The next step in the Broadcast Your Life revolution:

The social networking phenomenon is leaving the confines of the personal computer. Powerful new mobile devices are allowing people to send round-the-clock updates about their vacations, their moods or their latest haircut.

New York Times

New online services, with names like Twitter, Radar and Jaiku, hope people will use their ever-present gadget to share (or, inevitably, to overshare) the details of their lives in the same way they have become accustomed to doing on Web sites like MySpace.

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There’s no denying that MySpace is the Wal-Mart of social networks. But over the past two years, I’ve come to learn that I prefer to go to boutiques for my needs.

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After the Click Thinking meeting in the morning, off to Newry to visit the new Story Finders group there.

Story Finders is an idea that I came up with just over a year ago.  Most of the time spent then has been finding the funding and recruiting volunteers.  The original idea was to find individuals around the country.  Train them in digital recording, give them the suipport to go and find stories (of all sorts - not "traditional" news stories) who could report from their community about - well report on what ever they want.  They could then offer them to us for publication at www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland or post the stories on their own web site or even offer it to a newspaper or other publication.  The idea is that the stories are theirs - it’s up to them what to do with them.  Our job is to help and support and drive forward digital media literacy.

That idea has blossomed largely do to the volunteers and the project co-ordinator.  We now have six groups in different stages of development.  In Newry today we were talking around editorial matters and traps that people can fall into.  There is the makings of a really good team of committed individuals and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with and beginning to develop their own site with their own stories.

  BBC | Newry | Storyfinders |

To a meeting in BT’s head office in Belfast’s Lanyon Tower this morning.  As a member of the steering group for Click Thinking, we met with representatives of organisations working for older people.  The objective of Click Thinking is to give people who might be excluded from digital developments the confidence, skills, knowledge and understanding to embrace digital technology.

In his introduction Frank McManus from BT explained that there are now 300,000+ broadband connections in Northern Ireland.  There are around 700,000 homes in Northern Ireland.  The potential of a digitally divided society needs to be challenged.  Older people are one of the groups who are likely to need more encouragement than the rest of the population.  At present 47% of people between 50 and 65 use broadband while only 14% of people over 65 use broadband.  While appreciating usage of broadband is only one measure of digital inclusion, it is a useful one.

Cost, confidence, relevance, capability and access are the main reasons why older people can become digitaly excluded.

Twenty-one years ago today I joined the BBC!  I realised that as I was making my way to the BBC NI Archives at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum to do some reasarch for a website. 

The place has thousands of hours of programme recordings and as if by fate and without searching I pulled out two recordings of The Bottom Line - the programme I launched in September 1986.  A version of the programme is still broadcast but now it’s called Across The Line.  The target audience wasn’t born when the programme was first aired.

 BBC

Glad to see I appear to be on the right track with the personalised media thoughts:

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2063126,00.html

I rarely get to visit the historic BBC building Kingswood Warren .  I know it has a revered history having played a part in most technical broadcasting advances in the last 60 years - but the onlly one I was able to remember when I was there was the development of NICAM digital stereo.  But I did find this, here.

Designs Department was set up in 1947 to give impetus to the re-equipping of Radio and the re-opening of the television service after the war.

In the following thirty years there were very few developments in broadcasting engineering in which the Department did not have a hand. From the conversion of the 405-line service to 625 lines, the launch of colour, flim and video tape recording, telecine and caption generation, transmission of television by radio links, transatlantic cable and satellite, teletext and the BBC Microcomuputer, Designs Department had a hand in them all.

We were meeting about the PRISM project.  I am about the only non-technical person attending the meetings but after a year of technical planning and research I’m beginning to get an insight into some of the potential for the project.  It looks very, very exciting for the producer and the consumer.

In a few months there will be a public exhibition of what the possible outcomes are for the three year project.

This is fun and challenging, too.

It can also be slightly addictive.

