The first half of the week involved some proper, heads-down serious work, which made a pleasant change from the meetings and proposal-writing that made up the bulk of January. Still, if you don’t put in the effort in the first place you don’t get to do the work, so I shouldn’t grumble.

Alex graduated this week. Hooray!

The intense work was balanced out by some time out of the office. On Wednesday I had a good chat with Daniel Bye who was responsible for a much-discussed blog post on Twitter’s use by theatres. In the cafe of the Free Word Centre we discussed the variety of online voices that surround theatres as well as their restrictions, affordances and scope for creativity.

There were plenty of good discussions to be had the next day at the RSA’s State of the Arts conference. As is often the case with these things, those chats often took place in the gaps between the scheduled talks and panel sessions. That’s a testament to the quality of the attendees attracted as much as anything. It was a decent event too, although my main gripe was that the breakout sessions felt rushed – too many speakers (often good ones) and not enough time, meaning conversations and ideas didn’t get enough of a chance to develop.

I also went to an event hosted by Arts & Business at The Fleming Collection, which currently has an exhibition of work from the Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Collection, and on Thursday I made it along to the closing party of Social Media Week London.

Next week will be good. We’ve got some visitors coming over from Nantes, I’ll be live blogging Screen WM’s City As A Platform event and then I’m heading to Bristol for a Media Sandbox showcase. More about all that (and Guardian Hacks SXSW) next week.

Distractions:

… have been fewer and further between, in all honesty. However, a few things caught the eye:

• Stephen Truax’s Artists on the Internet contained a goodly number of interesting links
• Don’t Make Me Steal
• All the reported sessions from Devoted and Disgruntled 6
• The Future of Art – a video shot, edited and screened at Transmediale

Oh, and as a final note. You may have noticed that this is the weeknote for Week 104. If so you may be wondering why there’s been no mention of birthday celebrations. Well, although the company was registered in Feb 09, we didn’t officially start trading until April. So there you go.

Just when you think you’ve made something idiot proof, someone goes
and builds a better idiot. We know your visitors aren’t idiots, but if
you make your site so a 5 year old can use it then your visitors will
be able to do so without even thinking about it.

You already know how to use your site, so do the people who built it,
but what about your visitors?Small stumbling blocks in the journey
through your site can cost you a fortune in missed opportunities and
you and your designers may not be able to see the wood for the trees.

Usability testing should be done early, before you launch and
certainly before you start spending money promoting it. Usability
studies needn’t be expensive, they’re no longer the preserve of the
big boys, getting real life people who weren’t involved in building
your site to test it for you is the best money you will ever spend.

Multivariate Testing

Picture the scenario; your marketing people have written a new slogan,
your web designer has made a new layout and your graphics guys have
designed a new logo. Your MD likes the logo but hates the copy, your
sales Director loves the copy but hates the layout and you love the
layout but hate the logo.

You could argue these points for ever, you could ask more people in
your organisation, you could employ consultants to decide for you, you
could flip a coin or ask Paul the psychic octopus.

And you would probably still get it wrong.

The best, simplest and cheapest way to make the decision is to test.
In the scenario above, you have two logos, two layouts and two
slogans. If you were to make every possible combination you have eight
different versions of the page – 2 x 2 x 2 = 8.

Multivariate testing lets you test each version of the page on real
life customers – without them even knowing you’re testing.

Multivariate testing generates all the possible versions of your page,
displays them randomly to each visitor and measures the conversion
rate for each one. Not only that, it tells you which area – logo,
slogan or layout – has the biggest effect on conversion.

You get to make the decision based on real results from your visitors,
not on the personal opinions and vested interests of individuals.
Clever huh?

Visitors want to convert, that’s why they came to your site, you
should make sure your site makes it easy and doesn’t do anything that
will put them off.

Here are a few no-brainers that a surprising number of sites get wrong:

Bad Navigation – make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for
Hide your contact details
Make visitors fill out complicated forms
Make your pages cluttered
Ask for loads of information
Don’t show shipping costs up front
Use tiny, poor quality photos

Exactly what you need to do to increase your conversion rate will be
unique to your site, products, services and visitors, so how do you
know what to do? And more importantly how do you know whether the
changes you made work or not?

