Creativity as a social act July 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, Art, Community, web2.0 , 1 comment so farI was going to write something about creativity based on Matt Moore’s article but Jack beat me to it. I know some people are trying to think hard about exactly what is the nature of creativity. Well if “human knowing is fundamentally a social act” (Wenger) , and creativity is a social act (below) , not to mention work rest and play, software and media all being social these days, when do we get to have 2 minutes to ourselves?!? It’s a convincing argument though:
Engineers without Fears: Creative Ecologies (or why my genius is unimportant)
We have tended to view creativity as personal act. The creator sits in their garret (or mansion) & comes up with the goods. As the previous posts on work by Bob Sutton, Teresa Amabile et al indicate, I believe more and more that creativity is a social activity. The relationship between a creator (be they professional or amateur) and their audience is not one way. Comments, references, tags, bookmarks, private emails & words face-to-face can all feed into the outcomes (a post, a video). But we only see the tangible outcome not the intangible exchanges between participants in the creation conversation.
To understand the inputs into and impacts from social media, we have to see these invisible ecologies of creation that form & reform. These ecologies have long pre-dated the internet but now we see them more.
To repeat, co-creation is not an option, it is the default…
As a creative writer and musician, I do need to sit in my garret (yes, I have an upstairs room) and come up with the goods by myself, although it does help to have a sense of audience at some point, and of course plenty of previous social experience feeds into the creative process, but the role of the individual should not be dismissed. There’s a dialectical relationship between the individual and the social so I would say that neither can be accurately described as the default.
Ferry between Ilfracombe and Swansea, Minehead and Penarth by 2008 July 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : UK , 37comments
Here’s a great prospect for increasing economic activity in an area of the UK outside of London and the South East. A fast car ferry service between North Devon and South Wales. One of my earliest memories is of being taken onboard the paddle steamer between Cardiff docks and Weston Super mare. According to recoords, The Cardiff Queen also served a route to Ilfracoombe at one time in the 1940s, so the idea of a transport link between Wales and Devon is not completely new. The link across the Bristol channel should help to fuel the mini economic boom in South Wales as well as improve employment prospects in the south west, not to mention vastly cutting travel times between Cornwall and Gower.
BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | South West Wales | Wales-Devon ferry aims for 2008
Wales-Devon ferry aims for 2008There is support on both sides of the Bristol Channel
Backers behind plans for a “fast cat” ferry between south west England and Wales will tell business leaders in Swansea it could be running in a year.They say £1m has been promised for the passenger services from Ilfracombe to Swansea and Minehead to Penarth.
Blog Challenge: Your Blog Story July 9, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community, edublog , add a commentLorelle on Wordpress issues occasional challenges to inspire readers to blog.
This week’s blog challenge is to blog your blog’s story.
What is the story behind your blog?
I want to know the story behind why you decided to blog. What made you believe you had something to blog about? How did you pick your first blog and why did you settle on the blog you have now? What inspires you, motivates you to keep blogging? What’s your blog about and why did you choose the topic?
Greg Balanko-Dickson took up the challenge, and I’ve decided to follow the example. So here is
My Blog Story
Community, research, art, technology, self publishing and significant learning.
Learning Journal
When I signed up for my degree in 2003 I was told to start up a Learning Journal. This could be in a notebook, a diary, a looseleaf binder or a word-processing document. The adventurous, I was told, could include photographs, sound recordings or even video, but this was not required.
I had already heard about blogs. My son had already started one, but I hadn’t yet seen the point in it.
Switching Hosts
So I registered at blogger.com and started to write about my course. There were two or three other students who had set up blogs too, and in due course we found each other. Then the institution itself became aware when Tom Smith returned on sabbatical, evangelistic about blogging. Tom explained the importance of RSS reading for cultivating the blogging habit. But blogger didn’t output RSS at the time, so we recommended blogdrive for students. I had already registered on the multi user Movable Type installation so I kept that one.
This meant I could upload photographs and video, and it was in the days before Flickr or youTube so my blog became a multimendia showcase for a while, in which I indulged myself with blogging as ART.
By the final year I was getting frustrated at being hosted by the University so I set up my own domain with an installed Wordpress blog and a Mediawiki. The old Movable Type blog was eventually killed off by the ultralab, but I had already exported all of the posts and comments, though sadly missed some of the files. That’s now hosted here, for reference.
Research Project
The new blog was to be an integral part of my undergraduate research project, as well as an online CV and tool for developing my own network. I used the Wordpress ‘page’ format with comments to prepare and host my online exhibitions and collect feedback, which worked well for me.
