Pittsburgh Bloggers unite!

On Sunday, February 18, the Pittsburgh Symphony will host a "Blogfest Extra" concert - a two-part community outreach event. The afternoon's concert will include traditional works from Mahler and Beethoven as well as a new work, Rainbow Body by Christopher Theofanidis. The work's title is derived from a Buddhist idea that when an enlightened being dies, his or her body doesn't decay, but instead is absorbed back into the universe as energy and light. As a spectacular display of technology-enhanced art, the PSO will perform Rainbow Body along with projected images of dying stars taken by the Hubble Telescope. Following the concert, the PSO will host a blogging reception, during which "blogging after the concert is strongly encouraged!"

The PSO recently established its own pair of blogs, one featuring staff contributors and the "internal perspective" and the other featuring community members, composers and volunteers who provide the "external perspective". The PSO blog has come a long way since its founding last fall, and now even includes a few video blog posts. It's clear that the blog has become an internal priority, and I hope the Symphony's artistic team will continue to create innovative events like this one.

Wikimania

Penguin publishers and De Montfort University recently launched the first wiki novel - an experimental project designed to see if "the wisdom of crowds" can apply to more artistic disciplines. Contributors to "A Million Penguins" will include Masters students in Creative Writing and New Media, who study writing in the evolving fields of online communities, blogs, and wikis. The project went live on February 1st, and the wiki has already seen a flurry of editing activity. The novel's current cast of characters includes a penguin "trying to save mankind from its own destruction" and the mysterious "Tango Prisoner".

The experimental novel will be online for at least six weeks, according to Penguin, who insists that this project is not a talent search for the publishing house. Even if fleshing out the character of the "Tango Prisoner" won't lead to your big break, writing in this new collaborative medium will certainly be a great challenge.

Recent Articles Worth Reading

Here are just few articles I have come across lately that I think you might find interesting: Web Refocus - Jeremy O'Neal examines Web 2.0 and forecasts the role that media arts organizations will play in it - namely preserving and promoting the noncommercial space.

Welcome to Wi-Fi-Ville - Kristina Dell reports that more than 300 cities and communities nationwide plan to have wireless ventures in the next year. While we all want free Internet access, what are the contentious issues surrounding the offering of a low-cost or no-cost wi-fi municipal plan as a public service?

Can't Touch This - Welcome to the future of the human-computer interface. Jeff Han, a research scientist from NYU's Courant Institute, wowed the tech world with his touch-driven computer screen. Learn more about this amazing device and watch the demo video.

This last article comes from the current issue of Fast Company magazine. Another article in this issue that is not available on the web, "An Unlikely Story: Tech Where You Least Expect It," documents the success that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA has had with podcasting its classical music concert series. Check it out.

The $150 Laptop

CNN.com recently featured a nice piece about EXTREMELY affordable laptops that will be made available to children in Libya, Thailand and other developing countries through the One Laptop Per Child program. The "XO" machine, which will run on a version of the Linux operating system, will cost about $150. They aren't incredibly powerful - they have a 512 megabyte flash drive in lieu of a traditional hard drive - but they will offer a leg up to children who otherwise wouldn't have access to technology.

Read the complete CNN.com article here.

Time Magazine's Person of the Year: YOU

The explosion of social networking sites into the public consciousness and the corresponding user-content-creation phenomenon convinced the editors at TIME that you are the Person of the Year. Click here for the article.

Social Networking Technology and Arts Organizations

Recently in the Artful Manager blog, Andrew Taylor discussed how social networking technology evident in popular user-driven sites (MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Dandelife, etc.) is rapidly changing the nature of the web and how we use it by enabling individuals to share their voice, vision and story with the wider world. For many months now, I have been ruminating over how to (a) strategically integrate the use of social networking technology into my programs and services, and (b) convince my organization's leaders that we need to move in this direction.

I know many artists are finding ways to utilize this technology as a tool for furthering their artistic endeavors. Comedian Dane Cook has used his MySpace network to catapult himself into the national spotlight as today's top-selling comedian on tour; Boston painter Jeff Hayes produces a successful painting-a-day blog to sell his work on a daily basis; hundreds of filmmakers post their trailers and short films on YouTube to promote awareness and generate buzz for their work.

So what can social networking technology do for arts organizations?

• Given the current trend in the field for arts organizations to market the "artistic experience" coupled with contemporary audiences' desire for greater interactivity, social networking technology has great potential to assist arts organizations in deepening their audience's experience by providing more avenues for engaging with the art, the artists, the organization, and each other. For example, check out Chicago Classical Music (CCM). Founded by nine classical music organizations, CCM launched in March 2006 as a six-month pilot program under the auspices of the Arts & Business Council of Chicago. This online community is dedicated to connecting its 11 current membership organizations with classical music enthusiasts through a blog, interactive forums, a chat room, a ticket swap feature, an events calendar, and more.
• Due to the "tell your friends, who will tell their friends, etc." nature of this technology, another benefit for arts organizations is the viral expansion of their reach and awareness. Earlier this fall, I started a weblog for our Southern Circuit - Tour of Independent Filmmakers program wherein touring filmmakers post about their experiences on the road in the South. Even in its nascent phase, the blog has been viewed throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America; thereby providing our program with a reach and awareness we could never afford to garner through another channel.
• A third potential function for social network technology is to galvanize a virtual community around a mission, goal or issue to spur positive change in the real world. Take a look at how the New Orleans Video Access Center has been using YouTube to answer the question "Why should New Orleans be rebuilt?"