The answer to both of these questions is testing. Find potential
conversion rate problems with usability testing and then decide which
fixes work the best with A/B or multivariate testing

Temporary Film Birmingham Assistant.

Responsible for supporting the Film Liaison Co-ordinaor through the following duties:
- processing filming requests submitted to Film Birmingham, including responding to phone and e-mail enquiries for filming requests and other information such as enquiries about various locations, child licensing requirements or about arranging screenings for films.
- gaining permissions to film in accordance with the City Council’s Film Charter, including, contacting the nominated film liaisons within each directorate, ensuring all relevant forms have been completed satisfactorily including risk assessments, and granting permission to film. You may also be required to carry out site visits to ensure adherence to conditions.
- managing all aspects of the content of the locations database including collection of photographs and data for the online locations database, travelling to locations and taking photographs with digital camera to be provided, inputting this data into the locations database.

The rate is £8.50 per hour and will commence from the end of Feb for 2-3days per week.

If you are interested in applying please send your CV to Rebecca on info *at* producersforum.org.uk

Deadline:16th February 2011
Informal interviews will take place w/c 21st February 2011

I was aproached by MADE (Midlands Architecture and Designed Environment) to take part in an all day workshop and evening seminar that focussed on the future of wayfinding and identity. The daytime workshop was organised by Birminghams's Local Education Partnership as part of an ongoing programme for artists who are working on Building Schools for the Future. The theme of the day session was therefore heavily focussed on wayfinding solutions within schools. It was good to meet the artists and see some of the great work they are doing with schools, from lighting solutions to very impressive stone carving to companies like cantoo who work on developing artworks for the public realm.

The evening seminar was billed as the following:

Discover interesting and innovative future approaches to wayfinding and identity in an evening seminar organised by MADE and Birmingham Local Education Partnership. This event will be of interest to anyone working in architecture, design, graphics, branding, the arts, schools and public buildings.

The evening seminar proved to be well promoted with over 80 people turning up for the 2 hour event.

Colette Jeffrey, a lecturer in graphic communication at Birmingham City University, led a master class in wayfinding during the day, as well as presenting in the evening seminar. Colette definetly knew her stuff and, amongst many other things, researched and co-authored the official guidance on wayfinding for NHS hospitals, as well as working on wayfinding strategies for Wembley Arena, Heathrow Airport and the Natural History Museum.

Jonathan Rez talked about wayfinding design in the context of service design - a holistic approach to visitor experience design and the design of public/private environments. Jonathan talked about the concept of thingfinding, more of which you can read here http://www.rez.com.au/notes/from-wayfinding-to-thingfinding.

MADE asked me to present on the subject of digital media in the built environment and as a tool for wayfinding. I thought this description (that I provided 2 weeks before the event and without too much idea of what I would present) would leave it fairly open for me...

Andy will be talking about the use of digital media in place and space, and how sharing data pertaining to location can be used to enrich user experience. As well as focusing on how this data affects visitors, he'll also discuss how the visitors themselves are now key to building bigger and better experiences, using digital technology to improve the data and navigate their surroundings.

I talked about four case study projects we are currently working on that use digital media and emerging technologies within the built environment, focussing on how linking data sets between buildings and spaces can start to create seamless user experiences that allow users to navigate from place to place efficiently and explore much richer content.

Trying to look to the future of wayfinding I talked about technologies including Augmented Reality and Near Field Communications and discussed possibilities of how these will be used more within the urban experience.

It was an enjoyable event, and the seminar was followed by some very interesting conversations.

If you have to move a large site witha number of hierarchical categories from one WordPress installation to another, you may come across a problem we at Substrakt have faced quite a few times.

WordPress deals with hierarchical taxonomies like categories in a strange way. It not only stores the categories in the relevant taxonomy tables, along with parent IDs, it also stores an array of those parent-child relationships in the wp_options table.

The upshot of this is that, if you import a blog and you find that not all of the categories you've imported are appearing, fear not, chances are they've imported just fine, it's just that the category_children option within wp_options hasn't been updated.

When you setup a new site, you'll probably find the value of this option is something like “a:0:{}”. Problem with that is that WordPress recognises that it's an array of options, so doesn't bother to correct it. If however, you clear that value out of your database - using something like phpMyAdmin or the below SQL statement - you should find the next time you get a list of categories, the hierarchy will be displayed correct.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'category_children';

This happens because WordPress first checks to see if that value is an array. If it is, as I've mentioned, it'll take the value as read. If not - ie: if the value of that option is blank - it will rebuild the tree and resave the value. The next time you look at that value in your database, you should find something a bit more verbose.

Hope that helps. And if you're having any WordPress issues at all, get in touch with us and we'll see if we can help.

There’s an article in the web version of NMA says that the creative is the most important part of any campaign. Whilst it might seem obvious its actually a comprehensive piece of research and worth reading. Flash back a couple of weeks and the print NMA ran the headline that Cadbury makes £3 for every £1 it spends on digital advertising. The company ran a comprehensive trial, the first of its kind apparently, to accurately monitor the impact of online advertising on offline sales. This is good news for many people, for Cadbury first and foremost, their agency PHD Media Group, Consumer Connect (joint venture between Yahoo and Nectar) and the Google backed Gfk Media Panel. That’s a lot of big brands. The only one I hadn’t heard of previously was PHD Media Group (I ran a credit check and they’ve got the same credit score as WH Smith where I bought the magazine. You’ve probably heard of them). So that’s a heady mix of expenditure, expertise, big brand backing and hours of work to make this happen and its quite some distance from being available to most companies. But the intriguing (and obvious) element for me is that Cadbury wanted the same thing every company wants - cost efficiency. The headline caught my eye because NMA were shouting about it. The magazine’s title gives away where its interests lie. But the trial was win-win for Cadbury because even if the figures had been the other way around the data are still extremely valuable. If you’re making £1 for every £3 on digital ads you should stop spending it.

Its not necessarily the case that it takes a hugely complicated mega-brand backed system to track success. This was a complex system because people weren’t clicking on banner ads to buy their Creme Eggs, they were seeing the advertising, registering an emotional response and being reminded of it when they were in a shop. Cadbury advertise on a plethora of channels, largely because they’re a huge brand, they can afford to and they’ve never previously been able to say for sure what works so they couldn’t afford not to.

This sort of tracking is actually possible for most companies because most companies in the UK don’t sell their wares in shops. For most companies there is a direct connection between web traffic and sales. Its not hits (hits = how idiots track success as analytics guru Avinash Kaushik says), its more subtle than that. The trick is understanding that connection and knowing how to measure it. Its about working out the best way of defining success and knowing when its achieved. This is something that takes its own kind of creativity. If you’re not getting both kinds of creativity from your marketing company, branding agency or video production company then there’s something wrong.

Most of this week seemed to be packed into the first few days. On top of the usual kind of stuff, a few proposals required midnight oil to be burned on a couple of occasions. Such is work/life. The highlight of the week was a meeting to firm up the final stages of our project with Rosie Kay, launching 3 March – proper exciting stuff.

There was a change of pace on Thursday, as I headed off to the Light House in Wolverhampton for some training. It was time to slow down and think about different business models and how they could be applied to our various projects. It’s not easy to spare a whole day for this sort of thing – when you’re busy, investment in your own skills is often the first casualty but it’s important to make the time when you can.

Meanwhile, Ian was at a meeting to hear about plans for the BBC Big Screen. You can read his notes on CiB.

On Friday I was invited to a round-table discussion with Jeremy Hunt MP and some local media luminaries to talk about the plans for local TV. I don’t particularly care for or about the idea – only one person around the table seemed all that keen – and much of it sounded utterly nonsensical, but what do I know?

Disappointingly, we never got off the first item on the agenda, which was a shame because I was much more interested in talking about the wider promotion of the creative industries (and digital media in particular) and hearing more about Creative England.

Next week looks set to be nice and varied – as well as the general day-to-day there’ll be more proposals (some time to do the work would be nice), the RSA’s State of the Arts conference, an exhibition launch to attend and a few long-awaited meetings.

Distractions

• The vids from the Culture Hack Day talks are online along with a few extra notes from a couple of the speakers, so I’ve updated my notes
• Google’s Art Project was probably the talk of the week
• The Visible Archive has a lot to discover. I came across that shortly after seeing the website for The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris
• On the American sports front, I liked the visualisation of the NBA Slam Dunk Contest and Stamen’s Super Bowl-related musings
• The second part of Everything is a Remix is up
• Finally, from PopTech, Lisa Gansky’s talk called ‘The future is sharing’ caught the eye. The description refers to a ‘”mesh” economy of shared services and products’. I don’t think I’ve explained why we’re called Meshed Media before, but this hits a few relevant marks:

It’s been a while since we went to Birmingham’s Science Museum - Think Tank - at Millennium Point, so myself and Elliot went there today. Here’s a quick video:

Think Tank at Millennium Point in Birmingham from Karl Binder on Vimeo.

Creative Careers Festival organised by Bright Space was a two-day event for 13 – 18 year olds. The creative and cultural sectors offer a multitude of opportunities for interesting careers, although there seems to be a lack of information and guidance out there, therefore these pathways become unclear. The aim of this was to highlight careers in the creative industries offering workshops, demonstrations, seminars and networking opportunities.

We were approached to work with Bright Space to create an identity that would engage with young people and we produced a brand, website, flyers, banners and a 54 page event brochure. The event took place at the Mac, Birmingham last Friday and Saturday and attracted over 1000 attendees. Some involved organisations included MADE, Rare (Microsoft), 4Talent, The Rep, THSH, Fused Magazine and Substrakt.

On the Friday afternoon I was sat on the Young Creatives Panel in the Hexagon Theatre alongside Emily Jones (Town Hall Symphony Hall), Annabel Clark (Blogger / Flatpack Festival), Courtney Salmon (Music video producer) and Matt Windle (Poet). The aim was to give young people a chance to talk to those who are already working in the creative industries but close to their age group. The panel lasted an hour and we were asked questions about our experience, routes and aspirations for the future. Tips and advice, that as professionals we can often take for granted. Very informal, we shared answers and openly discussed opinions based on our individual experience and journeys. Coming from all different backgrounds it was a great insight to hear about all the amazing stuff happening in Birmingham and it reinforced how important it is for us all to work together and collaborate as young creatives.

The latest addition to studio 39 is James Crockford of James Crockford Photography who joins Substrakt, Podnosh, Amarus and ourselves.

He does wedding, portrait, pet and corporate photography, as you can see on his site.

What his website doesn’t tell you is that he knows just how to endear himself to his new studiomates, as evidenced by the box of cupcakes that was tucked under his arm yesterday. Off to a good start, then.

Over the last month I’ve been writing about the Future of Local Media over a series of posts (plus introduction). This was a process leading towards an article for the Talk About Local website, which I’m about to start work on. Before I do that I wanted to try and summarise everything in one place. Here are my notes.

The importance of The Commons

• Radically lowered barriers to entry.
• Fundamentally this is human social activity like any other.
• Local websites look like trad media on surface but are fundamentally different.

What does “local” really mean online?

• A place is like any other subject. Interest in it will vary.
• Online communities of interest are similar to local communities of interest.
• Not everyone who lives in a place is interested in it.
• The local knowledge resource is like an iceberg. “tacit local knowledge” and “surfaced public local knowledge”. (D’Log)

A Fractured Landscape

• News as social currency. Awareness of resources and changes in community.
• The Media has never functioned effectively at a really local level.
• Word of mouth. System with high tollerance for failure. Powered by gossip.
• Fixing the “bowling alone” problem for certain generation.

Geo and the Now

• Viewing places through social graph.
• Viewing social through places graph?
• Moving away from lock-in of Facebook towards disposible of Grindr.
• Majority are lazy innovativers. Learn from social minorities.

Empowerment and Innovation

• Blogging is empowering to the blogger.
• Platform for innovation.
• Tools for the inquisitive and experimental.
• Personal and business development.

Filtering places

• Augmented reality using data.
• Filtering reality. Again fits with normal human activity.
• Issues moving forward.
• Move away from hard data towards “sense of place” through complexity?

The gap between hobby and professional

• The middle ground. How to be bigger but not huge while staying afloat.
• Future of local media requires experimenting and not slavishly echoing old models.

I’m still not 100% sure what form my Talk About Local piece will take. It has to be accessible to “normal” people and attempt to influence the agenda for where local media might be encouraged to go in the next few years. I’ll be working through some ideas with Nicky at TaL tomorrow so before then, is there anything I’ve missed? Is there something above that you think is really important and should be emphasized?

I would really appreciate your thoughts.

Fullrange were out in force on Sunday 30th January to support James Villarreal of Glide Utilities, Colin White of Ortus Group and me doing Tough Guy. If you don’t know Tough Guy, it’s an endurance event consisting of a 6(ish) mile run interspersed with, and followed by a set of army-style obstacles. Scramble nets, tunnels and rope crossings constitute the more standard style of obstacle but there are also burning barriers to jump over, pitch black tunnels with live electrical wires hanging down and an abundance of water-based obstacles. For the frontrunners most of these water hazards were completely frozen over. I’m reliably informed that these people spilled plenty of blood smashing the ice with their legs as they went through. Our team plan of allowing a couple of thousand people to go in front of us made sure the ice was broken by the time we got there. The temperature was a little above freezing so the ice did hang around all day. Mostly it felt like you were wading chest deep through Baileys on the rocks.

Given the cold and the somewhat extreme nature of the event its always impressive to see people sprinting round in costume. There was a team of guys dressed as native americans, barechested and warpainted. One guy in a dinner suit that I sincerely hope was rented from Moss Bros and a number of lunatics in lingerie, mankinis or just thongs.

We ran the event in support of Birmingham Children’s Hospital as well as the organiser’s chosen charities and have so far raised over £3,000. Click here if you would like to sponsor us.

There’s a bunch of pictures over on our facebook page.

Stetsons at the ready people! I'm pleased to announce that Andy and I are jetting off for SXSW Interactive 2011, in March. Though Andy's a seasoned South-Byer, it'll be my first time, so I am, as the young people would say, stoked.

Last year, location-based services like Foursquare ruled the roost, and the year before saw Twitter begin to burst into the mainstream. But with geosocial stuff still very much on the horizon, and services like Facebook Places merging checkins with voucher-code sites like Groupon, we're hoping we can still join in the conversations around place and space.

Watch the sxswi tag on our blog for more updates, and find Andy and myself on the SXSW Directory, should you want to say hi!

Here’s Matt Haughey, creator of MetaFilter, talking about his community.

via Anil

These weekly updates come round far too quickly. Today Alex and I were at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe, the first of the year and a thoroughly pleasant way to spend a morning. It was the busiest it’s been for a few months, which was good.

We’ve got to decide what we’re doing with the regular meet-ups – we’re keen to make sure the format doesn’t get stale and, more pressingly, we’re moving them elsewhere as there are problems with disabled access at the current venue. There’s still no decision on where the next one will be yet.

This week has been blessedly meeting-free, meaning we’ve been able to deliver a fair amount of work relatively uninterrupted. Ian’s been busy at Trident House but also spent a couple of days helping our office-mates Podnosh on a project. Alex’s has been helping me with some research among other things.

Otherwise, there’s been lots of interesting stuff floating around the internet this week. Ed Vaizey’s speech at the National Theatre on cultural innovation was interesting and potentially encouraging, if a little heavier on aspiration than practicalities. But then it was a keynote speech – what do you expect?

Daniel Bye’s Twitter – a Challenge to Theatres was nicely provocative and deserves a longer reply. In a nutshell: I absolutely agree that there’s scope for theatre people to do more interesting things on Twitter (not to mention the many other communication channels that have opened up in the recent past) but I don’t entirely agree that the ‘institutional’ channels are necessarily the right place for that.

