I recently gave a presentation at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Character Conference in New York. It was on Twitter, the media and chaos theory. Here’s the video (not only is it widescreen, but I had to scrunch the video to fit my blog margins resulting in fat face!) Ah vanity. Hopefully, what I say makes up for it

I just had a play with Tinychat.com and thought it was worth doing a quick write-up on as I know a few people are interested in video-conferencing and it has just recently added that capability. I’ve seen Tokbox used most often these days, Cameron Reilly has been using it for his G’Day World Live editions and it’s worked pretty well, but Tinychat has a couple of key differences that make it rather interesting.

No sign-up
Firstly, you don’t need to sign-up to use it, it’s simply a matter of hitting “create a room” and you have a dedicated URL to send to people to join the chat. Joining a chat is just as easy, you just give yourself a username and you’re in. You can chat as well as join the video conference simply by hitting “broadcast”.

Better controls
If you set up the chat room, you are able to boot people out of a room if needed. But one of the things I liked is you can mute other speakers, which can make it easier for anyone recording a podcast, for example, to have better control quality. As far as I can see, if you are the one to create the chat room you can’t override other people in the conference by muting them, which would be a handy (and powerful ) feature. As the person who sets up a room you can also make a room private by giving it password access, which is handy if privacy is necessary, if you were using it for a business meeting for example.

Auto recording
Tinychat video conferencing has recording built into it. From what I understand it’s up to the person who set up the room as to whether the conference is recorded or not. I’ve not tested the recording quality, but it’s great to see this built in as a feature.

Desktop sharing
Tinychat has done something a bit different here, that I don’t think exists on any other video sites I can think of (correct me if I’m wrong) by allowing people to share what is on their desktop with people on the chat. This will be a handy feature for people using video conferencing for meetings and the demo I saw of it worked pretty well. The image is a good size and pretty easy to use.

100 people
Dan Blake from Tinychat told me you can have about 100 people in a chat room with about 12 on video. I think any more than 12 would get a bit much, but 100 is a good size for chat.

Embed the chat on your own site
One of the stand out features to Tokbox is that you can embed the chat on your own site or a social network. I haven’t tried this yet, but I think it’s a great feature and something that will make it appealing to podcasters and videocasters doing live shows. And we appear to have a stable of those in Australia 

Tinychat video was originally built with a premium model, but I understand at the moment they are letting people access most of the premium features for free while they build up their user-base. It’s definitely worth having a look at as there aren’t many players in this space yet and Tinychat has an interesting take on video-conferencing. Besides Tokbox I don’t know of any other players in video-conferencing space. In fairness, Tokbox also has a myriad of other  “social” features – sending video mail, profiles and friends – which make it a different service in lots of ways.

Overall, I think Tinychat has got a great interface and is very easy to use. When I was in a video chat there were a couple of bugs with the sound, but as it has only launched today, I’m sure they’ll smooth things out. Best of luck to the Tinychat team.

Last week I attended the Future Summit as a member of the Twitter crew, the ‘unofficial’ official back channel of the two-day conference. Our mission was simply to attend the event and twitter about what was said and our thoughts on the summit. It’s something I’ve seen referred to recently as event-casting. As well as ‘pushing’ out what was happening at the event, our goal was to ‘pull’ some of the conversation from outside back into the conference. We had a number of questions come through Twitter that were asked of speakers and panelists. We were given free-reign as to what we said and there was no expectation that we didn’t voice anything negative about the conference. I wouldn’t have attended had there been any direction against what we could tweet, but I think it’s something that’s worth acknowledging as fairly progressive especially given the rigid formal nature of these events. And we certainly did the avant-guard proud, despite our scrubbing up, I can certainly say the Twitter Crew stood out among the sea of grey suits.

Twitter Crew

Quite a bit has been written about the event itself, but I’d like to give a few thoughts on the logistics of event-casting and what I learnt from my Future Summit experience. I always like to think about how we could do things better next time, so these are my thoughts on improving the effectiveness of the conversation with the Twitterverse.

Spamming the Twitter timeline

Admittedly there was some hesitation about flooding my Twitter followers with a whole lot of #futuresummit tweets. There were some public complaints about it from my followers, others just unfollowed me and added me back after the event was over. All of which is fair enough, but it does raise the question about how willing we are to accept these sorts of Twitter interruptions as they become more mainstream. It’s not happening often at the moment and not at saturation levels like it does during #SWSX for example, but I suspect it will become a more common occurrence.