After I graduated, I wanted to keep up the blog in order to build my reputation and increase my network of friends and contacts. It takes a fair amount of work, and sometimes feels thankless but I carry on. One week it feels like I’m making steady small steps of progress, another like bumping along the bottom.
Music
I found some time to return to my interest in songwriting and performance, discovered the delights of garageband (The MAC app, not the website) and used another WP page as my base for putting some of my songs online. Gernika got its own subpage.
UK
Since becoming Country Manager UK for pajamanation, I made a concious effort to orientate some posts more towards the UK, since that’s a target audience. I thought about setting up a new blog specifically for pajamanation writings, but decided to keep it here and promote my own blog at the same time. Just in case. I do have some others though, the ukcider blog, usefulwiki blog and a new one about turning freelance. There may be problems defining the boundaries for that but I’ve thought it through and it does make sense to me.
plugins
Recently I finally got around to upgrading from the legacy WP1.5 - by exporting all posts and comments, installing a brand new WP2.2 and re-importing. I’d tried the straight upgrade path before without sucess. Since then I’ve become obsessed with trying out all the plugins and themes which have become available, fiddling with the settings and watching what they do. I love it! So from now on if I do manage to write some compelling content, at least the funtionality and format of the blog won’t be an obstacle to people finding it and interacting.
On the other hand, I note that Hugh thinks blogging is less useful these days, and anybody starting out would be better off building their network in Facebook groups and twitter. Hmm, I’ll use those tools as well but I can’t see myself being prised away from my Wordpress blogs any year soon.
What’s your blog story?
Well that’s my blog story. It felt a bit self indulgent and I’ll have to reflect a little on what I may have learned through the telling of it at this stage. (Perhaps as the subject for a Gibbs reflective cycle.)
So what’s your blog’s story?
Rolling Your Own Online Office July 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Microjobs, tools , 4commentsThis is a pretty good introduction and survey of communication tools for distributed teams, written by Josh Catone last month.
Rolling Your Own Online Office
The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team.
I don’t really find the term ‘virtual office’ very helpful when describing an online toolset. To me its a misuse of metaphor. Like who nicked my virtual pencil sharpener, huh?
I have a real office, and it has a computer in it and I use that to communicate with real people in the world using various asynchronous channels. What’s ‘virtual’ about that?
Anyway, getting back to the article it seems to be a big recommendation for basecamp, with which I’m not familiar so I’m wondering if we should be considering that.
One dimension not mentioned is that of language. International distributed teams face communication challenges through the use of diverse languages, or through the participation of many people for whom English is a second language. However fluent and articulate a second language speaker may be, there are always going to be nuances, regional variation and vocabulary shift which can cause endless misunderstanding. Not that there’s likely to be a technological solution to that, but there may be some tools or procedures which wil help.
Seedcamp 50k prize for top European startups July 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : UK , 1 comment so farSeedcamp: 50k prize for top European startups from Guardian Unlimited: Technology
Twenty projects will be invited to the camp, and at the end of the week five of them will receive offers of €50,000 funding for a 10% stake in the company. A talent show for startups!
They could make a TV show out of it and call it “Dragons’ Den”. Ok that exists already, and I quite enjoy listening to the pitches and finding flaws in the business plans, or not.
Some of the best pitches have been for website businesses where the VCs have been infuriated when the entrepreneurs have turned down their offers. To me, they obviously used the TV programme to get publicity for their sites and had no intention of giving away big shares in their businesses. It’s funny.
Europe’s position: good broadband penetration, higher-than-average advertising spend, companies like Skype and Last.fm able to exit profitably while services like Betfair, Lovefilm and Joost, show that Europe can change the game.
Technorati Tags: seedcamp
Death of blogging - film at 11 July 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community , add a commentIs it just the weather or have lots of bloggers seen their traffic go down lately?
Hugh MaCleod notes that it’s because of the rise in popularity of social networking sites, particularly facebook and twitter and welcomes the trend.
gapingvoid: The time of the a-list is dead.
I totally applaud this development. Whatever your blogging strategy may be, I personally believe that on average, you’re far better off going off to somewhere like Facebook and building your own social network with like-minded folk, based on your own collective interests, your own collective passions and own collective sense of merit, than loitering around the Blogopshere, waiting for some rockstar like Scoble, Arrington, Cory etc to link to you.
Meanwhile twitterers are trying out pownce, and micro-video-blogging is on its way…
So is the read/write web becoming more and more the victim of fickle fashion?
July 4th Wiki Wednesday July 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, wikiwed, London, COP , add a commentAnother London Wiki Wednesday last night, and a good one too. This time hosted by Bearing Point in Paternoster Square.