Lyn Gardner asked ‘In the age of blogging, can shows keep critics at bay?‘. Interesting that. The answer might be along the lines of ‘maybe only those critics who get their tickets for free’. Again, it raises some good questions and plays into a possible upcoming project.

In other new, my education/indoctrination into Ruby on Rails is continuing. Having twigged that all I’m doing is learning a new language (and I like learning languages) I’m trying to immerse myself to as much entry level stuff as possible for a bit while the key concepts settle in my head. Lifehacker’s Night School has been timely.

Distractions:

• Netflix Q4 report which is fascinating for the general air of ‘wow… that was better than expected’
• Cultural Bloggers Interviewed – something I’ve downloaded for reading some time later
• Mixlr is a platform/service for broadcasting ‘radio’ online
• ifttt is internet gaffer tape. Top idea
• Birmingham has a Lonely Planet iPhone app
• Managing News is a news and data aggregation thing with added visualisation cleverness. Hyp3rLocal is an impressive, Barnet-based deployment of it
• Amnesia Connect is my ‘cor, wouldya look at that – the future just turned up’ video of the week

I was turned onto this by Jim, our Creative Director, and thought I'd flag it up as it's quite a neat little time saver.

If you need to convey a web concept quickly and simply to a client, download and install Dropbox - the free and really easy way to sync files between computers and access them on your mobile - and put your web files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images) into the Public folder of your new Dropbox. Right-click your HTML file, go to the Dropbox menu and click Copy Public Link. Paste the URL into an email, and you're done.

You can also create a folder inside your Public directory and move yoru files there, thus giving you the ability to stage multiple mockups. For example, any files in your Public folder are accessed via a URL like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12345/foo.html. Create a subfolder inside Public, and it becomes http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12345/bar/foo.html.

Great if you're working on a few mockups and you need to show a client an idea quickly, as there's no FTPing, no logging in with passwords, and vertually nil possibility of others stumbling across it, as those addresses aren't published anywhere except in your account.

A desktop wallpaper featuring Drupal 7 phptemplate variables.

Part eight in a series of posts about The Future Of Local written as research for Talk About Local.

Before I get to the summary and conclusion, and trust me, I intend to get to them in the next post, I want to talk about the space between the lone blogger writing as a hobby and the full-on commercial media organisation. To do this I’m going to talk about Rhubarb Radio, a community radio station in Birmingham I’ve been watching from the periphery since it emerged in Summer 2008.

The story of Rhubarb Radio is long and complex and I’m slightly reticent in writing about it now as I’m sure a) I’ll get things wrong and b) I’ll upset someone in the process. So let me preface this by saying I’m not judging or praising those involved and I don’t want this to turn into a post-mortum. What I want to do is take my observations of Rhubarb over those 2.5 years and see how they can inform the future of local media. If nothing else Rhubarb was a brave and interesting experiment and deserves to be learned from.

You’ll notice I’m fluctuating between tenses here. I’m not sure if Rhubarb is still a viable enterprise at the moment. Over Christmas a lot of the regular people stood down and stopped doing shows and there have been issues with funding and so on. Since I don’t really have any contacts inside the organisation anymore, nor the time or inclination to get to “the truth”, I can’t comment on its status. So for the purposes of this article I’m going to draw a line at December 2010 and talk about the period up to then in the past tense.

Phew!

So, without further a do.

Things I think Rhubarb Radio did wrong

Predicated audience size on level of interest. A lot of people were excited by the prospect of doing something with Rhubarb Radio. The first meeting I attended had a good 30 or so people there and time-slots for shows quickly filled up. If I had to guess I’d say at least 500 individuals gave their time to the project on some level. Audiences, however, were poor. Anecdotally, most shows had under 20 listeners with triple figures being very rare. The majority of listening took place through the “listen again” option. It’s fair to say Rhubarb didn’t really reach a community outside its own.

Professionalised unnecessarily. I remember early meetings dealing with jingles and training, putting people into units of presenters and engineers. There was talk about buying a very expensive computerised music-library system used by commercial radio stations. Within a year most presenters I saw (other than the turntable users) were playing music off their iPods and chatting informally between tracks.

