I would be very interested to see Twitter Search stats — to see how many people actually look at collections hashtagged content rather than just pump them out because it seems part of etiquette. This hypothesis brewed when I saw how hashtag use breaks down of  during real big events (World Cup, election) — as people already know the context, I am thinking that they are used more as a shorthand for context than searched or monitored.

Without much hope of getting that valuable data, I have created a very short questionnaire to get some feeling for use of hashtags. Due to the responses being self-selecting I am assuming that the results will be biased towards experienced Twitter users, but we’ll see. That this may be compounded due to my network containing a lot of social media profesionals is also a worry, so I would appreciate if you would spread it as far as you can.

Civico is an offshoot of Rhubarb Radio, which I’ve been a member of for about 14 months. Rhubarb is an online community radio station, and Civico is an extension of that platform to cover democracy and events. Last year we covered the PdfEU conference in Barcelona, with what was little more than the streaming audio and a whole lot of hard work.

For this conference we hope to be able to use the newly developed Civico player. This has two great developments, one is that it integrates with the Twitter API to capture tweets alongside the audio or video. The second is much more exciting (and proud to say, developed from my original concept).

Once the audio, video, tweets (and more in development) are captured then users can share any fraction (or all) of the coverage — highlighting the best line, the biggest laugh or the most damming miss-speak. In other words it makes it easy to share the bits that you want to share. And share them by link or by embedding wherever they like.

Here’s an example from a recent conference in London, by link and by embed (this is still a beta, excuse any foibles or downtime as the player is worked on):

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

It came about as an idea to make sure that culture from around the city, and from the grassroots, was showcased — we worked on the idea of helping people in the city create a cultural snapshot of whatever they were doing. Put simply, the idea was to allow people to blog about their activity within one 24-hour period (12noon 23rd April to 12noon 24th April).

I chose Posterous for the platform of the blog – it’s ability to  automatically convert images, video, audio and documents made it simple to offer one easy point of entry for the public. They were asked to email whatever they liked, and it was a technically easy job to moderate and publish – although it meant me being available for 24 hours straight to do that.

To make sure we had a good spread of content there were a team of social reporters engaged, with whom I did a short training session (as well as being in contact over the blogging period) — but in the end there was a huge wealth of content created from all sides of the city. Over 5,000 visitors to the site and around 350 different cultural experiences blogged and mapped made it a really successful exercise, showing — I think — that online engagement doesn’t have to be anything too complicated.

As that shortlist includes big budget projects like BBC Blast, I don’t think we’ve done badly seeing as it was one crash hot web guy (that’s Matt, not me) and 20 odd (very) Twitterers on a cold December afternoon (which you can relive, of course, here).

In speech mode, we couldn’t have done it so well without the support of the Birmingham Hippodrome — or the hundreds of people that joined in during the play. Sincere thanks for going along with it.

Quite interesting timing as the RSC’s Twitter Shakespeare project launched this week with much fanfare, in some ways it’s a logical step on from Twitpanto and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s sheer scale affects the experience (a slight overreach of scale was one of the problems I felt with this second panto).

To read all about both Twitter panto experiences there are a couple of long and detailed posts here.

We’re both of the opinion that there are a lot of good writers that don’t have the opportunity to stretch themselves — and that commercial magazines don’t afford that chance at all, driven as they are ‘backwards’. ‘Backwards’ in the sense that writing exists to fill gaps of a certain size: 50 words for a joke sidebar, 1,000 for a short article  — and that those gaps are defined by the sensibilities of advertising.

If we’re going to try, we’re going to try to do this the right way round:

• Find good writers and give them the freedom to write — a piece should be a long or as short as it needs, in whatever style the writer wants.
• We’ll edit as minimally as possible — if we think it needs much more than that the author will get a chance to re-write.
• We’ll match each piece with an illustrator and give them equal freedom.
• The whole package gets made into a magazine as beautiful as is possible.
• It’ll have as many pages as it needs, and no adverts, filler or regular features to distract from the good writing and drawing.

Given that when handed completely free reign to choose what to do, most writers, and creative people in general, seize up. We’ve decided to theme each issue. The first issue theme, appropriately enough, is ‘Birth’. We’re open to offers of work now.

This is hard, it’s unlikely to make any money — and it’s unlikely that to start with it’ll sell enough copies to make the cover price able to pay for everything. To that end we’re planning on financing printing through a series of events — of which more soon.

What makes it even more interesting is that we’ve decided that it should have only the most minimal internet presence, there’s not going to be online issues, or content available on the web — so how to use the web to promote a thing that only exists in the real world?

Not sure yet.

At the moment it’s called Dirty Bristow, and we’re planning to release end of April. And, yes of course we both get to have an article in every issue.

Pleased to see the RSC Friends (a subscription group who are fans of the RSC) starting to use their blog. I did a day of training with them last year, most were very new to the idea of blogging but enthusiasm for their subject is carrying them through. They’re planning to use it a little like an online magazine, but hopefully to share their love of theatre to more people.

The design work is by the team at Substrakt, who also developed a plugin to deal with the wide variety of data that can be pulled from the NHS Choices API. (The plugin would be very useful for local blogs as it would automatically allow search and display of local health services — hopefully it can be released publicly). They’ve done a great job of producing an accessible, clear site with in the NHS brand guidelines.

The site is to be run by the team at the PCT, so a lot of the consultancy process has been about making sure they understand as much as possible about the possibilities and the (simple) procedures needed to administer the site — confidence to experiment has been vauable. We decided on WP MU as there are plans for may sites and sub-sites — a MU install can have a site up and running in a matter of minutes, and with a set of themes designed they can all fit the brand straight away. We’ve also set up a system allowing each site to have a completely separate domain name if required — so no-one need know that they’re related to the main PCT site.