Most of us who were invited have been on Twitter for some time and have a decent following (I hate to focus on follower numbers as I find that unhelpful, but necessary to discuss here) which was part of the reason for our invitation, getting the event out to as wide an audience as possible. My advice to someone who complained to me was to use a filter on a Twitter desktop client to weed out #futuresummit tweets, but I think overall we should be supporting the intentions of conference organisers who try and implement Twitter engagement. As little as three years ago, we couldn’t have done this and I think most of us would agree that we certainly brought ’something’ to the event – dare I say edginess?

The limitations of 140 characters

The challenge of reporting fairly dense (and heavy) topics in 140 characters was made pretty plain to me at the conference. It was quite hard to give some context to what was being said and by whom (we often added speakers names to the tweets, but realistically I doubt many followers knew who any of those people were.) Some sessions were easier to tweet than others, but my overall feeling is that we may have relied on Twitter a bit too much. It occurred to me afterwards that using more video and perhaps taking turns in writing short blog posts (about what was coming up and what was said) could have better created a context around what we were then tweeting. Kate Carruthers did some great vox pops using video and in hindsight I’d like to have experimented using video a bit more. Perhaps a video of few of us giving a brief summation of talks straight after they happened would have been good and kept up with events. Ideally streaming is the way to go, but logistically the mesh network (which was brilliant) would not have coped with it that well (if at all).

In conclusion, it was a great initiative by Steve Hopkins to have organised for us to be there. I think the response and experience was very positive. I write this post as a big supporter of twittering at these sorts of events. I learnt a lot about the logistics and challenges of event-casting and I hope some of my thoughts can improve on future conversations. Long live Twitter and the Twitter Crew!

My friend Jo White (@Mediamum) recently asked for my thoughts on why citizen journalism matters as she’s teaching a class on the subject. So here are some of my views for your perusal and comments:

The internet is the natural environment for news to take place.

Traditional Western news organisations exist as they do because the distribution of news was previously limited by its means of production and the dynamics of capitalism. You needed a printing press, a TV license etc. to produce and distribute news.

To counter those constraints and deal with the enormity of that responsibility, we structured largely false, and “ideal”, notions of what was news and how that was reported. We developed terms such as newsworthiness and imparted notions of objectivity to sort through the practicalities of “telling stories” to the masses.

News became big business and news organisations became big corporations. All of this was not a bad thing in itself, but born out of social constructs and economic necessity.

The internet has changed this. The barrier to broadcast is essentially access to the internet (not discounting some social challenges), but while this remains a problem in some third-world countries, the existence of large mobile infrastructure is quickly overcoming at least the technical problems.

For me, the impact of this change was made evident during the second-Iraqi conflict, when a group of local bloggers set about writing what was happening from cafes and with limited internet access. Traditional journalists were often unable to go out and report on the situation in any meaningful way because they were compromised by having to go out with the US army or simply unable to leave their hotels for fear for their safety. In fact, it was were the term hotel journalism was coined.

What the Iraqi bloggers were able to do was report on what was really going on in a way that traditional media could not. Their opinions were better informed, personal (free from the falsehood of objectivity) and told the news to the world in a way that could not be done through traditional journalism.
Modern news rooms are somewhat remnant of the situation in Iraq – reporters are often tied to their desks and beats with little time to get out and discover what is happening outside of what is fed to them through sources and press releases. While there are exceptions, this is the harsh reality of the costs and time it takes to write for a large news organisation and the internet has only added to these pressures.

Those on the street now have the ability to report directly on what is happening around them. Our own personal experiences of our neighborhood will always be better informed than that of a reporter, surely? (Hence I was inspired to start the norg.)

News is no longer limited to the false dichotomy of “one side versus another” – there are often many views/sides/opinions to a story and as long as all have equal opportunity and access to sharing that information then we can leave the shackles of control media behind. Open comments on news stories is an important step in the right direction (and also Citizen Journalism).

Lastly, “citizen journalism” is not the best term, but possibly the easiest to understand. I think we are all news makers. Journalism has never been an official profession, but a prescribed name for a skill set many people can learn and contribute to outside of mainstream media.

Also the term Citizen Journalism does not account for the fact that many experts now have access to audiences.

Really what we are seeing is an age of hyper-connected news as opposed to that we have only been drip-fed. We are all news-makers engaging in what is only natural to us – telling our stories.