Was dependent on an unsustainable infrastructure. Rhubarb was launched by Dynamics Arts who used their expertise in getting significant funding and support before stepping aside after a year or so. This enabled the station to pay for professional things like dedicated servers, PRS broadcast licenses, upkeep of the studio (donated gratis buy the Custard Factory) and so on. Unfortunately a business model for the station didn’t emerge and it wasn’t able to scale down thanks to the infrastructure provided at the outset. It’s now in a position where the administration needed to keep the station going is distracting from the act of creating radio.

Was obsessed with an existing model. There exists an obsession with radio from a golden age. I suspect a lot of this is nostalgia for the days of listening to the likes of John Peel under the bedcovers and I’ll admit to being a willing victim of this disease. The times I joined in on Rhubarb shows were magical, even if no-one was listening. The act of performance, of structuring your conversation to entertain, is very rewarding and seductive. But, as with the record industry being confused with the music industry, Rhubarb assumed that in order to do radio you needed to behave like the BBC. No swearing before the watershed was a particularly hilarious rule that everyone seemed to obey because that’s how it’s done. Wrapped in their blankets of nostalgia no-one wanted to experiment, to push the boundaries of what radio could be. This was the perfect platform to do that on – a blank slate with no existing audience to alienate – and yet, with some exceptions, most of them were happy to carbon copy the formats of radio stations with massive audiences without questioning why those formats exist.

There were plenty of good things that came out of Rhubarb, and it should always be remembered that the journey is more important than the end result. I’m sure those involved in the project got a lot out of it and will take many lessons onto their next endeavours. Hell, I couldn’t have written the above if it hadn’t have happened.

So, with the benefit of hindsight, and with the Government’s local TV plans in mind, what’s my recipe for a local media organisation that is sustainable, self-empowering and ultimately useful to the communities?

(Makes cup of tea…)

Designing a local media organisation in the Internet age

1. Setting up.

If you have expenses, make sure your business plan covers them. Do not depend on funding. Not only is state funding a rare commodity, you’ll have to satisfy requirements that won’t necessarily relate to what you want to do. Advertising and sponsorship are also hard work.

If it’s looking too expensive, cut back. You probably don’t need a mixing desk or £1000 camera. Go through the bargain bin an Maplins. Use free software rather than expensive hardware. Borrow stuff before you decide if you need it.

Find out if you have an audience. Is there a tangible need for what you want to do? Or is it just you wanting to do it? Build appropriately.

If you need to go live experiment on free ‘casting services to begin with. Look at things like UStream. And once you’re happy with your live output don’t get your own server or invest in excessive hosting packages. Use a scalable service like Mixlr which grows as you grow.

For archiving, use services like YouTube or MixCloud. That way if you you do get unexpectedly popular you won’t get brought down by a bandwidth bill.

2. Programming.

Don’t get distracted by live broadcasting. While recording live is fun and interaction is nice, it’s unrealistic to expect your audience to join you at a specific time. Look at the success of the BBC’s podcasts and iPlayer for niche subjects. Think about how “specialist” shows, usually shunted to the graveyard shift, now have a daytime audience. Live media is a hangover from the capacity limitations of broadcast media when there was no other way to get information to people. This is not a problem anymore.

Don’t get distracted by your brand. Again, this is an echo from the low-capacity broadcast model. No-one really cares that much about your brand. You should only care about it if you need to maintain audiences across all the shows to please the advertisers. If you don’t then the brand is irrelevant. Make the shows good and the brand will look after itself.

Don’t copy the professionals. If you want to make a different you’re going to have to do something special to get noticed. Pumping out the same formats as the big guys is not going to cut it, especially when you’re competing with trained and experienced professionals. If you’re reporting on local news with video you don’t want people to be thinking “this isn’t as good as the BBC.”

If you need convincing of this look at some of the cringeworthy attempts made by local newspapers to go “multimedia”. This is a good example as I know the reporter is a damn good writer making it doubly painful to see her struggling in a medium she’s got no experience in.

