drbexl.co.uk » communications

#assk64: Trending

drbexl — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:37:00 +0000

#assk64

Finally, I am “trendy”, and was ahead of fashion!

The website “64 words for Aung San Sui Kyi” launched yesterday evening at 9.30pm (GMT), and I was only the second person to Tweet using the hashtag #assk64. Working late on something, I watched it start to take off, particularly once @SarahBrown10, @jimmycarr and @eddieizzard started tweeting about it.

Trending Topic
The image to the left is a screenshot from Twitter in the last 10 minutes, showing that #assk64 is now the third most popular topic on Twitter right now – that’s pretty impressive in less than 24 hours! Most are redirecting people to the website although of course there’s always a few mis-using it – ignore them!

So Where are most of the Retweets coming from?

The organisation behind this hasn’t been slow in asking celebrities to post their “64 words” (although many, like me, have tweeted about it, rather than written their 64 words), and I suspect that @stephenfry (with over half-million followers) has had quite a bit to do with an extra spurt in popularity and the official @64forsuu should be worth following too! @assk64 has dropped off the top trending topics, but still plenty of activity, particularly triggered by Alan Davies this afternoon.

On the Website: George Clooney, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Vaclav Havel, David Beckham, Daniel Craig, and the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown have all written messages of support.

The News: Waiting to see it start to appear, only 1 story in Google at the moment.

Take Action: On the website, on Twitter, or on Facebook!

Update 11th July 2009: Interestingly #assk64 is still circulating on Twitter.

#assk64 : 64 Words for Aung San Suu Kyi

drbexl — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:32:00 +0000

Aung San Suu Kyi: 64th Birthday Coming Up

As Aung San Suu Kyi approaches her 64th birthday (June 19th 2009), and around 13 years of imprisonment, this site was created to collect hundreds of messages of support before that birthday. Created in only 6 days by Rechord, and launched only a couple of hours ago, the site already has a buzz going on Twitter, largely thanks to @SarahBrown10 (Gordon Brown’s wife, he’s also posted an entry, but it keeps disappearing thanks to the volume of Tweets!) and @JimmyCarr, and now @eddieizzard! You can read more about ASSK, and her fight against illegal imprisonment.

Add your voice: Website; Twitter Feed (using hashtag #assk64, let’s see if we can get it trending!); become a friend on Facebook.

Bill Pertwee: The Warden Says

drbexl — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:37:00 +0000

I’m currently trying to write my abstract for the “Framing Film” conference at the University of Winchester, and spent a very enjoyable couple of hours this afternoon watching “The Warden Says” introduced by Bill Pertwee (on VHS, how old school.. and now I see they are available on DVD!)… thank goodness such little gems have survived!

I know far more about the posters themselves, but there are a few good examples to use for the abstracts from the 48 mini-films (many only a minute or two, to one mini-film at around 20 minutes!), covering recruitment, careless talk, the blackout, cigarette dangers, careless sneezes cost diseases, food choices, dig for victory, salvage (tin/bones/paper), holiday harvests, save fuel and save water! Many echo the messages used in the posters, whilst others actually feature the posters themselves. That should fit well with the ‘call for papers’ on “Cinema’s relationship with, and even reliance upon, the other visual arts, whether for subject matter, inter-textual promotion or graphic design, is central to our understanding and appreciation of the medium.”

DVD 1: The Warden Says
DVD 2: The Warden Says: II

Universities Online

drbexl — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:43:00 +0000

As part of my research into possibilities for universities to make use of the plethora of social media around, I put out a message on my Twitter feed, and picked up a few new followers working at the overlap of social media/academia, and it’s interesting to see what is popping up in this constantly changing field.

YouTube.edu
Last week (Thursday 26th March), YouTube officially launched an independent area of its site (to which Universities need to apply, and at present seems to be US universities only, but where the US leads, the rest of the world follows…) which seperates scholarly content from the more general content available on YouTube. Along with site Academic Earth which also launched last week, offering lectures direct on the World Wide Web…

Scott Stocker, Stanford’s director of Web Communications notes: “Particularly in this time when the coverage of higher ed in general is diminishing in the mainstream media, it allows us to tell stories directly in a very effective way to a large audience.” Wall Street Journal Blog

It’s an interesting time to be in academia, seeing what possibilities the new technologies offer, but also being aware that they need to offer a return on investment (both time and money), and to most effectively leverage the media available whilst retaining intellectual property.

