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Two Seesmic evenings later
For the past two days I’ve been monitoring and participating in the seesmic conversations and it’s been a really interesting experience. There are so many different people. You’ve got some people living in San Francisco, others in South East Asia, France, Australia and England and they’re all coming to chat via video.
This chat is different from other chats in that it’s recorded segments. It’s about people speaking about key parts of their day. Both Documentally and Sizemore for example decided to meet up at Sizemore’s place to have a very entertaining evening of Seesmic video posting and discussion. As a result of this Jester joined in although quite timidly, at least for the start. With time I’m sure she’s going to become quite active.
There is a great range in age group from those that are children all the way up to their parents and beyond. As a result it’s a family environment, a community where people joke around and have fun. It’s a place that shows how a community can form without any ties in the physical world, at least initially.
It’s a great place and the best way for you to get a taste of the conviviality for this website is seesmix, the daily show that summarises the hottest conversation for the day. On some days it’s conversations about racoons, snow, a song that sticks into people’s heads and many more topic.
It’s also about the overheard conversation. It’s about someone putting something out there and waiting for people to respond. It’s about individuals talking and for others to involve themselves, community building. As a result of this it’s quite different from the culture and the use of video phones that we had envisaged many years ago.
I really enjoy the conversations on seesmic and I can see how strong a community it can become with the right discussion and time. I can see it as a video version of twitter and I’m wondering whether threading would be that useful, after all the conversations are working fine as they are.
It’s about actuality, about currency. If you want to get something out of this community then you need to participate rather than sit on the side and listen. You’ve got to become part of the storyline, to show your character to encourage others to interact with you. There are apparently about 1000 people currently active although no more than 50 people are trully active on the site at the moment.
As it moves out of Alpha we can expect a lot more fun.
Close to Success – Exporting Instagram images to WordPress Natively
When Instagram was a self-run startup I loved the product. I loved that it was a way of sharing images with friends. I loved that it was fast and that it was light. I also liked that it had it’s own community. I liked that it was a way of sharing real life with people we conversed with online.
When Facebook bought Instagram that slowly changed. Algorithms and popularity contests became more important than sharing between friends and so the sense of community was lost and we were posting for strangers rather than friends.
For months, or even a number of seasons now, I have felt that Instagram is just a way of forcing us to see images by people we are not that interested in, with the hope that we will eventually see images that are relevant to us. That time investment we make is devalued when you consider that the Facebook behemoth is making millions from our mindless scrolling.
During the pandemic my patience for social media finally fizzled out and I’ve been playing with my website. By playing I mean, experimenting, learning, and developing and trying new ideas.
One of those ideas was to export my Instagram account and find a way to flip it over to Wordpress. Why Wordpress, rather than another social network? WordPress is an open-source social network that we control. We control advertising, we control posting frequency, we control layout, and best of all, there is no group of investors holding our… …I’ll leave that to your creative imagination, over the fire.
I tried finding tools to import from JSON to WordPress but in one case I needed to install wp-cli and that was complicated, and I wasn’t confident that it would be tolerated by the web host. I could have asked but instead, I set myself the challenge of installing MySQL on the laptop and running the localhost for experimenting. I failed to connect my localhost WordPress install with MySQL and eventually after two days of trial and error I decided to take a break and try something easier. I tried XAMPP but then I found what looked like a simpler tool, with WP-CLI integrated.
I settled on LocalWP. With this, I tried the GitHub project I thought would help me import the JSON files but that failed so I looked for another solution and it got me 90 percent of the way to achieving what I wanted to achieve. When I confirm that this process works I will post a How-To guide.
Social networks and project collaboration
Jacques Yves Cousteau’s documentaries would have done well in the social media age, especially if the social media age moved away from profit and money. Imagine that social media companies such as Facebook and twitter were Not For Profit Organisations and imagine that instead of having advertisers they had sponsors. The quality of content and discussion would increase and the time wasting element that so many people worry about would be gone.
Alexandra Cousteau, grand daughter of Jacques Yves Cousteau is on twitter and she shares articles related to conservation and related topics. Not for profit organisations such as MSF and UN organisations such as the United Nations Development program all share content and articles that provide their followers with valuable resources for bringing conversations forward.
