onionbagblog

Re-birth of the Cool

Billy Bragg reinvents himself as the new Poster Boy for Americana (although to be fair, the Mermaid Avenue noodlings pre-date England Half-English.)

There’s some astute observations in the first half of the recording from The Bard about the nature of the music industry [URGH].

No longer a stand-alone record business, but an all-round entertainment industry.

Yer man makes the point that as recent as five years ago he didn’t even have a FB page, let alone a Twitter account. It’s a theme also touched on by Amanda Palmer in her TED talk:

“Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance. The interent and the content that we are able to freely share on it are taking us back. It’s about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough.”

See what @solobasssteve is working on for evidence as to how this micro artist / audience relationship can actually work.

Movers and Shakers

“I don’t want to be a slave to a mortgage for the next 25 years. This is what happens when property in your city becomes a global reserve currency. For that is what property in London has become, first and foremost. London houses and apartments are a form of money.”

Great piece by Michael Goldfarb in @nytimes, explaining the economics behind the Great Escape out of London.

Let Them Eat Cake

Meanwhile, one of the *possible* accentuators of gentrification in Brixton gets a little bothered below the line in The Graun:

“If anybody were ever to ask me why so many people who write for Guardian newspapers dislike the comment sections below the line I shall direct them to this emetic joyless explosion of bile, self-pity, insecurity, point-missing and all round general chippiness, from a bunch of people who don’t even bother to buy the paper.

This isn’t interactive journalism; it’s care in the community. And people wonder why I no longer bother to engage.”

OUCH @jayrayner1.

Twitter QT

“Brent Council will integrate Twitter with the live streaming of council meetings, as part of Local Democracy Week 2013. The council will be the first local authority in London to enable people watching the webcasts to tweet messages to the council. Councillors at the meeting will be able to reply to messages live in a Question Time-style evening on 14 October.”

Superb work over in Brent, and a reminder that #localgov needs to take the message out to the masses, rather than wait for a response from residents.

Note the trust in allowing Cllr’s to conduct a meeting and tweet at the same time. *some* local authorities don’t seem to credit Cllr’s with the multi-tasking skills to contribute to a meeting and simultaneously tweet. Which leads to the old top-down structure of #localgov with layer upon layer of hierarchies, and little public engagement [URGH].

Meanwhile, any attempt at hyperlocal transparency further down the food chain is still being brushed aside with a medieval battering ram of:

“It’s not in our Standing Orders.”

No wonder there is so little faith in a closed talking shop, percevied to be in place to perpetuate civic social standings, rather than offer solutions.

Catch up, Comrades.

FT Reverse Ferret

“In future, our print product will derive from the web offering – not vice versa. FT journalism must adapt further to a world where reporters and commentators converse with readers.”

No such old school Establishment layers in the um, FT.

A brave move in going Back to the Future with a single print edition, and one that purposeltfully relegates the power of print as only a secondary concern when it comes to the modern interweb.

The FT is Dead, Long Live the FT, etc. This isn’t so much as a changing business model, but the building of a new business. You almost get the impression that the Dead Tree Media is something of a thorn in the side for the digital disruptors that want to dive straight in.

The gatekeepers have gone (sort of) and the users are shaping the content. ACE that the old publishing barriers have been broken in what was once the bastion of The Establishment.

SHIT, FUCK, WANK, BOLLOCKS, D***Y

Shout yer nuts off at the House of Pain, Borough High Street, as part of the Merge Festival, 2013.

via @tiredoflondon.

I’ve entered into the world of online archiving. It’s really becoming quite addictive. It’s not so much archiving, but unarchiving. If this activity conjures up thoughts of an agenda-less collective, writing on post-it notes one weekend, and then agreeing to disagree on a plan of action, then you couldn’t be more wrong.

Nope - unarchiving is the re-discovery of online content that I’ve created over the past decade, and then slowly, slowly unpackaging it for my own perusal. It’s not quite as cringe worthy as reading your personal teenage diary. My mantra in content creation has always been to rather cleverly stay on the correct side of the lens, the one not in focus…

And so what has been the driving force behind my digital reconnections?

I’ve not had any major data outage, but I’ve realised that my system of organisation has been about as random as my approach to creating content in the first place. It’s all been backed up, and then backed up again, but the systems and pre-systems just weren’t talking to one another.

Time to sit down, plot a strategy and implement.

Oh, and SMILE an awful lot as I look back over ten years of creating content.

It also coincides with my own blogging birthday. TEN years of onionbagblog, and hopefully not too much internal naval gazing.

I’ve always tried to Tell It Like It Is, or even tell you something that you don’t already know. Blog posts about blog posts are just bobbins, but occasionally I like to look back with a retrospective and remind myself about what’s been happening.

