More NOISE layouts

Top secret NOISE websites layouts/ designs.



Felt really good to get these sorted today, just need to get the damn thing built.

Work in progress for NOISE festival

Too much writing on this blog and not enough pictures, here's a mock up for a success page on the new NOISE Festival website

Vic,

I've attached a rough layout for the success page for each category, curators could work in much the same way.

It based on the Dazed and Confused layout here www.dazeddigital.com/rise/photography/jannica-honey-(edinburgh-uk)/

Left hand side.

Mini artist success profile includes: Name, image, link to their NOISE profile, Dream Job blog if they have one, their selected work (this will open in a lightbox on the same page)description/ list of any success they have had (text, press image, audio etc)

We can run as many of these as you want here but I'd say we limit it to the most successful.

Right hand side.

Thumbnails of successful artists/work from other categories and links to these categories.

I'll go through it with you properly on Tuesday but can you think of anything you want to change/add?

Neil

Build what you want using BBC content

Build what you want using BBC content

backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC's developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent. Content feeds are available for people to build with on a non-commercial basis.

Join the email discussion list to tell us how we could improve the service and converse with others about backstage.bbc.co.uk

The best stuff all ways rises to the top....

This was brought up at the end of the seminar with Aidan on Wed's. Discussing the availability of new technology and how everyone can become a graphic designer, the question was asked how do we find the best stuff. My immediate response was "The best stuff all ways rises to the top...." but that's completely wrong and misses the point.

What we should be focusing on is not the obsession with work getting lost out there on the 'net and the "best" work being over looked. It is now far easier than ever to find work that is of interest to you than ever before. Whether this is the "best" is not the issue, if it's of interest to you, you can find it. More than ever it's possible to get work out there (this comes back to the long tail theory) and seen by/ bought by the people who will find it of most interest.

Notes from Tutorial With Graham

Graphic designers role
YouTube
BBC IPlayer
Portrait of Nation
Influencing a client. Does this matter?
Client, brief, branding.
Traditional broadcasting media.
Channel 4
MA Website
Freelance or organsiation?
Graphic design or website design
Graphic design, website designer or coder?
PHP, XML :(
Role I see for myself at the end of October
Haddock.org
plasticbag.org
elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk
Submissions for the MA
MA as research, MA as professional practice
Blogs

FaceBook Scrabble

Why brothers' Facebook homage to Scrabble spells L-A-W-S-U-I-T

· Big toymakers claim breach of copyright
· Hobby that spawned 2.4m internet addicts

* Randeep Ramesh in Kolkata
* The Guardian,
* Thursday January 17 2008

It is Facebook's most popular game, giving 2.4 million Scrabble addicts worldwide a way to get their fix online. But the web addiction that is Scrabulous may be shut down after the makers of the board game claimed the electronic version was a breach of copyright.

The man from Fortune magazine talks the most sense
"Fortune magazine's Josh Quittner, who broke the story on his technology blog, said: "If I were running a board games company, I might do this: wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding ... Then I'd sweep in and take it over. If I were compassionate, I'd even cut in the guys who did all the work for a percentage point or two to keep the site running."

Tara Brabazon: Bowling Google a googly

This article
Tara Brabazon: Bowling Google a googly

An Australian professor is fed up with essays full of regurgitated Internet mediocrity, she tells Chris Arnot

Tuesday January 22, 2008
The Guardian

really made me angry. In particular this quote

Her argument is that we need more investment in books. Students must not be allowed to accept as truth anything they can find through Google, including "facts" given credence by Wikipedia. User-generated content, she maintains, is creating an age of banality and mediocrity, and stifling debate.

The Wikipedia "facts" thing is interesting and something that is often brought by academics up but misses the point of what Wikpedia should be used for. It's a starting point that should lead to further investigation through external links. Chris Anderson discusses this in "The Long Tail" the role of Wikipedia is not to be an authority on a subject and has never claimed to be. And Google doesn't create any information. It organsises it for you and trys to flog you products via it's adverts.