Social Media MA
Birmingham City University is to offer an MA in Social Media in September 2009, and the Twitter feed has been buzzing with feeds, and the press has quickly picked up on it, publishing online material several hours before it could make it to print.

“”Social media” in the context of Internet technologies is itself a relatively new term which broadly correlates to the concept of Web 2.0. “Social media consultancy” as a profession is being shaped by the early proponents of the field.

There is a dichotomy within this nascent industry. On the one hand established businesses are seeking to co-opt the tools of social media and use them for commercial gain; on the other third sector organisations are making use of these tools to build complex and conversational communication strategies for minimal cost.

This MA programme will explore the techniques of social media, consider the development and direction of social media as a creative industry, and will contribute new research and knowledge to the field.” Birmingham City University.

University of Glasgow: Student Blogs
An interesting idea: “our student blogs aim to give you an insight into what it’s really like to be a student at Glasgow”, which they could also do via a search on YouTube! Interesting to think about the dynamic between official/unofficially sanctioned media. My expectation is that prospective students would trust the unofficial (looking) material more!

Careers: Media Agencies/Academic Work

drbexl — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:00:00 +0000

I’m hunting for either web content or lecturing work, and have identified a number of agencies specialising in media/web content work:

Media Guardian (buy print newspaper on a Monday)
Civil Service (Communications roles)
Creative Pool Agency
Purple Recruitment Consultancy
Formula Won Media Recruitment
The Blueprint (Digital Recruitment)
Brand Republic
Job Rapido
Planet Recruit
Chinwag Jobs
Profiles Creative
Reed Agencies
Careersandjobsuk
The IT Job Board
Pure Genie (online travel jobs)
Amazon.co.uk (specific vacancies)

There are only a couple of places that I know of that Universities advertise in. Looking on the websites of specific universities you are interested in always works:

Rediscovering a social life on the ‘net

drbexl — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:58:00 +0000

Just because an application, widget, tool, web device, web 2.0 implement – whatever you want to call it – is available, doesn’t mean that it is necessarily useful. Yesterday, I started my re-familiarisation of what is ‘now’ on the ‘net. Here are some first thoughts in response to that…

Blogging
Working on a previous project, we’d established that www.blogger.com was a simple, solid site to use, and easy to access using my Google log-in. Wikipedia explains what a ‘blog‘ is.

FeedBlitz and Feedburner are free services which allow your content to be seen by more users through sending them updates (using RSS or Atom Feeds, as generally used by blogs). Feedblitz converts them into regular (‘regular’ can be defined’) emails to be sent to subscribers.

RSS Feeds add automatically updated content onto a website, naturally keeping the site fresh. Choose content carefully to be relevant to your website/blog.

Virtual Worlds
I tried Second Life, but discovered I wasn’t that interested in getting the hang of it. There’s enough going on in the real world to keep me busy, without inventing a second life! Social networking is different as it’s keeping in contact with people I have met in the real world.

Social Networking

Facebook is my social networking site of choice. Facebook has been a great tool whilst I have been travelling, and I have many ‘Friends’ on there from a variety of different walks of life, but particularly from my time as an Oak Hall Tour Leader. Others recommend ‘spring-cleaning’ Facebook, but if I want to find someone, it’s easy enough, no need to go removing people… always interesting to have a chat with someone from your random past!

I still have MySpace and Friends Reunited accounts. I find Facebook more useful than MySpace, but am currently tinkering with the new features in Friends Reunited (now it’s free!). I have recently signed up to Twitter (famously used by Barack Obama) andTagged to experiment with their capabilities.

There are also more specialist social networks which I have experimented with, includingMyChurch and OKCupid (which gives access to a number of personality tests).

I have deleted my Orkut account as it is largely aimed at the South American market. I’ve not used Bebo as it seems to be aimed at the younger market.

A couple of useful Wikipedia articles: