Over the last few years especially, I’ve struggled to reconcile blogging Meg and working Meg. Blogging was always a thing which was nothing to do with my professional life, and even as my work became more and more about blogging (and social media, digital engagement, publishing, storytelling and so on), I somehow felt that I had to keep the two separate.

But that doesn’t really work anymore. My work and personal interests are so blurred now, it feels rather artificial to keep them apart.

So I’ve resolved to get back into the blogging groove this year. And because so much of what I want to write about seems to be about things that are pertinent to both my personal and professional worlds, I’ve started writing again over at megpickard.com, my sort of professional site, which for the last four years or so has just been a place for people to find me online and a list of upcoming/previous talks and the like.

So there we go. I’m moving some of the pertinent archives over, and future blogging is shifting from meish.org to megpickard.com – from me(ish) to me.

See you there, I hope.

Househunting. Negotiation. Fucked over by two vendors then landlady. House! Finally! Goodbye SW14, hello Surrey. Painting. Nesting. Happier, poorer, more in love than ever.

Remember: 24 words summing up the last 365 days.

Over to you, in the comments below this time (because I haven’t got time to set up a separate page before going out for dinner).

And happy new year. Hope 2011 is a good one.

I noted down on a fresh page the name of the session I was attending, and the time, so I would later be able to piece together the sequence of sessions I attended at least, through a fug of jetlag. Underneath each session’s title, there follows about a page of notes – the questions under discussion, framing the topic, perhaps, or salient quotes and ideas. And then, by the time we get to the second page, the notes descend into lists – of names (people in the room and beyond), book titles, publications, other references cited, half ideas, questions – all headed by an underlined FOLLOW UP LATER.

This tells me two things about my experience of Newsfoo: One, that I was frequently too busy listening, thinking and participating to record the event. There was so much going on! And two, that each session acted as a catalyst for further thinking, reading, conversation afterwards. In other words, you needed your attention in the room; and the session was only the beginning.

This perhaps provides some context for the misunderstood suggestion from O’Reilly organisers, who dissuaded people from liveblogging and tweeting during sessions. Some – who weren’t there, incidentally – saw this suggestion on the event wiki and reacted angrily, referring to a “twitter ban” and alleging that this was part of a conspiracy to keep the content of the event secret, cabal-like.

On the contrary. My impression was that people were free to socialise and cover their perspective of the event (at least anything that wasn’t covered by O’Reilly’s famous FrieNDA, which is like a person- or statement-specific Chatham House rule), just not in real time. And since the weekend in Phoenix, there have emerged a number of stimulating, informative and thoughtful blog posts – and I expect more will emerge in time.*

So it’s not that nothing was said. It’s that, like coffee, Newsfoo reactions took time to percolate – though, as a non-coffee-drinking Brit, I’m bound to say that a good cup of tea needs time to steep (we call this “masting”) before it’s ready to drink. Whisk the teabag out too soon and your cuppa is insipid, weak – hardly worth bothering with at all.

In my experience, inserting a pause in usual social reporting activities/obligations provided time and mental space to listen to, reflect on and add to what was being said.

It was a welcome change. As a frequent event speaker, Twitter fills me with both joy and dismay.

Joy, because seeing an audience full of people cradling glowing screens tells me that whatever I say will resonate louder (beyond the conference hall) and longer (archived online and findable beyond the timebox of the event) than it ever would have done previously.

Dismay, because I recognise as a blogger and long-term Twitter user (since Nov 2006) myself, that a third of their attention will be spent hunting my words for appealing bon-mots: portable insights and notable quotables (which in turn makes me change or form messages to be easily tweetable – focused on the wider audience getting all this context- and slide-free and second hand, rather than those in front of me. That means it’s harder to weave a story through a presentation, because every slide and statement needs to stand alone).

Another third of attention will be taken up with the intricacies of transcription, editing down and paraphrasing to fit the cruel constraints of a text-entry box on a screen.

And the last third of their attention will, inevitably, be occupied by consuming the aggregated output of everyone else in the room – the backchannel – or elsewhere, because it is practically impossible to make using Twitter a broadcast-only occupation, even if you want to. Once the connectivity portal is open, our attention too-easily tumbles down it like Alice and the rabbit-hole. Under normal circumstances, that’s good – it should be read, as well as write – but when you’re competing with the rest of the world’s status updates for someone’s attention, it feels rather less positive.

On the wiki and at the opening event of Newsfoo, the organisers urged us to ‘be in the room’. They weren’t talking about physical presence – they meant attention.

This is important for a couple of reasons.

In a small conversing group, the social dynamic is changed when someone’s attention – and eyes, and fingers – is focused on their personal screen. Try it next time you’re out with friends, an see how long it takes one of them to wave a hand in front of your face and say “Hello? We’re right in front of you! Are we boring you?”

Second, attempting to liveblog or tweet proceedings mean making a conscious transition from participant to observer. By doing do, you step back from the circle, choosing to document and interpret from above rather than being involved. Even anthropologists say that skews your perspective.

The combination of these two things is that at an event like newsfoo, you wouldn’t be able to effectively participate and you wouldn’t be able to pause, reflect and parse the conversations you were present for, because your focus is on an external audience – yours – rather than a present community right in front of you.

I ruminated on these ideas in a comment on Steve Buttry’s recent blogpost about the event:

“…we were encouraged to be “in the room” – fully engaged with the conversation taking place around us. That felt like a good thing, and meant I focused on the conversation and participating in it, ruminating over ideas in my head overnight and on the journey home and since.

One thing I noticed was that since the sessions were much smaller than you might see at a normal conference – I counted 5 in the smallest session, 30 in the biggest – it was very involved and discursive. A discussion among engaged peers rather than a presentation from someone on a stage, witnessed by an audience. There was no audience. Everyone was involved and engaged. As a result, there was actually very little opportunity – or time, or desire – to tweet or liveblog in real time. Doing so would have involved making a conscious shift from “participant” to “observer” – stepping out of the conversation, focusing attention on fingers and the context of an external audience, not presence in the room at the time. And there was so much to discuss! Plenty of time for distillation and external exploration (and exposition) later – but who’d want to waste the opportunity to be present and engaged?

Plus as a participant, it was actually quite liberating to feel that I wasn’t going to be quoted out of context, or would have to limit what I said, or had to speak in soundbites (as is often the case when speaking at conferences). Usually, “anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence…” – but not this time.

For the most part, at newsfoo people were pretty good at being considerate of this. But I noticed a couple of people tweeting continuously throughout sessions – quotes, statements, examples, ideas – which made me uncomfortable, frankly. How will I be able to invoke the frieNDA if what I’ve just said has already been captured and re-broadcast? Would I need to preface everything with a caveat? And also, we were invited as participants, not reporters. But I guess old habits die hard.

Participant is not an accidental word, by the way, used in the way politicians say ‘community’ and mean ‘demographic’, or Mark Zuckerberg says ‘friends’ and means ‘random people you once shared a fleeting context with’. Every invitee – it was invite-only, but according to whose design or criteria I can’t say (because I don’t know, not because it’s a secret!) – was expected to participate fully in the forming and the content of the event as it unfolded over three days in the desert. Indeed, if they hadn’t, then the event wouldn’t have emerged as it did. And that’s the point of an unconference.

I’ve been to unconferences and Open Space Technology events before, and one of the first things you learn is that there are a bunch of overarching guidelines to bear in mind. At Open Space events, these are Harris Owen’s Four Guiding Principles and One Law, the first of which is: whoever shows up (to event or session) is the right group. Though the overall event may be by invitation, all sessions are self-generating and self-selecting. Whoever decides to show up to each changes the content and the dynamic by their presence and participation. A room of 20 people has a very different participatory dynamic – it needs facilitating, and not everyone will get an opportunity to speak, for example – than a cluster of six, which can be more conversational and evolving.

After Newsfoo was over, some of those watching the event from afar commented that it seemed like a forum for Thinkers rather than Doers. I’m not sure that it’s fair to contrast the event with a hackday, where everyone’s focused on building things, with the skills to do so. There were plenty of people there who you might define as “doers” but the important thing is that it was a thinking – and talking, debating, discussing – event. So comparing it to a hack day is like comparing a community meeting to a barnraising.

But beyond this, I reject the classifications being used. Thinker? Doer? The good news is, increasingly, we don’t have to choose which one we are. Calling someone a “doer” is insulting – it implies there is no thought behind their actions. What are they, Doozers? Automatons? And calling someone a “thinker” just reminds me of Deep Thought. I’m a thinker who does. A doer who thinks. Welcome to my world. Stop trying to pigeonhole by increasingly obsolete definitions.

I feel extremely privileged to have been invited to participate in Newsfoo. Though I was invited to a previous FOO in Sebastapol, I wasn’t able to make it, so when the invite came for this one, I jumped at the chance to get involved. And I’m ever so glad I did.

One thing that people who’ve been to FOO events before tend to say is “you’ll often feel like the dumbest person in the room” – but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. In any industry full of posturing, egos, hierarchy and people obsessed with the sound of their own voices, interesting, insightful people sometimes get drowned out. As with any meeting, the first few Newsfoo sessions were understandably rather rife with attendees jockeying for social position, trying to establish credentials and influence the direction of the group (this part of normal community-forming behaviour; happens with monkeys as well as news professionals). But thankfully this settled down and subsequent sessions were frustrating for entirely other reasons – so many ideas! So many brilliant voices and ideas! Not enough time or space to hear everyone! I felt like by the time Sunday lunchtime rolled around, connections had been made, conversations begun and synapses firing through a haze of jetlag and late-night werewolf action (see above: I’m a villager, I tell you!). It was time to leave, and I was ready to begin the next level of conversations! I’m sure everyone who’s attended a similar event will have said this at some point, but I could have done with it being twice as long, to fit in more sessions, more conversations in breaks, more levels of discussion and idea forming. And more Werewolf. Perhaps next time, if there is another one?

But this is where that notebook I mentioned at the beginning of this post has come in very handy since my return. Obeying my own scrawled underlining, I’ve followed up on resources, conversations, contacts and ideas. Newsfoo only lasted a few days in a desert, but the conversations, connections and ideas continue to emerge.

There’s plenty more to say about Newsfoo. I hope I’ll get a chance to distill my thoughts (and sparse notes) about specific topics and sessions over the coming weeks. In the meantime, more thinking and doing…

PS Incidentally, I could claim that this blog post took a couple of weeks to publish following my return from Arizona because since then I’ve been pondering the event, turning the ideas and conversations over in my head like a boiled sweet in my mouth. That’s partly true, but more likley is that unfortunately directly on my return from Newsfoo I succumbed to a nasty seasonal virus – Newsflu? – (possibly related to going from -8°C London, covered in 24″ of snow, to 25°C Phoenix and back, via two transatlantic flights in four days) which knocked me out for most of the last ten days.

“Although porcelain is very robust, the enthusiastic interaction of visitors has resulted in a greater than expected level of dust in the Turbine Hall. Tate has been advised that this dust could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time. In consequence, Tate, in consultation with the artist, has decided not to allow visitors to walk across the sculpture.”

The work is intended to be interactive and to have people walking through it, although some visitors, mainly children, had more fun in the seeds than curators might have liked.

I’m interested in the idea of artworks that you can’t predict: although Ai Weiwei conceived the artwork as interactive, it’s not until 100 million ceramic seeds are being shuffled through by gallery visitors that the true size of the dust-cloud is revealed. That’s art in itself.

Also, health and safety has played a role in visitor interactions with installations at the Tate Modern before….

Throughout the morning, as news of the emerging miners breaks, I’ve had an earworm playing at the back of my head, which I’ve been trying not to give focus to, but here we go:

The song is the Ballad of Springhill, originally by Peggy Seeger (the version I know is by Martin Carthy) which was written about a mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia, in October 1958. An underground seismic “bump” caused the coal faces deep underground to collapse, killing many men instantly and trapping others. Over the days which followed, survivors slowly made their way to the surface and contact was made with a group:

“After five and a half days (placing it around the morning of Wednesday, October 29, 1958) contact was established with a group of 12 survivors on the other side of a 160 foot rockfall. A rescue tunnel was dug and broke through to the trapped miners at 2:25am AST on Thursday, October 30, 1958…. Of the 174 miners in No. 2 colliery at the time of the bump, 74 were killed and 100 trapped but eventually rescued.” [source]

Thankfully, it looks like all the miners in the Chilean situation will be rescued safely throughout the course of the next couple of days.

Tangent: I think going by their onscreen graphic Sky News will refer to this as “Miners rescued: 33/33 – Achievement Unlocked!” Though people seem to find the count variously tacky and/or helpful, I think there are many who echo the sentiment of this twitter user:

Anyone doubting this similarity is urged to study any Lemmings screenshot, and compare that with Sky’s on-screen graphic.

The 1958 “Springhill bump” was notable for another reason, too: it was the first major international story in Canada to be covered by live television broadcasts — a new service being developed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) [more info]. Then, as now, the media circus camped at the minehead, watching and waiting.

While you watch the rolling news today, and follow the liveblogs and twitter updates, take a moment to watch this archive footage from CBC with interviews and coverage from the pithead. The events change, but the live media coverage is eerily similar, together with questions from the studio to our man at the pithead: “What’s going on right now? What can you see?”

Some things change, some stay the same. Meanwhile, in a Chilean desert, the miners rise one by one, blinking from what could have easily been a tomb. The world welcomes them back.

——–

More on the Springhill disaster

This is a wonderful audio clip featuring the words of Maurice Ruddick, a black* miner at trapped Springhill who kept his companions’ spirits up by singing happy birthday and hymns while they waited for rescue in the dark.