Social networks should be seen as anything but a waste of time. Their purpose would be to find clients, to find collaborators and to find mentors. In having these three resources finding new projects, employment and collaboration opportunities would increase. We would eliminate viral videos, tabloid content and keep high value, high return on investment prospects. Rather than PR and marketing specialists flooding our timelines with emotional but useless content we would have high value content worth responding too.
The aim would be to demonstrate our strengths in a high brow environment where conversations are possible and encouraged. From the time I was ten years old I have lived in the international community, between school, where I worked, university and more. As a result friends are distributed around the world rather than driving distance. Imagine that this network stopped seeing social networks as tabloid as commercial and a waste of time and instead saw them as useful work tools.
For me this is nothing new. When I was in London when twitter was in it’s infancy and when facebook too was in it’s infancy I saw both social networks as networking tools. I met hundreds of people via both networks and I continue to do this today but at a less efficient pace than I would like.
The aim would be that for every four or five days of social media use I would get two or three in person meetings with people to discuss projects and collaborations. I would also like to be inspired and encouraged to work on specific projects.
The Game Ingress by Niantic labs is a perfect example of what I would like to see within a professional context. Through the game Ingress I have met people in Paris, Fribourg, Lausanne and Geneva to mention just a few. If I go to Paris on the 22nd I can meet agents. If I follow mission days or First Saturdays then I can meet people in a number of cities. I mention this because although ingress is not a professional network it is still a project network. It requires geographically based teams to collaborate to achieve goals. If we could distribute that kind of network for documentary production and collaboration then employability and familiarity would both benefit.
It’s a shame that with all of the communication tools we have today we see social networks such as facebook and twitter as PR and marketing tools rather than collaboration and relationship tools. I have web designers, musicians, camera operators, writers, journalists, photographers, fundraisers, financial analysts and digital analysts as friends on Facebook and yet it is hard to see what people are working on. Imagine social networks that are optimised to benefit from your existing network.
Joke of the day
Apologies if the site has been slow or intermittently available. We were having an issue with a new database, but it’s been fixed.
So they’re going to start apologizing for the site being up now?
On Friends, The Series, Being Offensive
Friends is a television series that aired in the 90s and that still makes millions today, as the show is re-aired. Jennifer Anniston, Rachel Green in the series, says that people today find the series offensive today. I find it ironic, that in a day and age where books are edited to be more politically correct, parties that are immoral, are voted into power.
Brexit, the Tories, the UDC and The US Republican Party are two examples. They represent old fashioned views and yet people not only vote for them but they lead politics. In the age where people are worried about what people said and thought decades ago, people are showing more bigotry in who, and what they vote for today.
If we edit books to be more politically correct, and if we criticise television series and films for representing old fashioned views, then we should edit the bible and Quoran, to make them more representitive of modern values.
Television series, films and books represent the world as it was, and if we have moved on from the values seen in TV series, films and books, then that is the entire reason we study them in the first place, whether through english litterature classes, film studies or media studies. The fact that our values change is part of the academic discussion to be enjoyed.
The danger comes not from laughing about something, but about growing angry, and showing intolerance. Remember that joking about something, offending someone by accident, and apologising is one thing.
Brexit and some political parties are about radicalising hatred against people based on race, religion or national identity. Whether Roald Dahl or Friends shows old fashioned attitudes to one thing is an interesting quirk to be discussed by parents, children, and students.
The movement to divide, radicalise and spread hatred is quite another. Until Drumpf and Brexit I felt that England and the US were making forward progress. With BRexit and Drumpf the US and England took a big step backwards, morally.
Complaining about books, televisions and films is nice, but it’s a desire to change the past. What worries me is that the Far Right is thriving in the US, England, Switzerland and other countries. I want people to vote against the Far Right, in government, rather than worry about how people thought three decades ago. What I see happening now worries me. England voted against Europe and the European identity. They behaved in a xenophobic manner and no one noticed.
Rather than complain about television, books, and films people should vote to keep the Far Right out of power. If the Far Right is in power then the very things that people decry in films, books and television, are shaping government policy in the wrong direction. Vote intolerance out of government.