July 3rd, 2009 |
by Sam Coley
Published in
Events, social media

Cartoon of Sam Coley CC Alex Hughes
Moseley Barcamp was held at The Cross in Moseley on Sunday the 28th of July and was a free-ranging forum for those involved in Birmingham’s social media / internet “scene”. Speakers included Pete Ashton, Nick Booth, Chris Unitt and Michael Grimes to name but a few… The room contained a fair smattering of the “Brumtwitter mafia” who debated, and I imagine “tweeted”, passionately about all things “web” in Birmingham.
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June 28th, 2009 |
by Andrew Dubber
Published in
AHRC KTF, General, Technology, social media

Singer Nima captures video of her fellow Aftershock participants on a dinner break in Genoa – Pic © After Shock Project
“I can’t believe how hard you work.” High praise from Nitin Sawhney, composer, multi-instrumentalist and (it turns out) heavy-duty arts and culture thinker.
Of course, work’s a relative term when you’re doing something really enjoyable and fascinating in a really amazing setting, but given that I was completely focused on (almost) nothing other than the task at hand from 8am till 2am over 5 consecutive days, perhaps he had a point.
I was in Genoa, Italy with Birmingham web developer and entrepreneur Stef Lewandowski to work on the Aftershock Project – a pan-European collaborative music event. In short, Nitin Sawhney turns up in a town, brings about a dozen musicians together, and they workshop, compose, rehearse and eventually perform about an hour’s worth of completely new music over the course of a week. Stef had been commissioned to make them a website, and he’d asked me on board for my perspective as the “online music guy”.
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June 12th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
Events, General, social media

Last night I spoke at “My Dad’s on Twitter but he doesn’t know why” – part of Fazeley Digital ’09. Part lecture, part performance, the idea was to mind map some current thinking about Twitter by writing on a wall in an empty studio space. I’ve written a blog post about the process of the event on the new MA Social Media blog but wanted to also reflect on some of the content here on the IC blog.
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May 15th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
General, social media

Image CC frontlineblogger
Today the Telegraph published an article headlined “Oldest Tweeter talks cuppas and casserole on Twitter at 104”. The article tells the story of Ivy Bean, who has taken advantage of some IT training offered to her at Hillside Manor residential home in Bradford, and has recently taken up use of the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. The story is being gently taken up by the Twitter community, who are excited about the concept of the “world’s oldest tweeter”. But in some ways this story is actually quite troubling.
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May 14th, 2009 |
by Jez Collins
Published in
AHRC KTF, social media

Myself and Jon Bounds are working on creating a map of musical activity in Birmingham. As part of the AHRC KTF, Interactive Cultures sent us to the Cultural Mappings; Cities, Landscapes and Memory Symposium. Jon has provided the following report for us from the event: Read the rest of this entry »
March 19th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
social media

Image CC pigsonthewing
One of my favourite panels at last week’s West by West Midlands (WXWM) event was Nicky Getgood’s talk about the Digbeth is Good blog. Nicky’s presentation itself was a gentle journey through the history of her blog, complete with anecdotes about some of her Digbeth centred projects such as the week of breakfasts. The talk was interesting, but it was the Q&A session at the end that really got me thinking.
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March 18th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
social media

Image CC pigsonthewing
Last week ended with a flurry of good meetings about social media. As seems to be the way with the social media scene, they featured many of the same actors, but in different configurations. More so than any other work context I have encountered, social media really lends itself to informal teams brought together as needed. Here’s a quick breakdown of two days in my social media world.
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February 27th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
Technology, social media
I spent the afternoon with colleagues from Screen Media Lab and User Lab brainstorming ideas for a social media game which we’ve called @brumtag. The first game will be a demonstrator project for the Lucid Project: an exploration of the potential of wireless devices to deliver context-aware information.
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