* His colour is relevant because after they were rescued, the governor of Georgia in the southern US offered the surviving miners a free holiday…only Ruddick couldn’t stay with the others on account of his colour. His companions wanted to turn it down. Moral: in a coalmine, trapped in the dark, skin colour doesn’t matter; everyone is black. [More on this story from an Ottawa Citizen archive article, published in 2000 but which survives on a web forum]

Listen to the Ballad of Springhill, sung by Martin Carthy:

U2 version, for those that way inclined:

Twelve men lay two miles from the pitshaft
Listen for the drillin’ of a rescue team
Six hundred feet of coal and slag
Hope imprisoned in a three-foot seam

Eight days passed and some were rescued
Leaving the dead to lie alone
All their lives they dug their graves
Two miles of earth for a markin’ stone

Sobering to think how today’s events might have turned out instead. Glad they didn’t.

Postscript:
October, 1958:

[on being asked by reporter Lloyd McGinnis "doesn't this remind you of 1956, when all hope was gone?"] “I’ll stop you there, Lloyd: all hope is never gone” – Bud Tabor, CBC technician who lost his father at Springhill in 1938 and with uncles injured in Springhill in 1956, then trapped underground at Springhill in 1958, speaking at the pit head

October, 2010

“We always knew that we would be rescued, we never lost faith,” – Mario Sepúlveda, Miner at San José mine

Previously:

I add the emphasis, because it’s the most disturbing thing about an already tragic situation. Clearly we don’t know everything about the circumstances and there’s almost certainly a lot more going on than is apparent when a closeted teen commits suicide, but any way you look at it, his roommate’s actions were cruel, invasive, bullying and wrong.

There are two things jostling for attention in my head about this:

One: I’m not blaming social media, but I do worry about the habits that a social life (amplified by social media and networks) can fall into. Performing. Feeling like you have to constantly feed (/amuse/entertain/shock) a hungry audience, it’s easy to slither unawares across the line into behaviours and activities which are just wrong – like bullying – or stupid – like revealing too much about yourself online. I think some people – ok, many people – get seduced by the noteriety and enjoy the buzz of microfame, which means their boundaries of privacy and acceptable behaviour get ever so blurry. This can come back to bite them – or others.

Two: how do you support teens (especially) who are being bullied because of sexuality, appearance, intelligence, economics or anything else, especially within the artificial cruel crassness of a school or college dorm?

Speaking of supporting teens who are being bullied because of their sexuality, sex-advice columnist and podcast host Dan Savage recently kicked off an interesting and – I think – worthy initiative called the “It Gets Better Project”.

The project is inspired by the suicide of 15-year-old Indiana teenager Billy Lucas, who hanged himself two weeks ago in his family’s barn after enduring bullying from his classmates.

Savage realised that the one thing he and others who had been through tough times and bullying as teens wanted to say to today’s LGBT teens was: I know it feels bad now, but it gets better.

From an ABC interview about the project yesterday:

In an effort to counter the despair and isolation that many young gay people feel, Savage has launched a YouTube channel to provide positive examples of gay adults living their lives and sharing that simple message — it gets better.

“It occurred to me that we can talk to these kids now,” Savage said. “We don’t have to wait for an invitation or permission to reach out to them using social media and YouTube.”

He’s inviting LBGT people to upload videos to a dedicated YouTube channel, describing how they may have been bullied in high school, and how life got better once they moved out into the read world.

Human, moving – and hopefully effective.

I don’t know if it’s got something to do with the quality of the iPhone 4 camera, or the way they’ve tweaked the algorithms in the app, but my love for CameraBag (at least its Helga setting) has dwindled. It no longer seems to be able to bring out the punch in shots.

So for punchiness these days I turn instead to Lo Mob, which comes with 28 different filters, including TTV, instant, and more. Some are more interesting than others, and I’ve been particularly pleased with the transformative effect it’s had on some of my recent shots – the black and white ones with high contrast are especially effective.

It’s almost as good as using an actual retro camera, like my beloved Holga.

Almost.

Here’s how you play:

1. Read an article which has comments open. Since most things have comments these days – wisely or otherwise, YMMV – this can mean anything on a blog, news site, content portal or whatever. It helps if the comment count is greater than 0, but don’t read the comments just yet.

2. As you are reading the piece “above the line” (i.e the blog post, article, original content), try to predict the nature of the comments which will follow. Your prediction may concern form, tone or content of comments. For example, you might keep a mental tally (NB this is not the same as a mentalist tally) as follows:
– there will be a comment consisting of just one word
– someone will complain about the topic, insisting that this has already been discussed and concluded
– people will mention (and take issue with) the third paragraph

3. Now read the comments.

4. Award yourself a point for each comment type or form you correctly predicted would occur “below the line” as a result of the piece above it.

