In July 2007 on Created in Birmingham I coined the term “Collective Memory” to describe a blog post which collects all the writing, photos and video that are put online after a large event found by searching the Internet for mentions of that event. The first one was for an event called Rootsville where I found seven blog posts and 4 collections of photos, including my own. That seemed about right. A few weeks later was the Supersonic Festival and I did the same thing online this time the results were astonishing. Later in the summer I did the Moseley Folk Festival with decent but not extraordinary results and continued gathering the memories for other events in the city. The next year Chris did Supersonic again in 2008 and boom it was the same only more so. There’s clearly something about Supersonic that makes people need to record and share their memories.

But this isn’t just a fun and interesting thing to do. Capsule found the collective memory posts to be invaluable feedback on the festival, complimenting the more traditional audience research events like this do. They already had a positive record of communicating with their audiences through MySpace and Facebook but this blew the doors open because it gave them impartial, unmediated feedback and qualitative data they could use to get funding and support for the festival. It had real value for them.

So this year Capsule decided to do the Supersonic 2009 Collective Memory themselves. Since I’m on their steering group for Internetty stuff I sent Sarah the following links to get her started. If you want to use them for your own thing simply replace “supersonic” with the relevant keyword(s).

• monitorThis: A general search of the entire Internet including blogs.
• The Twitter search for #supersonic, etc with an added filter to include only those tweets with links. (Twitter’s advanced search is quite powerful in places.)
• Recent videos uploaded to YouTube and the same for Vimeo.
• A Flickr search sorted with most recent first. I suggested linking to sets where available and tags if not.
• Google News picks up the more formal articles and as such you can probably filter it down using words like “Birmingham” or “music”. Proper journalists tend to be more detailed and thorough in their writing than bloggers who might assume their readers know it’s in Birmingham or about music.
• I have no idea how best to search Facebook for publicly available stuff. I’m not sure Facebook is interested in people doing that. Facebook is weird. I need to do more research on it.
• If you spot activity in an area not covered by those searches do a new one. Maybe your audience is all on Bebo. Capsule’s aren’t but yours might be.
• And finally, open up the comments and let people leave links there, particularly for those areas of the Internet that aren’t easily searchable like forums.

Once you have all the info it’s up to you what you do with it. Prepare a report, curate it into something (Capsule could stitch all the audience videos into a massive replay of the festival from all different angles, if they had the time) or simply leave the page there as a monument. It’s up to you. The point is collecting all this is not hard and if not more useful then certainly differently useful than getting people to fill out questionnaires.

See also Chris Unitt’s guide to doing a collective memory from January. 6 months is a long time in this game but most of the tools still relevant and the spirit and methodology certainly is.

One of the first problems I had was the absurd number of web pages I have open in my browser, often filling between 30 and 60 tabs by the end the day. These are links I come across in Google Reader or on Twitter which I think are interesting and want to do something with but don’t have the time. My big problem here is I often have too much to say about a subject and feel I can only do it justice with a 1500 word essay. The solution is to use a system which forces me into brevity. I’ve already been doing this to some extent by posting links to Twitter throughout the day (which is also where the majority of my audience is so it’s by no means a poor strategy) but archiving Twitter posts is next to impossible to do usefully. I could import all my tweets somewhere but there’s too much noise and chat on there. Better to find a new system to run alongside it.

Enter Delicious, the social bookmarking service which is very hack-able – see my post from January about how I track comments I leave with Delicious for an taster of how it works and what you can do with it. My new strategy is fairly simple and goes like this:

When I read something I think is of interest to ASH-10 readers I hit the “Tag” button on my browser toolbar (part of the Firefox plugin – they also do one for Internet Explorer) which brings up a form to fill in:

I can edit the title of the page to something more useful and add tags to categorise the link for future reference but the key thing here is the Notes field where I can add no more the 1000 characters to describe it. No chance of verbosity here. I can get my thoughts or opinions out there without spending the whole night wittering away.

The most important thing, though, is to tag those links I want to use on ash10.com with “ash10″. You’ll see why in a minute.

Now I’ve got a load of bookmarks in Delicious and an empty browser. Lovely. But since hardly anyone checks my Delicious account (as far as I know) they’re not really doing anything for me. I need to take that data and put it somewhere else. Like, say, this blog.

I use the WordPress blogging software to run this site which I’ve installed on my own server. This takes a bit more technical knowhow than simply using WordPress.com but it gives me much more control over the functionality. For example, I can install plugins to do all sorts of whizzy things such as take my Delicious bookmarks and turn them into blog posts. The most popular plugin to do this is Postalicious which I have set up to check delicious.com/peteashton/ every hour, look for any bookmarks tagged ash10, import them into a blog post and, if it has more than three by midday, publish it.

So this:

Becomes this:

Without me having to lift a finger.

So, in summary I spend a few minutes for each link writing a brief piece of commentary about it and produce the following:

• A knowledge bank of useful pages on the web categorised by subject (want to see everything I’ve bookmarked for ASH-10 about Twitter or WordPress plugins I’ve noted?)
• A daily newswire of social media news and opinion for readers of the ASH-10 blog.
• A process which forces me to codify and communicate my thoughts.

That’s just the beginning. Because my bookmarks are available in a structured form on a public website I can do any number of other things with them. I could turn them into a daily email using Feedburner, import them into a Tumblr blog to reach the community there, use Twitterfeed to auto-post them to Twitter (not necessary since I intend to do this in a more conversational way, though I do a similar thing with my blog posts through @petepump) or get a bit more adventurous and do a mashup using Yahoo Pipes.

But for this will do for now. It captures my thoughts in a sustainable way and delivers them to a wider audience. Problem solved.

If you’re using Delicious to solve a problem, or have any questions about how it might be used, the comments box is yours…

One of the things I’ve never managed to crack is how to keep track of all the comments I leave on various blogs, forums, newspapers, etc. There’s no standardisation (some have RSS or email updates for comments but many don’t) and while many solutions have been attempted (the latest candidate seems to be Disqus) they never seem quite comprehensive enough so I’ve preferred to keep things in house.

My previous solution was to have a folder in my browser bookmark toolbar and to drag pages into it when I comment on them. Simple, but all that data is just sitting there doing nothing. Indeed, I had to delete most of the folder every so often to keep it manageable. Not ideal. Not to mention it being a step that wasn’t a natural part of how I move around the web. I do, however, use Delicious.com a lot, so I devised a system which works like this:

After leaving a comment I select the text I wrote and click on the Delicious “Tag” button (Install it from here). This automatically populates the Notes field with my comment. I then add the tag “comment” and save:

Since I tag all the pages I comment on with the same tag I can filter them from all the other bookmarked pages.

That’s all nice but what else can I do with this data? Luckily Delicious provides RSS feeds for pretty much everything so I can take those bookmarks and at the very least display them elsewhere. So using the simple WordPress plugin Inline Feed I threw together a page on my blog which looks like this:

And to prove how simple it is, here’s the code. If you can even call it “code”.

Finally we come full circle. Using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks function to subscribe to the Delicious feed I can access a list of pages I’ve recently commented on directly from the toolbar.
(You can also do this in Safari and I believe even Internet Explorer.)

Sure, there’s no notification of new comments and I have to click through each one (meaning it still feels like a pre-RSS system) but it brings tracking comments inline with the rest of my bookmarking activity, allows others to follow my conversations should they see fit and despite my years I still get a little tingle when the toolbar automatically updates. Feels like magic.

How do you keep track of comments you leave about the place?