sent the most:
The top result ‘/’ means the homepage.
So, what are the lessons to take from this?
Without dissecting the stats in forensic detail, the obvious lessons are:
Share your stuff. This was an utter fluke but the more of your media you make available, the more chance you’ll get lucky. You never know what others might find interesting.
Include a link back to what you do care about people seeing. At the bottom of my photo is a link to the Birmingham Social Media Cafe’s website. Although only a fraction of viewers clicked through, that site still received an eight-fold increase in traffic over the corresponding days.
There are ways to increase your chances of hitting big on Digg but, as I had no hand in submitting this item, I’d feel a complete fraud trying to talk about them here. Suffice to say the basics include submitting a decent item in the first place and having lots of friends. An alluring headline and punchy description might help too.
All this traffic – what’s it good for?
In this case, not much really.
If I was trying to drive traffic – any traffic – to a particular piece of content then it’d be quite a coup. However, I’m not trying to maximise views of that photo and the Birmingham Social Media Cafe (being a local get-together) isn’t likely to benefit from an influx of untargetted, worldwide traffic.
To reinforce that, it’s worth noting that a few days later my Flickr stats and visits to the BSMC website are both back to background levels, as if nothing happened.
That said, I should still say thanks to Digg user xdvx for Digging the pic in the first place. It’s nice to know a bunch of people got a kick out of one of my snaps.
As previously advertised, on Friday I made my way down to The O2 to have a nose about. I was there to check out the filming of a new advert highlighting all the goodly things available at the venue (priority ticket booking, access to private areas, etc) if you’re on the O2 network.
I gather that my involvement was part of a proof of concept – seeing what it was like to have bloggers involved in documenting what goes on behind the scenes. Essentially I’d been brought along to blog, tweet, photo and video lots and was given pretty much unfettered access to do so. There are worse ways to spend a Friday.
Anyway, I met up with @benrmatthews (who was doing remarkably well considering he’d been hosting 200 or so Twitterers at the inaugral Twestival the night before) and @drewb and we were ushered into a strange world of horses, wrestlers, bands, dancers and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things.
There’s no point me describing what went on because I was documenting things as I went along. So, for a flavour of the day here are my tweets (to be read from the bottom up):
Here are my photos (there are more from Ben and Drew – we tagged everything o2bloggers):
And here are a couple of videos I streamed (and recorded) live using Bambuser, a nice little service that I’d all but forgotten about. Please bear in mind that these couldn’t have been any more spur of the moment so there’s no incisive questioning or anything. The first is with Ed from O2 who explained what the ad is for:
The second is with JP, O2′s Digital Communications Manager – the guy who monitors the internet and responds to O2-related problems, queries, etc that people might have:
Some other stuff from the day, bulletpoint-style:
We got a tour of the building from the events manager which was pretty sweet – they don’t usually do tours.
Drew, Ben and I were initially the subject of 5 mins of curiosity. Sample question – “Blogging… why?” Actually that was as deep as the conversation went.
Actually, saying that, one of the stylists was talking about getting some sort of website together so I spent a couple of minutes setting up a blog here – Lucy Harvey. I showed her what some companies around Birmingham are using blogs for which impressed her so I’m hoping she makes some use of it.
The editor was Joe Guest. I wish I’d chatted with him more because he worked on the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad as well as music videos for U2, The Streets, Kasabian and Dirty Vegas. He looked kinda busy though.
I got the distinct impression that if this wrestler didn’t want me to exist it wouldn’t take him much to snuff me out. Dude was huge.
The O2′s (v swish) VIP bar is going to be the venue for a hack day sometime in October. More info on that to come.
Anyway, it was a good day. I got to poke around the venue and saw some things you certainly don’t see every day. It was fun to really put Bambuser, Flickr and Twitter to work for a few solid hours, even if the best lesson I learnt was about how quickly an iPhone’s battery can be used up.
I also enjoyed meeting the guys from Hotwire and am hoping to keep in touch, especially as some of Ben’s side-projects (the Twestival meet-up and Bright One, a PR company for charities and such) might maybe have some overlap with some of my own.
Work
If you want me for anything work-related then my company's Meshed Media.
