Social web & social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit. I also do the odd bit of art.
November 14th, 2008

Live blogging from the bus

I spent over 11 hours on the bus on Tuesday, and got off exactly where I got on. It was art, and I live blogged the whole way. I was also twittering and streaming live video to Qik. It was all part of the project I’ve been doing over at elevenbus.co.uk.

I was really surprised with the video blogging, as it’s something I’ve always been sceptical of. I think more down to most video blogs’ lack of content that then technology. It was a really good way to quickly update anyone following (announcements of new video sessions were pushed to twitter) and when there were other people to talk to it was great to be able to quickly widen the sources of information. The quality (over 3G from an N95 mobile) was good enough, the problem came for me of deciding what to show on camera. The N95 has two cameras, one facing the screen one away, but you can’t cut between them in a single stream. This left me offering viewers a choice — my face and no scenery, or scenery and a disembodied voice. I partially solved this by quickly panning by hand from me to the surroundings, but a way to mix both (picture-in-picture style) would be good. If you should want to watch them they’re collected here.

The live blog, using the very good Cover it Live system, was not so successful. For a start you really need a laptop to blog and to answer comments from any readers — which could work a lot better when you don’t need to spend most of the day on a bus. The main problem was my trying to do too much. The content of my tweets and the live blog  obviously overlapped, and there wasn’t the time to do both. Compare my live blog with that of Michael Grimes who forsook twitter for the duration.

The reason twitter won out was the ready made audience. You can see tweets related to the event here — and that’s only ones that used the tags and keywords — there are a lot, and taking the event to people in their own space works really well.

Ideally I would have mereged the two and used a system to aggregate my tweets into a live blog page on the site — allowing non-twiter users to join in. If someone could build a live blogging system that allowed comments and pushed them back to me via twitter I would be sold.

Great experience, I doubt any live internet coverage will be as difficult to do as that from the top deck of a moving bus.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in my projects | Tags: , , , , ,
August 4th, 2007

A Flash Of Inspiration #2 Social Ethical Shopping

I’ve had this idea for a while, but want to get it down on ‘paper’ so people might be able to take the idea and sort it out. I could probably hack together the software side myself (not quickly, it’s a big job), but there’s a huge need for hardware and legal back-up to get it to work properly which I don’t have.

It combines three technologies, but aims to solve the problem of knowing how to be good. In short “should I buy this product”, “how does it sit with my values”. For example you may decide that you don’t want to buy any products from Heinz (as I don’t), but Heinz are a large company – it’s not always obvious in the supermarket which company ultimately owns which brand. Or despite the labeling, how can you really work out the food miles in some products?

In this system you can use your mobile phone to scan the barcode (already possible on the Nokia N95, but you could write an image processing app for most camera phones that are coming out onto the market now) and a small application on the phone interfaces with a website to give you the information as to whether the product sits in your ‘ethical space’.

You would have to sign up to the site and set ‘ethical sliders’ showing your views on different issues (animal welfare, economics, food miles, fair trade, local issues) and also your home area (for calculating some distance based ethics). You could then get a personalised yay or nay on each product you were unsure about.

Two potential problems here – collecting and updating all the information, which would hopefully be solved by using a very tight database and allowing users to add information on each product (if a barcode wasn’t in the database , you’d get some sort of message asking you to help populate the information). Luckily I think that a lot of this information is already collected by campaigners and if it was easy enough to add to the database on the site it could be filled up quite quickly. The other main problem is the litigious nature of major corporations, this product would have to have some very good PR and legal back-up, and be prepared for a long fight.

The project could self-finance in a number of ways, for a start there would be a wealth of accurate and self-entered data on shopping requirement that could be used for research (and sold perhaps, once de-personalised – the ethics research itself could act as a pressure on retailers and suppliers), the site woudl also be able to offer very tightly focused advertising online (even on the phone app itself, IN the supermarket, offering an alternative product that did fit in with the ethical map of the user).

It’s a social web-app, a wiki-database- and mobile technology. It’s very clever I think, technologically possible now and broadly speaking very 2.0. It just needs a cool name.














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