Over the years, you will hone your instincts to such an intuitive level that you’ll be able to accurately predict the content of any thread without needing to read it.

Whether you then decide to do so is entirely up to you.

The Author Variant

If you ever write a blog post, article or content piece which is open to comments, you may sometimes be dismayed by the comments which follow it. You may have deserved them. You may not. But people being rude to you in public is never nice, is it?

So rather than feeling depressed and downhearted about the public discourse surrounding your efforts, you can ameliorate any negative feelings by simply using the alternative comment scoring grid below:

Tot up your score at the end.

If you have scored more than 200 points, CONGRATULATIONS! You have won, and everyone who participated in that thread now owes you a proportionate share of the £ or $ or € equivalent to your score. So, 20 people participating in the conversation and your score is 1000? They each owe you a nice crisp £50. You can go round to their house and collect anytime.

(inspired in part by this parody of a science news story and – more importantly – the 400+ parodying comments which follow it. Nice to see that commenters have such a good knowledge of their own, often unwritten, rules)

You can read more about the snailr project, here and the original idea, here.

I received my postcard last week, but entirely failed to capture it digitally until today. But it’s fun seeing the other postcards find their way onto the web – from mental, to analogue, to digital memories – so I finally got my act together and here it is…

Front:

It reads: This is the snailr project, crossing the border n.b. please to customise this card. and i love you.

Back:

It reads: #63 I remember our mum loving reading The Night Train to us as children. As a poem, it had precisely the same tempered metre of a slow, careful train. And she sounded it out just like that, coming down heavily on enough syllables to suggest clacking tracks. I now wonder what it would have been like if she’d had access to an American version of the same poem, reflecting the Amtrak policy of blowing the horn, constantly, all through the night. I like to think she would have brought a hawk to bedtime stories. Or a stuck pig.

She’s right – our mum did read Auden’s The Night Mail to us at bedtime. A wonderful, evocative out-loud poem – and one which becomes even more vivid at the thought of a train whistle piercing the rhythmic clacking, all night long.

My sister’s ace.

But a little glimpse for now: last night, waiting at St Pancras, I noticed that the people on the opposite platform (waiting for the northbound train) were huddled in particular formations relating to where the doors open when the train eventually arrives.

This tells us three things.

1. The train’s obviously going to be busy when it arrives, so proximity to the door is everything
2. You’ve got to do a lot of commuting before you know not just which zone to stand in so you’re near the exit when you get off, but where the doors open
3. If you’re not standing in prime position (by the doors when they open), you’re going to get left behind

I’ve tried a number of photography apps over the past three years of iPhone usage, but these three have come to be my stalwart accomplices. Crucially, they all allow me to be creative, and enhance my existing creativity, without getting in the way and making something which I don’t recognise as “my” work. I formula for a good photography app is: my skills + app = better result. So in an app I tend to be looking for something which doesn’t take over.

1. Autostitch

Unlike other panorama apps (like PhotoStitch for desktop, and the original version of Pano) which only allow you to construct a panorama from horizontally-connected image (perfect for panning around a horizon), Autostitch lets – no, encourages you to get creative with multiple overlapping images, in any direction at all. This can lead to some interesting – and sometimes quite unintended – effects.

I still boggle that this amount of intricate and elaborate processing power is packed into a tiny app on my phone. And available to anyone for less than $3. We truly live in the future.

2. Camerabag

I’m not crazy about apps that only exist to add retro effects to images, but there’s something about Camerabag’s filter settings that seem to be able to turn a lacklustre image into a much more rich and interesting one.

It’s telling that of the twelve filters available, I only use two with any regularity: Helga (which mimics Holga contrast & vignetting) and Magazine (which seems to flatten and punch things)

FWIW, I’ve also played with Hipstamatic and can see the appeal, but I’m not wild about it. For me, the fun is somewhat limited by the fact you have to take images through it, rather than being able to use it for post-processing, as well (as you can with Camerabag)

3. Diptych

Relatively new, this one allows you to quite simply combine multiple images according to a number of templates. Bosh.

I don’t use this one a lot, but it’s handy to have on the phone when I do (and a damned sight easier than downloading, opening and editing in photoshop).

—

I’d love to know which photography apps you use, and rate….

I’ve got the Here And There (HAT) map prints, and they absolutely deserve further scrutiny because they’re so detailed, plus it’s a really interesting, mind-bending (sorry) way to think about space, and the world.