I’ve finally put the audio online.

Download the mp3 (21 MB)
Download audio file (socmedglob_mac_peteashton.mp3)

Here are my notes if you want to sing along.

Please bear in mind I was utterly exhausted from running the Created in Birmingham shop so while I did manage to remain coherent and make my points I’m not at my most sparky!

The Media Talent Bank from Birmingham City University was an online directory for people working in the media industry that, well, hasn’t quite met its expectations, shall we say. As someone who sees something like this emerge every few months with the best of intentions before quietly fading away this doesn’t really surprise me, but this isn’t really the place to go into that. The point is it’s sitting there not really working so, as I understand it, a bunch of 3rd year students have been given it to play with as their final project.

I had a chat with Jamie Futers, one of the bunch, who told me they’d decided to put on a series of events and workshops for those about to graduate from media courses at BCU. My take of this being if the Media Talent Bank wasn’t the right model, what should the students be doing to get the talents and interests noticed by the right people?

I agreed to do a talk (which turned out to be the only talk) and take part in some workshop discussions with the students and other folk who’ve done interesting things with the social web from a variety of backgrounds – Nicky Getgood, Alison Smith, Kate Hughes and Simon Partington.

Jamie asked me to cover the following areas in my talk:

1. The different social media tools – uses/limitations
2. What social media brings to creative individuals and the opportunities it can bring
3. Birmingham’s social media scene – contacts and networks
4. Personal social media success, how it worked for you etc..
5. Balance of personal and business
6. Being interesting

I pretty much ignored the first one. The second was pretty much the theme for the talk. The third was answered with “there is no scene, there are many scenes and networks.” The fourth was a brief talk through my blogging history. The fifth made for a nice look at my different online personas and how they relate to the “real” me. And the sixth was my big concluding point.

I’d been thinking recently about “being interesting”. It’s probably the surefire way to success in this lark. If people think you’re interesting then they’re more likely to follow and interact with you. If they think you’re boring then they’re not. The problem is “interesting” is incredibly relative, especially when we’re dealing with the granular nature of online activity. The conclusion I came to is you have no control over whether you’re interesting or not. All you can hope for is that someone out there thinks you are.

What you do have control over, however, is how interested you are and how you show that interest. And, I believe, interested people are inherently interesting to those interested in the same things. So be demonstrably interested. That’s probably the best advice I can give anyone.

Above all I should say I really enjoyed this talk. Partly it was because it just worked and I didn’t fluff anything major but mainly, I think, it was because I had a huge stage to run around on. I would appear to have become the sort of person who’s comfortable on a huge stage. Hmm.

Thanks to Jamie and team for organising the event and framing it so well. Watch these kids. They’re onto something.

Appendix

Andrew Dubber graciously let me have the recording he made. Sadly I was too far away from the mic during the Q&A but the talk itself is in these three mp3s (each aprox 5mb).

Me and my blogs
Download audio file (mtbworkshop_1_allaboutpete.mp3)

Some other examples
Download audio file (mtbworkshop_2_someotherpeople.mp3)

Musings on social media
Download audio file (mtbworkshop_3_socialmediamusings.mp3)

Laura Hogan posted her notes online and they’re shockingly close to what I intended to get across, which is nice to see.

The group was using the #mtbworkshop hashtag but since Twitter has a goldfish memory I’ve taken a screen grab.

I’m frequently asked to give talks to artists and creative practitioners about how they might use blogging and related social media tools to promote their work but until now I’d never recorded myself doing one. On Wednesday I did one for Shropshire Council’s Arts Network and popped the Flip video camera on a table. As I explain in the intro the framing and audio are awful but you can hopefully make most of it out and get an idea of what I do.

I start off with a brief look at how I use the Internet both as a business and as an emerging artist, emphasising how simple the process is and the effects of my behaviour online. I then work through a few examples of artists working in various mediums who blog, looking at how they use simple and free tools. I emphasise telling the story, bringing the personality of the artist to the fore and, ultimately, using social media as a means to enable communities of artists to emerge, grow and strengthen. I also look at how putting byproducts of an artists practice online without giving away the “crown jewels” can be effective and the notion of throwing small pebbles into a lake and letting them ripple out.