Tiddlywiki was on show again, this time with a quick prototype of an app for setting up VOIP connections in the form of “speedgeeking” which was chaotic as intended.
I spoke on ‘the importance of theory’ briefly relating Communities of Practice and Social Objects theories to the online landscape and wikis. No slides or pitches, just conversation really.
Steve Coast put on a great presentation explaining the rationale behind wiki.openstreetmap.org
“OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.”
PS regarding the date, I was amazed to see that a group on Facebook called
“Petition to revoke the independence of the United States of America”
has 88,057 members!
WikiWednesdayPajamaNation is now FREE July 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Pajamanation, Microjobs , 2commentsRegistration for the pajamanation global microjobs exchange is now going to be free, forever. There will be no subscription fee, and no commission or percentage charged on microjob contracts.
Just as I pondered after listening to Jyri Engeström, the business model for a sucessful website these days often needs to change. “Charge the publishers, not the spectators”. I’m not sure that we will ever have ’spectators’ as such, but there will be people who are occasional browsers, searching the microjobs exchange just in case they spot something they fancy doing at that particular time. So searching, browsing, registering and placing ‘bids’, quotes or tenders will be completely free (as in beer). Pajamaworkers are also encouraged to consider creating microjobs of their own to place onto the exchange for others to bid on, to become micropreneurs, and there is no charge for this either.
So that’s the announcement over. What are you waiting for?
Desired feature: ignore threads in gMail July 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : listservs, tools , add a commentFunny I’ve been thinking about email functionality and I agree entirely with Jack’s analysis and feature request:
Knowledge Jolt with Jack: Desired feature: ignore threads in YahooGroups
Since I do read yahoogroups, googegroups, Mailman and other listservs in email rather than visit the websites, the feature requested could be implemented across all platforms through the use of a decent email client. I happen to use gMail, so it would be nice if Google would implement this. I’d like to be able to ignore threads and watch threads. Maybe authors too. Then I’d be back somewhere near the usability I had with Forte Agent about 10 years ago!
The citizens wage July 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, Music, politics , add a commentThis is a conversation which took place on Facebook at the weekend, copied from my “wall-to-wall” with Samantha Murphy who runs SMtvmusic.com.
On Facebook, just as on MySpace, ( and years ago on JellyOS ) the convention is to reply to comments left on your profile page ‘comment wall’ by visiting the poster and replying over there, on their space. On mySpace that means you have to keep flipping back and fore to make sense of the conversation, but on Facebook they have coded in a workaround through the view wall-to-wall function, which puts the conversation back together, albeit in an upside down sequence. I put it back the right way up, here:
Samantha asks…
How much do you think an MP3 is worth (One you want that has NO DRM, of course)?
I’d be in favour of a citizens’ wage for all artists and creatives who feel they are working towards making a contribution to society. That way there’d be no need to commoditise art as products, and there’d be a genuine range of free choices available.
Hey Andy!
I’d also be in favour of a citizens’ wage for all artists and creatives but only those who ARE making a contribution to society. Lots of them feel they are, however…
Only question is, who would be the judge of this?Cheers!
Hmm, well I don’t think any contemporaries can really judge. That way anything very innovative or forward looking would get filtered out. Only time or history can tell. Granted there will be more than a few who overestimate their own talent, but I think we can afford to carry them on a modest citizen’s wage. After all, we presently carry plenty of fat cat parasites who live off the results of other people’s work. Thanks for batting this one back and fore by the way 
All good points, but how would one go about applying for and getting this wage? How would it be paid/collected? Perhaps like the TV tax you have over there? Who does the TV tax money go to anyway? I lived in London and was having this conversation with someone last night, but couldn’t remember how much it was and who was the beneficiary (probably the government).
Two quite different things really. The citizens wage will be paid to anybody who needs it. A bit like claiming a pension or social security, but with full personal dignity because you’d be unquestionably entitled to it, just like every other citizen. Many people would probably opt for a higher standard of living through conventional types of work though, but without building empires out of exploiting others. Through the abolition of advertising, middlemen, pointless duplication of effort and waste, there would be plenty of food , shelter, creature comforts and even luxuries to go round, without anybody needing to work more than a few hours a week, unless they wanted to.
The present TV tax in the UK is collected by the govt and then dished out to the BBC, who then use it to make and buy in programming (and to run itself). Much of it goes on the rights to sporting events, films, celebrity presenters, independent production companies etc. Not to ordinary people.
I think you’re right on, Andy. How can we implement this new world?
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