Experiment and innovate. If you’re starting with nothing then you have nothing to lose. Don’t be afraid to try new ways of getting your material across. Play with formats, invent new ones, bring in ideas from other mediums. Find that thing that makes you unique.

Fill the gaps. By definition, mainstream local media can only cover those things that they can get a large audience for. That leaves everything else free for the taking. Look for things in your area that are of interest to a reasonable number of people and pick one of those.

Go deep. Have you ever seen big media cover something you know about? Did you notice how they totally got it wrong in a really annoying way? If you can’t compete on production values, compete on depth and accuracy. If you’re dealing with junior gymnastics or urban cycling or roller-derby deal with it really really well. Be as passionate and knowledgeable as the people who care about those things.

Develop your own schedule. TV and Radio has a schedule based on fitting into 24 hours and reaching minimum audiences. Magazines are similarly limited in their layouts. You don’t have to follow them. Your shows can be 5 minutes or 5 hours long, your articles a couple of paragraphs or 20,000 words. I’ve been quite taken with The Awl of late which looks like a standard magazine website but is ignoring whole chunks of the magazine website rulebook. There’s a nice New York Times article about them which is quite inspiring if you’re mad enough to give it a go yourself.

Don’t get trapped by medium or genre. You’re not a TV channel or radio station or magazine. Think of yourself as a vehicle for awesomeness. While limitations are a good thing and you should play to your strengths, don’t get tied to a model unnecessarily.

Here’s a nice example of that. NPR’s website is pretty much what you’d expect for America’s underfunded public radio station. Index of shows, podcasts, news and so forth. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary and certainly not troubling the commercial giants of the US media. But while they are small and fragile they are also nimble. This 3 minute video came my way this week.

It’s nothing like a 60 minute radio show. You could argue it’s got nothing to do with “radio” at all. And yet it’s got NPR written all over it. Think about why that is.

3. Expanding

Think hard about what sort of organisation you need. Don’t create roles because you think you should have them. Let the needs of the organisation dictate the roles. At the same time, if no-one wants to do a role structure things so you don’t need that job done. (I know of a monthly event that keeps their entry free purely because no-one wants to be treasurer.)

Consider a co-oporative or alliance. If there’s a bunch of you who are all happily self-sufficient in doing you own things then there’s no reason you shouldn’t just carry on with what works. Don’t form a company just because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do. Just collaborate on the stuff you can’t do alone and share skills and resources across the group.

Don’t be unrealistic. Traditional success in media is hard. Even the experienced professionals don’t know what’s going on these days so your chances of global domination are pretty slim. But if you have realistic sense of your own abilities and the audience for your thing, along with a sustainable vehicle to bring the two together, you should be successful enough to make a difference.

This was more a how-to than a what-will-be but I’ve tried to make it about the emerging local media landscape. I’ve been thinking more about Hunt’s Local TV thing and it still doesn’t make sense. It’s like a town planner looking at medieval castles falling into disrepair and thinking “What we need are more castles, only smaller and made of polystyrene bricks.”

Right now we don’t know what the dominant form of local media will be. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a decade or so we’re back to a small number of major players using a standardised media toolset, but I very much doubt it’ll be the same players and the same tools as today. What we need to be doing is experimenting to find out what people want, what they need and how it can be provided. And that needs a shift in attitude from the DCMS to the DIY podcaster.

Finally, I haven’t mentioned Jon Bounds in this post and that can’t be allowed to happen. Jon and Julia Gilbert did a show on Rhubarb Radio called The Big Paws. They’ve just started doing it from their living room using Mixlr for the live stream and MixCloud for the archives. The end product is pretty much the same which begs the question, what could a “radio station” offer them? It’s not a rhetorical question, by the way.

Next, the conclusion. I promise.

From an interview with Instapaper’s Marco Arment.

What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not being an engineer?

I love to write. Not anything substantial, like novels or stories — just blog posts. Writing about a subject helps clarify, mature, and sometimes even change my opinion on a topic. Afterward, I feel accomplished and productive, and the responses I get are fulfilling, constructive, and often more numerous than I expect.