The flexibility of WordPress allowed the team to build a mock-up site very quickly, with a very basic theme, and work on the content internally collaboratively — which was then skinned with the completed theme. For the user, the site offers RSS feeds of any of the categories, and many pages will have commenting on — both standard features.

The first of the sub-sites is under development, as well as experiments with the commentariat theme which is a theme built to make consultation on documents easy. I look forward to seeing the developments.

The structure of the pantomime was very similar to Cinderella last year — there was a cast, who had ‘motivations’ (character bios) and a script to follow (or improvise around), and a private “director” account for prompts and the like during the performance. Most of the differences were to do with how the medium (Twitter) has evolved over 2009:

The main difference is it’s reach — here’s an Alexa (usual caveats apply, Alexa is a skewed sample to both the US and to ‘techies’) graph of PageViews for the Twitter website (remember also that a huge number of Twitter users very rarely have cause to visit the site):

With more users comes both the problems of noise and an altered demographic — it wasn’t possible to rely on as much shared knowledge of either how Twitter works or shared culture if we wanted to reach any more than the same people.

Many people found following Cinderella (last years #twitpanto) hard and were happy to use Matthew Somerville‘s Roomatic hack which highlighted cast members within the stream — but I felt that this would still be too hard to read this year. So, while it was still possible to follow the hashtag any way people liked, I planned a version that separated those ‘on stage’ more completely using two different windows. Here’s my mock up:

The changing nature of Twitter also presented issues for casting, I found difficulty balancing keeping the cast open to as many people as possible, while making sure that they were people who would ‘get’ how to do it difficult. Due to this, and also the possibility of a collision with the Hippodrome’s offline panto (which due to real-world rehearsal commitments didn’t happen) I wrote a scene that would contain characters from other pantomimes, so people could be in it without having much impact on the story.

With increased interest in being in the cast (people were clamouring from May) , I wanted a panto with a good number of characters, but it was also imperative that the plot was very well known. Twitter isn’t a great medium for establishing scene or location, nor one where curtains can be drawn between scenes — there’s also the conceptual problem that there can be no secrets from one character to the other (we ask for suspension of disbelief, unless it’s a good plot point). For that, and the obvious men in tights gags, I chose Robin Hood.

The script this year was written to be less in-jokey than last years (where I not only knew the audience better, but wasn’t attempting to get a wide audience), which was more of a struggle but — with a good chuck of help from Danny Smith — it turned out I think to be a good deal funnier. In fact it’s readable and enjoyable out of context, if I do say so myself.

What I was more sure of this year is that Twitpanto is a collaborative and open piece of art — played out online — and as such the live, free and interactive nature of it is the main thrust. There were over the Christmas period attempts to do “real time” twittering of both Home Alone and It’s A Wonderful Life  — interesting, but too tightly scripted to be anything than transposing to a new medium.

The ‘set’ worked, after a few Twitter hiccups, brilliantly — and even more impressively Matthew modified it after the event to  allow a replay — it’s the iPlayer for Twitter and very clever. You can watch Twitpanto ‘as live’ here.

It proved a little difficult for the cast to use, I’d advised them to use the Twitter website and keep refreshing, as it wasn’t quite fast enough for them to wait for their cues on anything using the Twitter API. There were also some early web issues for a few of the cast, which contributed to the rocky start.

I also had to stop myself from being overly directorial, I felt at times that some of the improvisation was making it difficult for people to find their cues — disappointingly for me also muddying some of the jokes. But all in all the cast were brilliant in staying in character and interacting with the whole messy experience. It was especially difficult for some with only one or two lines to stay quiet for the duration, in retrospect fewer, bigger, parts work better.

Nudging, which is really all you want to attempt on the social web, is a difficult theatrical directing style to achieve, here’s what Joanna Geary (whose involvement got us a bit of press from The Times) tweeted:



It was  better attended than 2008 — the #twitpanto hashtag  was one of Twitter’s top ten trending phrases during the “performance” — very unusual for a UK based topic to trend these days. There were over 1,500 tweets containing it between 3:30pm and 4:30pm (1,500 is the limit that Twitter’s search facility can recall on any one search).

Whether the model can work outside the structured chaos of the pantomime I’m not sure, but happy to try (maybe  a Shakespeare comedy…), but it’s certainly the most innovative drama experience on the web.

Thanks again to all the cast (find ‘em here) all at the Hippodrome (follow them here), Libby (who contributed last minute lute) and all that participated.

A real traditional Christmas present for the inquiring kiddie (or adult) is the Guinness Book of Records — I spent many an hour looking up the tallest and widest things in the World in years gone by — so it was great to see ‘my’ record in the new edition. For a huge portion of 2008 I ran the web side of ‘The Big Picture‘ an Audiences Central project, where we collected photographs from the people of the West Midlands. 12,896 were then turned in to the World’s Largest Photo Mosaic by artist, Helen Marshall on a huge platform at Millennium Point in Birmingham. You can see Lucy Moore (who submitted the photo chosen to be mosaic’d) standing on the finished article above (and see a lovely video of her reaction here).

While getting the World Record was the culmination of the project, the real point was to get people involved in artistic activities in some way — and it was hard work, but rewarding. The nature of the project, engaging with those who weren’t always confident online, meant a huge amount of community management and support, but the feeling of ownership that the participants came to have over the site and the project was worth every bit of the effort.

No doubt the largest social media project (in terms of engaged audience) that I’ve worked on, and it’s nice to be reminded of it.

Thanks to Jaki Booth for the photo and the spot. You can explore the mosaic online here.