User-generated content, she maintains, is creating an age of banality and mediocrity, and stifling debate

Really? Good set of responses to her lecture here University students banned from Google and Wikipedia
These in particular

That’s a depressingly backward stance.

The web is just a tool: the more time-consuming but intelligent and long-term solution would be to teach students how to use that tool. Apart from that, she has absolutely no way of implementing her ban.

Why not contact Google, and ask one of their London-based Google Books reps to come and speak about online research techniques, and about the thousands of titles at universities and libraries that are being digitised and made searchable online?

How mindnumbingly stupid - the sub-text I hear is: ‘Read my shit, I know my shit and this is the shit you need to learn. Everyone else’s shit is…well…shit.

But Google ??? It’s not the source like Wiki, it’s merely a method to find out more objective information.

Data Matrix QR code for new promo material

Set up by Vic in the NOISE office

Below is image to use on our new marketing materials. If your phone has a barcode reader simply hover your camera over it and you will be redirected to the NOISE page. It’s all very exciting. Can be used with or with out text

Some background info

The Active Print project is exploring how printed materials and digital displays can be linked to online content, services and applications in all kinds of urban/suburban/rural situations. In particular the concerns of the project lie in how this can be done using the mobile phone – the device that many people carry with them everywhere. Current camera phones now have good enough optics, resolution and processing power to be able to read special "barcode”-like symbols known as "codes" on the printed materials. These symbols encode information such as URLs, phone numbers and various pieces of meta information. When read and decoded by a camera phone, they can initiate several ways of linking the user to content and services,

For some reason it reminded me of this

Barcode Battler

del.icio.us / oweneil

del.icio.us / oweneil

I'm going to start bookmarking everything here. It should make keeping track of sites easier as I'm currently working at NOISE in Manchester and the Leeds Met and Leeds Art College.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 - The Creative License Tour

I attended this way back in November

Adobe Creative Suite 3 - The Creative License Tour

Join Adobe and Academy Class for some amazing workshops around the UK. You'll learn the latest tips and techniques for designing and developing amazingly engaging experiences: in print, online or on any device. See the all new Creative Suite 3 family of products along with the latest in cutting edge web development tools including Adobe Flex and AIR.

See first hand what happens when you bring together the best of Adobe and Macromedia technology. Spend some time with Adobe experts and get answers to your design and development challenges. Take the opportunity to see real-world workflows that take advantage of the unprecedented integration features and benefits within your own creative world and beyond.

It was far better than I had expected. One of the most interesting things was a brief demo of Adobe Thermo

"Thermo" is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Thermo is] for people who are using tools like Illustrator or Photoshop and have a background in interface design and want to create a great experience for someone. But they are primarily a designer... [T]he designer can not only draw what the application looks like, but they can also add the interactivity for how it works. The magic of what we're showing with Thermo right now is that you can select elements that are just pictures on the drawing and you can say this actually represents a list box, or this represents a text edit field and we put the logic to convert the picture into a work component.

This appears to pitch itself in between Photoshop and Dreamweaver/Flex. It allows users to mock up pages that can be exported with code to be worked on by a developer. Whats interesting is a company like Adobe clearly thinks there is a mid-point between being a coder and a designer and is trying develop applications for this market.

The demos of AIR and the applications were also very cool. As were the Adobe Flex applications and demos. My criticism of would be the standard Web 2.0 design Adobe is pushing, lots of curved chrome boxes and reflections. Which seems to missing the point of Web 2.0, it should be far more than a re skin or look.

The FLEX applications in particular were very interesting. Lots of visually lead websites, with some experimental search methods. I'll put a list of the most interesting up at some point.

From a media point of view there were some interesting comments about how Adobe are operating. For example the word processing application Buzzword was developed using Adobe AIR/Flex. Rather than develop a similar product Adobe purchased Virtual Ubiquity, the company who had built the program.

