Current.TV comes to the UK

The American TV station current.tv (demostrated at my e-democracy seminar) is coming to the UK, as Al Gore spreads his channel to the UK.

The station, which has become famous in the US, allows users to upload “pods” (usually 3-8 minute videos) to the website, users that like the videos “green light” them and once they have enough they get queued to air on a mainstream sky/digital channel.

It has spawned a revolution of at-home TV film makers in the US, allowing them to create films of their everyday life and find innovative ways to share and record it on video.

Young people especially will find new ways to become their own creatives putting media back in their hands.

I have always said that students’ unions could hold the key to putting media back in the hands of students and encourage them to promote not only University life but the union, niche sports, political engagement and so on. Now there will a platform, unions can help cultivate and develop the creativity in turn supporting their students communicate, commentate and debate on key issues.

Guardian coverage

BBC coverage

Ian King on the future of SU technology

As we are now getting 100+ hits a day on this blog and importantly people are aggregating this feed, I invited CEO of NUS Services, Ian King to be a guest blogger, he kindly accepted and here it is:

“We had a ground breaking seminar at Yarnfield recently about the whole area of new technologies/ new communications. Personally I started using a computer at the age of 42 and am now moderately competent in terms of work and leisure, however, I have, for the last two years realised the vital nature of getting our Unions and national organisations up to speed and fast!!

Realising the strategically vital nature of something and making it happen do not often come easily in our movement, where we appear to be preoccupied with process rather than outcomes but I have been staggered by the responses and the enthusiasm for the intiatives which Kris Tailkowski has started to coordinate with and amongst students’ unions.

I hope that we are on the start of a”tsunami” of change in the way we present information to our Officers and members alike and we can use the good offices of NUS and NUSSL to kickstart that exciting programme. Lets hope that we can make a real difference very quickly”

Ian King – CEO, NUS Services

Playstations rival to Second Life

Second Life, the virtual environment community now has competition coming from Playstation. When the PS3 launches it will also launch ‘Home’ a fully customisable virtual environment in high definition allowing users to chat, play, talk in a rich, user friendly environment.

Watch the ‘Home’ demo

But will it take over from Second Life as THE most popular virtual environment?

Second Life’s major advantage is that everything is built by users. It’s true ‘User Generated Content’ but this absolute freedom, turns people wanting to get involved into “watchers” or people that just roam Second Life ‘watching’ but rarely interacting.

However Playstation will be tapping into an established ‘gamer’ market and bring a more adaptable virtual environment to the mass market. I must say from first glance it does look appealing.

Will ‘Home’ be successful? Certainly, but for me it doesn’t have the entrepeneurial advantage and creativity of Second Life (and you also dont need a PS3).

Also worth a watch is the BBC’s coverage of this story

GUARDIAN: How one year’s digital output would fill 161bn iPods

“Last year enough digital information – from emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, photos and TV signals – was generated to fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from the earth to the sun, according to research published today.  Todays Guardian article investigates this phenomenon. “

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2027327,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=20 

How can I read 10 blogs at once?

Just a quick link, WordPress has a very comprehensive description of what RSS is and what reads and aggregators do. My personal favourite aggregator is netvibes but there are many out there.

Here’s the ‘what are feeds’ guide:

http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/04/19/feeds-stats-readers-and-more/

BBC: Is e-democracy now a reality?

A BBC article investigate the reality of e-democracy under the revelation that The Downing Street website crashes under the weight of e-mails from angry voters.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6383717.stm

BBC: The political power of the network

Online campaigns and e-petitions are only the beginning of what the net can do to politics, argues Bill Thompson.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6400337.stm

Managers and sabbs take part in digital experiment

Groups at the seminar were set a tasks to experiment with creating and trying out technology to prove how easy it is.

Groups could pick from a number of different subjects including “student stereotypes“, “can phones flirt?” and “what people do in their spare time” and had 1 hour to use image or video to create a small digital piece. Below are the results:

All the image projects are on flickr <click to view>

All the video projects are on youtube <click to view>

8 Top Technology Tips for Students’ Unions

The main recommendations from the session as outlined in the presentation were:

1. Aggregate your content (news/video)
2. Use and share images
3. Develop your student media online
4. Engage in e-democracy
5. Attract students into a virtual building
6. Address changing demographics with techology
7. Get the University Involved
8. Review, plan, assess and look to the future

To read all the seminar notes and find all the links visit the ‘e-democracy notes’ page

SU’s leaders / managers favourite websites

At the digital experiment session, people were asked their favourite websites and why. Below are the results and links.

Google “It makes my world turn!”
Jigsaw “Love the clothes and I can turn the pages!”
BBC “Has the news and links to sport I want” “It’s all there and it works”
Ebay “Sucker for a bargain + never knew I needed so much”
Facebook “Stay in touch with people”
OutintheUK “Online community / great discussion boards”
Moneysupermarket “Does the searching for me”
Boohbah “The most surreal website ever”
Livejournal “Stay up to date with friends around the country”
Pandora “Free streamed radio based on your favourite types of artist, purely brilliant!” [TIP: to sign up to listen to more than 5 tracks you need USA zip code, just use 00001]

Please add your own in the comments…