Photo shared under creative commons.

In the spirit of the Australian web community, I’m pleased to announce I’m doing a new podcast with Elias Bizannes on TPN called Silicon Beach Australia. We’ll be talking to Australian web entrepreneurs about their companies, dreams and motivations. Our first podcast is with Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian and we have some great guests lined up already. Have a look and leave feedback. It’s all about the conversation people

My new movie muse Fidlr told me about the Drunk History series, which I just have to recommend everyone to look at. I was really busy and didn’t get round to watching them till yesterday – but it is just frakin BRILLIANT.

This is my favourite one *hic* but make sure you look them all up on YouTube.

I’ll be speaking at The Future of Journalism Summit in Brisbane next week on Saturday, 13 September. I decided I’d give the MEAA a call after I looked through the panelists and found most were from control media companies, who quite frankly, are no longer the authority on all things media.

Details for the event are:

The Future of Journalism Conference
2 George Street, Brisbane QLD 4000
9am to 4pm, Saturday September 13, 2008

Members: $66 Students: $44 Non-members: $88
Enquiries & Bookings: 1300 656 513
or email melissa.mcallister@alliance.org.au

I’m also hoping Brisbane Twitterers can organise a BTUB on the Friday as I’d love to meet some of them.

I’m even willing to sponsor the event – well Brisbane Norg is anyway Nothing like free beer to spread a bit of love.

I wrote a post up on the Norgdom blog which may be of interest to others as well about what makes a story “norgworthy”.

It raises some questions about our role as individuals in new media  and what contributions we make as citizen journalists to the “news”.

You can read it here, for those interested

Deborah Leavitt, who is the ABC Local Radio and Online Manager for WA, gave me a ring last week asking me if I knew anyone who may be interested in applying for two online positions they have in Albany and Broome. They have had trouble recruiting through traditional ads, so I said I’d write up a blog post and do a shout out on Twitter. She made the comment that they were finding it hard to attract university leavers to the roles, because they were more interested in creating their own media and setting up their own blogs/podcasts. You can guess what I thought about that

Still I think the roles are worth considering. The ABC has certainly been the front-runner in Australia in understanding and adapting to online media and if you are interested in working for a bigger news organisation then this is the best place to start. You’ll get the experience many other control media journalists are missing out on, by working in a cross platform environment – and that is where most future roles in news organisations will be. Working in a regional office is also a great opportunity – I did my time at the Narrogin Observer, attending pig and sheep auctions among other things. It means really getting to know the community you are working in and allows you to really engage with the people you live among and report on (which has its own challenges, but certainly a challenge worth taking up).

So here’s the job description as advertised (the same role also applies to Albany):

Local Radio Western Australia Broome has a vacancy for a highly motivated, multi-skilled program maker to work in multi media platforms. Based in Broome, working to the Program Director and referring to the Editor Local Radio Online, the successful applicant will have accomplished online publishing and radio production skills. Working as both part of a team and with sound, independent editorial judgement, the online producer will be responsible for the maintenance of the Western Australia Kimberley website with strong editorial contributions in text, audio, pictorial and video formats. There is a requirement to contribute to program planning and participate in operational and administrative activities of Karratha. The successful applicant will have sound production skills and may from time to time be required to produce one of the Broome Local Radio programs.

I couldn’t write the post without adding that I also think the ABC should make a real investment in getting up strong citizen journalism initiatives in these smaller regional areas. There’s a fiesty passion that comes from living in a small community that could be very well harnessed by someone like the ABC. I won’t be surprised if that is what eventually happens.

If you are interested in the roles please contact leavitt.deborah at abc. net.au

Catherine Eibner invited me to be a guest on the inaugral Geek Girl Blog Podcast last week. The Podcast will be focusing on women in IT, across a broad spectrum of areas. We chatted about running a Web 2.0 start-up. I had great fun recording it and it was fantastic to meet Catherine in person – she’s become a close personal friend and it’s good to have found someone to share the aches and pains of running a company, juggling kids and having a life. The podcast is hosted on The Podcast Network and you can listen to the show here.

In the pic is Kate Carruthers, Jodie Miner, Catherine Eibner, Bronwen Clune and Alison Young at Pubcamp Sydney.

PS. I thought afterwards that I should have mentioned some great “male” supporters I’ve had, who also work in the Web 2.0 scene – all whom I count as good friends especially Cameron Reilly, Richard Giles and Duncan Riley.