Coletta and Staley were asked about the Adobe acquisition:

When Adobe saw the work that the Buzzword team had done on their platform, which included an early version on the newly announced Apollo (now AIR) platform, Virtual Ubiquity became the first recipient of Adobe's venture fund in the fall of 2006.

The Buzzword team realized that in order to tackle the crowded and chaotic new market, we needed to work with an established software firm to get the kind of stability and market exposure needed to effectively launch Buzzword.

Interesting quote but I guess Adobe are just as grateful for Virtual Ubiquity for creating and developing the product and doing a lot of the initial hard work. This also ties into Adobe making the Flex developers kit free to anyone.

Guardian articles

For the presentation a couple of weeks a go I went back through some of the articles I'd been collecting in relation to the MA.
Broadcasters woo 'lost generation' in deal with social networking site Bebo

But broadcasters have only recently turned their attention to spreading their programmes throughout the web. Web 2.0 logic dictates that broadcasters will stand a better chance of continuing to reach mass audiences if they are able to scatter clips, programmes and other background material throughout the web to users who will no longer head for "destination sites" to watch it.

Inside some of Channel 4's new media projects

"Cross-platform projects fall into two categories: those that are highly integrated and exchange editorial between platforms; and those that deepen or extend the TV element without this editorial exchange, by addressing the same issues and being in the same spirit," Adam Gee Channel 4's new media commissioner for factual..

The news at ... whenever
Launched on Christmas Day, the iPlayer aims to transform the way we watch TV. Will it?

Certainly, in radio, which has had the equivalent time-shift technology for a long time now, liberation from the listings pages has significantly changed the medium. There is statistical and anecdotal evidence that audiences for anti-social programmes have increased through the addition of listeners who were often or always unable to meet fixed transmission times.

Bebo gives free access to TV and music

Evan Cohen, the Bebo director of strategy and operations, said the platform was not just an distribution tool, but an opportunity for media companies to exploit Bebo to cultivate the community around their brand.

Media content spreads virally, finding those "hard to reach" younger audiences who spend the majority of their time online.

Although media companies might prefer to build this community on their own site, said Cohen, "the reality is that they are not able to".

"There's a shift from that very possessive model of building up your own site to the super distributed mode - 'let's go where the audience is'," he added.

MySpace moves to centre stage

So-called blended distribution (using various platforms to deliver content) is at the heart of the BBC's approach, says BBC director of future media and technology Ashley Highfield. "We've always syndicated bbc.co.uk content to third parties - be that RSS feeds or AOL, MSN, YouTube and Yahoo - and it's worked well." According to Highfield, the monthly audience for bbc.co.uk is 17 million while the audience for BBC content consumed online, away from its branded site, is another eight million. "For us it has added significant reach," says Highfield. "The thinking was - and still is - to drive audience from clips of BBC content, shown on third-party sites like YouTube, back to bbc.co.uk to access the full programme using the BBC i-Player."

Current Reading List

Scott Berkun "The Myths Of Innovation"
Christopher Alexander "Notes On the Synthesis of Form"
Jesse James Garret "The Elements of Use Experience"
John Maeda "The Laws of Simplicity"
Raph Kostet "A Theory of Fun for Games Design"
Bill Moggridge "Designing for Interactions"
Malcolm Gladwell "The Tipping Point"
Lucy Bullivant "Responsive Environments"
Barry Shwartz "The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less"
Italio Calvino "Six Memos for The Next Millenium"
Donlad Norman "The Design Of Everyday Thing"
Lewis Mumford "The City In History"
Lewis Mumford "The Lewis Mumford Reader"
Scott McKevitt "Why The World Is Full of Useless Thing"
James Surowiecki "The Wisdom of Crowds"
Chris Anderson "The Long Tail"

New Media Seminar: arts and the digital opportunity

Great set of seminars/ lectures form the Arts Council

There's a real relevance to the work I'm doing with NOISE Festival in Manchester and looking at using new media to help promote and generate work for the festival in October. This goes beyond simply making a website for the festival. It's about how you use new technology to help create the work, document the process and showcase the final outcomes. This is something the Portrait of Nation site does. Rather than simply showcasing what happened at the festival in December 2008, as would have been traditionally the case PoN launches in January 2008 and uses the site to create a dialogue between cities and generate the work for the events in December.