I’m very interested in doing more of these. While it’s pretty basic stuff to me it keeps me grounded and the Q&A often brings out things I hadn’t necessarily considered.

If you’d like me to come and talk to your group or at your event, please get in touch.

Rhubarb Radio recorded all the audio from the Barcamp (you can find mp3s of each talk here) so I took my slides and recreated the talk as a movie.

If you’d rather you can download the mp3 or just look at the slides in isolation.

Here are the links from the last slide:
moseleyexchange.com
indyhall.org
citizenspace.us
nwcny.com
workatjelly.com
refreshingcities.org
coworking.info

I didn’t include the questions in the video because I didn’t have any slides for them and wanted to keep the talk as a discrete object but you can find them about 15 minutes into the mp3. I might do something with them later.

I’d welcome your thoughts on this either in the comments or on your own blogs (leave a link below).

Here’s a photo of me during the talk taken by Casper, probably during one of the pauses since I appear be looking at a slide and wondering what I meant to say about it.

Moseley Barcamp or MozCamp is this Sunday, the third such event from the WXWM stable. I’m going to be talking at this one. Looking at the schedule I guess I’ll be on around 4-4.30 ish so if you’re not going and for some reason want to catch me live then tune into the stream about then. Not to worry as mp3s will be available later.

I’m planning to talk about coworking and how it relates to Internet culture. The basic premise is coworking is not actually that strange and yet it’s considered a revolutionary new way of working. Why is that? Is it the Internet echo-chamber re-inventing the wheel or is there a shared attitude and approach to the formation of online communities and the creation of offline workspaces. I’ll be referencing the coworking people I met in Austin, specifically Alex Hillman from Indyhall, and it’s no coincidence that the Moseley Exchange coworking space is opening next to the MozCamp venue.

Or I might talk about something else entirely. We’ll see.

MozCamp is sold out but you can listen live, follow the Twitter – hashtag is #mbcamp – or check it out later. and if you’re going I’ll see you there!

Things are still pretty busy at ASH-10 Towers and I’ve been saying no to a lot of stuff lately, which is a nice position to be in but does mean I’m not saying yes to the interesting things. One thing that slipped through the net is Toby Barnes’ Post Digital event which he’s holding to launch Mudlark in Birmingham. Since it’s taking place in the same building as my office and since he only wants me to talk for 20 minutes without any prep, figured I’d say yes.

Plus when your brief is “to do a really short talk, discussing your thoughts on a post digital place, a place beyond websites, a place in a conversational space with people not brands” and you have no idea what that really means (I mean, I know what the words mean and the discrete concepts but as a whole?) then figuring that out on stage with no preparation, well, that sounds like a lot of fun.

Although looking at some of the people I’m sharing a stage with I think I might do a bit of prep. Some good names there.

It takes place at Fazeley Studios in Digbeth, Birmingham on Friday May 22nd, 10am – 4pm. Details and free tickets here.

• How to be a better blogger.
• How do online spaces work? Key similarities and differences with the “real” world
• What could civic websites learn from Wikipedia?
• Lessons from the emergence of the Brum Bloggers community. What can we learn from early adopters? How can these lessons be applied to other groups?
• The asynchronous town hall. Reaching people who can’t reach you.
• Creative failure. When the cost of collective creation is zero how does that affect the art that Artists produce?
• The interesting similarities between the technical structure of the Internet (autonomous machines communicating through agreed protocols) with the social structure of society.
• What does the radical devaluation of recorded music mean? What lessons can be drawn out for everyone else? (Specifically NOT for music industry people.)

Do any of those make you think “Hmm, I’d spend an hour listening to the speccy bald guy talk about that”?

Also, does anyone have any video of me talking? I know a couple of times there’s been big hefty professional looking cameras pointed at me but in my experience those never make it online for some reason. All I have is my appearance at the Fray Cafe (more a story than a talk) and a group discussion on co-working led by Stef and myself, neither of which are exactly the sort of thing I’m planning on giving. Plus I like to think I’ve gotten better since then.

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