The Original Sims

Days have gone since being the tourism supremo for Belfast or the Northern Ireland Tourist Board was stock comedy content.  Yesterday I joined a group of notable media people in a fashionable Belfast hotel.  The agenda of the meeting was re-branding Belfast as a destination.

Belfast has got a fantastic amount going for it.  Much of that is the recent history - but as one person put it "What do you do after you have your photo taken beside one of the murals?" Here are some examples. That question can be extended to "… especially on a Sunday?" a time that Belfast becomes a limbo.  There is the Industrial History - a lot of people want to see where the Titanic was built.

There is the cultural city - oddly not many tourists know about that.

Some cities are known by one icon; Paris has the Eiffel Tower (big and impressive)  Copenhagen has the Little Mermaid (have you ever see it - it is very very little - I felt cheated).  Belfast has Sampson and Goliath - now they are big and impressive and there are two of them.  There is a fantastic view from the top.  But getting up there is a big problem.

Should the Belfast Brand be about the future rather than the past?  Is there an annual event - or annual events?  If not what should they be?

Re-branding Belfast is no longer a joke - it’s a serious business with serious people thinking about it.  Where to start?

Like many people who live and work in the city, I’d start with the taxi service. All I want to be able to do sometimes is walk onto the street and hail one.  On Tuesday standing outside the Royal Hospital for more than half an hour waiting for a taxi "It’ll be there in 10 minutes" gave me time to think about the next day’s lunch about tourism in Belfast - it was pretty obvious to me what would enhance the visitor experience.

Constant Comedy is a major new website from Nothern Ireland created by Wild Rover.

One of the winners of the Broadband Content Initiative, it is the first to get a public viewing.  The initiative funded six projects from something like 80 initial proposals. 

I was one of the judges of the competition and feel proud to have a very small part in the project.

Good luck to them and the other winners.

The quarterly radio listening results were revealed yeaterday - and I’m more than happy to note, we all love radio more and more.  This from media Guardian:

But the latest audience figures published yesterday reveal that we are more in love with the radio than ever before. It is just that we are not listening to it in quite the same way as we used to.

Having seen off the rise of television music channels such as MTV in the 1980s, radio is now piggy backing on the digital revolution, with nearly 12 million people - 26% of the adult population - tuning in via digital radio, digital TV and the internet.

Around 4.4 million listen on their mobile phone, up more than 25% on last year, with 1.8 million of them aged between 15 and 24. "In this multiplatform environment it’s absolutely vital for radio stations to make content as accessible on as many platforms as possible," said Paul Jackson, chief executive of Virgin Radio, which became the first to launch on 3G mobile phones in 2005.

This is not a sitre for The Sims game - swe just happen to share the same name.  But here are some links that might help (thank you Google)

Looking at my Blog log (what searches brought people to my Blog), there are a lot of searches for ITV on demand.

On demand is now available for BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. BBC’s iPlayer is still in public beta and will be for a few more weeks.  iPlayer and Chanel Four’s 4OD deliver files to your hard drive and allow you time to watch - a week in both cases, I think.  ITV on demand streams programmes on your PC and Five downleads to your PC.

Find them here:

BBC iPlayer

Channel 4 On Demand

Five

ITV

The recently opened Oh Yeah headquarters in Belfast’s Outlet building is an impressive space.  I was invited to be part of a panel talking about giving music away:

In May Irish Band The Crimea became the first band to give away an entire album for free digitally, has it worked? The issue of intellectual property over routes to market will dominate the creative industries over the next decade, we talk to some of the main players: Davey McManus – The Crimea, Davy Sims – Editor in New Media (BBC) and others.

It was my first visit to the building which offers three floors of warehouse space plus (potentially) a roof garden area.  Stuart Bailie showed me and Adam around pointing out not only what was there (studio, office, lots of space) but what was planned. 

Outlet was a record label in Belfast (the linking URL is a redirect to a different site). It specialised in "Country and Irish". I remember one arguing with the owner (this would have been late ’70s or early ’80s) of the label that this new loud brash music coming out of Belfast was the future of music from this island.  He argued against.  I’m not sure if either of us were right. 

The Outlet building is no longer home to what was once the solid reliable country and Irish.  It’s now a place for experimentation and dreams and planning for the future.

So, it took a generation or so before my argument came to fruition. Although we were talking last night about digital distribution of music and how it can be given away through virtual communities and social networks on the internet, the final point I made was that it is having a physical space where people can meet, talk and share is essential and in many ways more important than a life on-line.  And it’s a tribute to the visionaries and deamers who have turned an old Belfast record warehouse into a "big idea" for Irish music.

Watch a video about the place here (real media player);