I personally think this is a pretty radical approach for an organisation such as Heritage Lottery Funding. To embrace social networking and user generated content and start to think about working this way. Whether you can pursued 17 city councils across the UK that this is the correct approach is another matter entirely

The other issue that these seminars raise is that there are roles out there for people who aren't quite designers, aren't coders, aren't art directors, aren't film makers or producers but operator somewhere in between all of this stuff. Adam Gee, Channel 4, and Anthony Lilley, Magic Lantern, are two really interesting examples. I'm really interested in pursuing this area of work and using my role at NOISE as a kind of test case. The festival has very limited funds so making the most of partnerships is key, I want to not just have the festival site but try and develop a presence across a range of new media platforms. Already I'm looking at using Second Life educational islands, YouTube video channels and developing FaceBook applications.

New Media Seminar: arts and the digital opportunity
On 12 September 2007, Arts Council England hosted a seminar at Tate Modern to discuss the opportunities, issues and challenges presented by new media and emerging technology.

Attended by a wide variety of music and other arts organisations, and key figures from the new media sector, the discussion ranged across many important issues, including education, relationships with audiences, intellectual property and contracts, the regulatory environment, user-generated content and new distribution platforms.

These two in particular are very interesting

Part 1: from arts broadcasting to arts media
Anthony Lilley (Chief Executive, Magic Lantern Productions) sets the scene and talks about what the changes in digital media might mean for the cultural sector

Part 5: potential for participation
Anthony is joined by Dick Penny (Managing Director, Watershed Media Centre), Patrick Walker (Head of Content Partnerships, Google) and Adam Gee (New Media Commissioner, Factual, Channel 4). The panel discuss issues surrounding ‘user-generated content’ and how artists and arts organisations can engage different audiences by making use of new distribution platforms such as You Tube.

Facebook article Guardian 15/10/08

I'm going to start to update this blog on a regular basis, as I have a ton of research and work from Manchester that needs putting somewhere

With Friends Like These 15/1/08

Briefly my main issue with this article is the assumption that Facebook, Google or MySpace are anything other than a business. Yes Facebook provides a unique way to interact with other people and stay in contact with people. I like Zuckerberg's social graph theory. Though I'll be surprised if Facebook lasts long enough to really test it but it can used with other social networking sites.

This goes against a lot of my principles but Facebook, like Google are in the business of selling advertising. They are not there to provide a social service or network, that is not their primary business. Users can use the site in this way but Facebook doesn't make money from connecting people it makes money from selling advertising. I guess this is what the article is saying but the author seems shocked that Facebook uses peoples details in this way.

There is a quote from Paul Walker from Google at the New Media Seminar: arts and the digital opportunity which kind of sums this up. When asked if Google are involved in the business of creating content Walker said "No our primary business is advertising and data indexing" I'm paraphrasing here but the point is that sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Google are not there to simply provide a social network service, this is not how they make money. Whether you agree with this approach is another matter.

Presentation

Three projects at the moment
Portrait of a Nation is most complete and will be launching at the beginning of February
Portrait of a Nation
Showcase Site

Networking Site

Noise Arts Festival for people under 25, an online showcase of work
NOISE
Current site

Site is to be relaunched at the end of February.

Ongoing MA promotional work
Studio space

PoN ScreenGrabs and Visuals




Arts Council

Anthony Lilley (Chief Executive, Magic Lantern Productions) sets the scene and talks about what the changes in digital media might mean for the cultural sector.

Presentation

Portrait of a Nation
Showcase Site