Blog (6)
With the advent of Ning charging for their service, actually i thought we were doing them a favour as we were drawing people into the site and their adverts - clearly that didn't pay for them though, i digress. Ning were going to start off by charging a small amount about $2 a month if you had less than 150 members of your Ning.
The How? WHY? DIY! ning now has about 123 members just 27 members short of the 150 mark. That was OK, I would be willing to pay that but after a conversation with Liverpool based Nerve Magazine they said there was an opportunity to have the How Why DIY event take place in a shop which they are getting access to as part of the shops up front project.
If/when How? WHY? DIY! Day, as I am calling it takes place then the numbers of people who are going to be involved are well going to exceed 150 in one way or another - leaving me with a problem, for Ning would then have liked to extracted from my very tight pocket $20 a month - I am generous but not than generous so a cheaper way had to be found that would house How? WHY? DIY! plus other groups that I am involved in such as Ignite Liverpool and Social Media Cafe. I looked at various options for expanding the reach of Joomla (what this site is built upon) using extensions such as Jom Social and extending K2 which i already use but the choice came straight down to Buddypress.
I have never used Buddypress before but i'm not afraid to take risks as I believe that is what life is about (except when it comes to heights) - so here we go the new How? WHY? DIY! network
Take a look and get involved.
So what did you think.
Paul Tarpey wrote the content for the Writing on the Wall publication which was on last month May - so tell us what you think to the content below.
I went down to The Liverpool Art Prize Launch at Metal in Edge Hill train station the other week and forced myself to have a go at Ustream'ing it. I tried to convince myself out of it but it didn't wash with me. I set up on a desk near the stage, cheap £40 camera, firewire and my USB microphone. I had background material and still shots all set up and away i went chatting to everyone. All was going well until i realised that the sound from the microphone wasn't being picked up by Ustream (See below) - it was meant to use the pictures from the camera and the sound from the usb microphone, but it insisted that it wanted to use the audio from the camera.
I was using the Free version of Ustream Producer and this does appear to be a bit of an issue on the the Ustream forum, I have managed to work out why now though as it appears that you need to assign the USB audio to the USB Codec before you start streaming. Simple really. So simple I'm really confident about how to do it - so I have said we will Ustream the next Rock and Roll podcast recording
How brilliant is that - I once bumped into the artist who was putting a show on at the old Tito's restaurant in Slater Street. Tito's was old as it had been a pretty good restaurant in it's time - so I was told - but the owner had died in the Kitchen one weekend - I knew him vaguely as I worked in the building next door, an old NCP owned office block, which I should have bought when I had the chance. Tito's is now a club/pub of some sort I went past there the other week and there were bouncers outside bouncing, needless to say I didn't try and get in.
A quick update on this - there now is a Social Media Cafe in Liverpool go here for further information http://socialmediacafeliverpool.wordpress.com/ 14 June 2010
Ok so it's not an original idea so few of them are these days, but having one in Liverpool is - Don't get to excited about it being a cafe it isn't - that just an expression as it woudl take place in a cafe or more hopefully a friendly hostelry.
The idea is to have a meet up once a month where presentations are given and where you can find out about such malarky as RSS feeds and Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Foursquare and etc etc etc - the list goes on. Social Media is great for letting your audience know what you are up to but also for them telling you what they think about it.
Manchester already has a social media cafe http://socialmediamanchester.ning.com/ which is really useful and it's about time Liverpool had one to.
Have you ever been to a presentation given by a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company where before the talk starts you are looking for the door? I have That is why I think that this is such a good idea as it all takes place in a nice space where you can come to all or just one of the presentations. A one to one surgery element is also an additional option where you could receive one to one advice from the presenters or organisers.
Is it for you? - well yes - it's free so what have you got to lose; the door is always open.
A few people have put their forward forward to say that they are keen to help out and even a venue that said they want to be used. So the next thing to do is to actually sort it all out.
Here are some social media ramblings by me on one of my other blogs
Next up I suppose is rallying some people around to talk about a format and dates. If your interested in getting involved either to attend, present or organise then leave a comment below and we will get back to you.
It looks like NING are going to be biting the dust which is a bit scary as we have the How Why DIY Ning on the go at the moment, which has been a great platform for publishing information about the HOW WHY DIY event and for drawing like minded people toghether - so we have used it to push information out about the Ignite Liverpool events and other Liverpool Tech/geekery events. There are going to be further announcements about NING's future on the 4th May so we look forward to that while we wonder if it is going to be able to oiffer us the opportunity to export content and membership.
Also we still don't know what platform we should use next - Or do we simply ship everyone into the back end of this website - it's a possibility.