Just to update

Kevin Coe says (rightly)

Just to avoid any confusion - Dare to be Digital is still being organised and run by the University of Abertay Dundee. The regional host centre in Belfast is sub-contracted to the bodies you mention, and the Irish teams will spend the first nine weeks there, travelling to Scotland for the tenth and final week.

About 10 days ago I hosted a morning for digital content producers form Northern Ireland.  Jon Kingsbury < http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/13/kingsbury.shtml > from BBC’s Future Media was the key speaker.  It’s Jon’s role to champion suppliers to BBC’s websites and other new media platforms. (more here http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/newmedia/index.shtml)

In bbc.co.uk we are going through something of a re-appraisal of the service and the technology that underpins the service.  Jon mentioned the 15 principles which are key to the thinking of BBC’s Web 2.0 proposition.

1. Build Web products that meet a clearly-defined audience need.
Anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. Don’t just bung more and more stuff up.

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well.
Do less, but execute perfectly.

3. Fall forward, fast.
Make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

4. The Web is a conversation. Join in.
Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

5. Any Website is only as good as its worst page.
Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

6. Maximise routes to content.
Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

7. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes.
Let users take nuggets of content with them, with links back to your site.

8. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves.
Link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content & tool to enhance your site, and vice versa.

9. Link to discussions on the Web, don’t host them.
Only host Web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale.

10. Treat the entire Web as a creative canvas.
Don’t restrict your creativity to your own site. Look at A&Mi and “One Big Weekend”.

11. Consistent design & navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all.
Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent.
After all, it’s their most personal data. Best respect it.

13. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”
She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

14. Accessibility is not an optional extra.
Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users.

15. 8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

I’ve been a two interesting conferences/meetings/symposiums (not quite sure how to label them) organised by Invest Northern Ireland in recent weeks.  The first at the Sonic Arts Centre in Queen’s University brought together a range of people from digital media.   Mind you (nearly) all media is digital, now.  It’s just that some producers don’t realise that yet.

The SARC event was the kick off (Blog here http://dcsf.blogspot.com/) and on Monday last we worked through some of the agenda generated from that.

Some of the ideas are “no brainers” – a website open to all with an interest in digital media to provide information and showcase work as well as using social networking tools to encourage real and virtual partnerships. Other ideas were inventive.  but I’m not sure what the level of confidentiality was - so I’ll say no more.

The emerging message is “Think Big – the planet is our foot print”, although no one used that phrase (I’ll do a Creative Commons on it if you want )  To me one of key points is about clarity on who the audience/client/customer is. 

Dare to be Digital is the UK’s premier video games competition for students who love to play games, and want to design their own video game. The competition has until this year been run by University of Abertay.  http://www.daretobedigital.com/. 

To quote from their site

 “Dare to be Digital is an internationally renowned proving ground for talented computer science and art students to design their own original video game. Do you like to play video games? Are you serious about designing video games? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Not only will you get to design and build your dream game but we’ll host your team in well equipped computer labs and you’ll also receive funding and mentor support to help make it happen.

“Every year between June and August, students form teams of five and compete over 10 weeks to design a fully functioning video game prototype. At the end of 10 weeks, all the teams will gather at Dare Protoplay to showcase their work and be judged by industry experts. Dare Protoplay represents the most innovative design from emerging games artists and programmers and is open to the public to come and play the games.”

A couple of years ago I went to the finals presentation and as well as having an excellent jolly, I came away both impressed by the event and envious of Dundee. 

But envy no more. This year Dare to be Digital it has been "franchised" to Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland http://www.daretobedigital.com/partnership/partnership-prospectus.pdf (see page 10 of the pdf).  Belfast City Council, Queens, Digital Hub and Cinemagic are putting together a team for this year.  Students will be drawn from North and South and Queens will be the venue for the 10 week course.  From what I gathered from yesterday evening’s presentation, Queens are planning a Digital Games course from next academic year.