These are just a few ways in which these sites and online services can benefit arts organizations. With every passing day, further innovative uses are realized. So why stay behind the curve? What could social networking technology do for your organization?

Digital Time Capsule

On October 10, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Time Capsule project, a brainchild of the artist Jonathan Harris. For 30 days, Yahoo! users worldwide can contribute photos, writings, videos, audio files, and drawings to this innovative digital anthropology project. On November 8, the collected files will be entrusted to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington D.C., and the data will be preserved as historical artifacts.

The time capsule is organized around ten themes: Love, Sorrow, Anger, Faith, Beauty, Fun, Past, Hope, Now, and You, each of which was chosen to encourage a broad range of submissions. In addition to creating a historical record, the time capsule's design is intended to foster online community building. Users can submit original content, view other submissions, and engage in conversation about submissions with other users.

Harris's recent work has focused on the exploration of humans through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web. His background as an artist/techie/anthropologist makes him an ideal candidate to mold the project's creative vision.

As he wrote in his artist's statement, " . . . the Yahoo! Time Capsule sets out to collect a portrait of the world – a single global image composed of millions of individual contributions. This time capsule is defined not by the few items a curator decides to include, but by the items submitted by every human on earth who wishes to participate. We hope to reach a truly global expression of life on earth – nuanced, diverse, beautiful and ugly, thrilling and terrifying, touching and rude, serious and absurd, frank, honest, human. The Time Capsule itself is realized digitally so that the maximum number of people can have access . . .

The aesthetic of the Time Capsule is that of a ball of thread, spinning like a globe, its shifting surface entirely composed of words and pictures submitted by people around the world. The thread ball concept relates to threads of memory and threads of time, where threads are taken to be any continuous and self-consistent narrative strand. When the Time Capsule opens, it displays the 100 most recent contributions, which form the spinning globe. The ten themes orbit the globe in a pinwheel pattern. At any moment, any individual tile can be clicked, causing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, revealing detailed information about the tile and the person who created it. Using a search interface, viewers can specify the population they wish to see, exploring such demographics as “men in their 20s from New York City”, and “Iraqi women who submitted drawings in response to the question: What do you love?”. There are an infinite number of ways to slice the data, and each resulting slice then becomes its own thread, which can be browsed independently, tile by tile, like a filmstrip."

With only 6 days, 8 hours and counting, there's not much time for procrastinating. Go and contribute now.

Starting a Podcast, Part 5

Now that I have some actual mp3 files from my interviews with CAMT staff - check them out and subscribe to the podcast - it's time to release them to the world. My first attempt to build a listenership - yes, that's a real word - is to use a site called Feedburner, which facilitates the distribution of blogs and podcasts.

First, I added to our blog site a "Podcast" category where my new CAMT mp3 files can live. It is important to add each podcast in its own post. Otherwise, a feed reader such as Feedburner or iTunes will only recognize the first audio file in the post and skip the rest.

Next, I registered for a free account on Feedburner. There are fee-based services, such as enhanced subscriber tracking, but I don't imagine this thing will take off fast enough for us to worry about that just yet. I'm charming, but I'm no Bill O'Reilly. (Disclaimer: The previously linked site is not my own, nor do I endorse it. I simply searched "Bill O'Reilly" and that is the funniest result.)

Once you sign up for a Feedburner account and enter the URL for your "Podcast" blog category, Feedburner will automatically create a page where visitors can either download your content or get your feed URL for use in their own podcast aggregators.

Learn more about Feedburner.

Starting a Podcast, Part 4

Yesterday I interviewed three of my fellow CAMT staffers: Guillermo Marinero (Senior Information Systems Specialist), Haebin Kim (Information Systems Specialist), and Melody Fleishauer (Systems Administrator). These interviews are roughly 5 minutes each and aren't thrilling, but you can hear a little about each of their backgrounds and how they became intrigued by technology. Listen to the interviews in our Podcast category.

Next week: I will discuss how to get these mp3 files out into the world as Podcasts.

EDIT: After publishing this post, I caught a mistake: I posted three mp3 files to one post. In order for a Podcast aggregator like iTunes to catch your audio files, it's important to post them as separate links. Since this blog is meant to be instructional, I thought I'd call myself out on this error publicly, so we can all learn from my mistake. I have added two more posts in the Podcasts category of this blog forHaebin and Melody, so iTunes will snag them for me. More on this next week...

Ode to Odeo...

While the audio interviews with CAMT staff as part of my continuing series on podcasting will be delayed until next Friday, I didn't want to let this week end without providing something fun and exciting. Odeo, recently named one of the hot Web 2.0 apps by WIRED.com (read the article), is a tool for creating and sharing podcasts without any muss and/or fuss.

Try it out. Simply choose a category and a podcast, then hit play. You can also download all files to your portable listening device. (Note that I did not say iPod... I'm being open to the fact that other mp3 players exist. In fact, I bought my wife an iRock. She liked it until I got my iPod, which was sleeker, smaller, and far more advanced. I'm a jerk.)