You live your online and offline life at such a pace that sometimes you forget the distance between Archive A and Archive Z. I’m probably speeding up to the halfway point in the alphabet. I’m in no rush to race through until the end.

And then what…?

You fall off the edge of the modern interweb?

One of the lessons that I’ve learnt in this process is to work with the tools that are available at the time and to be flexible. It was my stubbornness back in the day not deviate from a CDR system of backing up that has left me with such a random approach in trying to reunite all my lost files in one secure place.

But that’s also probably part of the problem. Placing all of your digital eggs in one fragile basket is always going to lead to data fail. No system is full proof, but as the tools and storage solutions continue to grow, you can hopefully hedge your bets and hope that you don’t lose your wedding photos once again.

Whoops.

My system has some structure, but I’d also welcome any suggestions or obvious flaws in the comments below. I’m working both personally and professionally with video content, audio files, images and words.

LOTS of words.

Time Machine backs up my MacBook and iMac seemingly every twenty seconds. It’s a reassuring hum whenever the hard drive creeks into action. The reality is that Time Machine is less than reliable, only keeping back ups for a certain period.

I’ve forked out for Super Duper, a Mac client that mirrors your hard drive. This backs up automatically at the end of each working day. Whatever Super Duper misses in a changed version of a file, Time Machine will be able to bring up to speed somewhere along the timeline.

That’s the theory. Thankfully I’ve haven’t had the need to put it to the test.

My SQL database files across two personal blogs, a hyperlocal forum, a [mothballed] hyperlocal site, three work sites, two sites for a pal and a site for a family member are mailed to me automatically each week via WP Complete Back Up. Gmail automatically recognises these as important files and archives them accordingly.

As a back up for the back up - WP Better Security also mails the SQL’s out (although the INTENSE security paranoia with the software has managed to lock me out of my own CMS more than once in the past week.)

As a third level of defence I routinely export the SQL files each month to my main machine via cpanel. These are placed in Dropbox, which in turn is then dumped into Copy. I work locally using Dropbox, and so all files will also be in Copy, as well as the Time Machine / Super Duper fingers crossed and hope for the best strategy for data storage.

I also use Evernote for random notes that are then exported to Dropbox / Copy. Plus I’m in the process of importing an image library of 50,000+ files into the ACE Pixa. iPhoto has been pants at offering any searchable image storage solution. The £17 or so for Pixa has allowed me to tag all of my images, and then have them on my desktop in seconds. These are then exported to Copy, via Dropbox.

Third party providers such as flickr, vimeo and audioboo add an extra layer of security. I use @ifttt to implement other cross-platform backups. Any audioboo content or images on my phone are automatically placed in Dropbox, and then Copy.

I’ve learnt that to rely on a third-party host as your primary source of storage is very silly. A big Ya Boo Sucks to blip.tv who have recently decided that four years of video from a Reception class in South East London are no longer suitable for their platform.

If this all sounds complicated then you should try implementing it.

I spend about two hours each work purely on the back up process. It’s an online investment well spent, especially when you consider not only the safeguards, but also the digital delights that I am now unarchiving going back over the past ten years.

My main observations from the unarchiving process are that I have taken an extraordinary number of photographs at Dulwich Hamlet over the past decade. Ditto Surrey Cricket, London Towers basketball, Streatham Redskins and um, Supernova Korfball.

I’m still hopeful in finding the Dulwich Hamlet GOLD of Peter Crouch at Champion Hill; Sir Bradley at Herne Hill Velo has been backed up, and then backed up again.

I almost had him on the back straight, dontchaknow…

It is the work content however that is proving the most rewarding. The last day of the summer term is always one that I don’t really celebrate. I have learnt to accept over the years that this is realistically the last time that I will get to share the company of some truly amazing kids. They sometimes come back, but then the conversation is awkward with a 17 year-old after a six-year break.

The video content of Nursery kids running around has been given even more meaning. Seeing the exact same bunch of pupils as confident, mature and truly inspiring Year 6 pupils eight years down the line is incredibly special.

I haven’t got the courage to show them the Nursery clips just yet…

But that has been one of the other overall aims driving my online unarchinving process. Having just celebrated my tenth blogging birthday. I’m also coming up to ten years of working Somewhere in SE17. Across the borough border in Lambeth and five years in SE21 is not too far off either.

I’m pondering the idea of putting online a data site that includes ALL of the content that I create in the day job. I come out of each school with an average of 200 images. I probably edit and publish a dozen at best.

What a wonderful resource to have a completely searchable archive of all of this content.

But this can’t happen until the unarchiving is complete. I need to upload before I even think about sharing once again. I estimate that I’m probably about 0.2% through my entire digital content.

It’s a classic painting of the Forth Bridge project. I’ll come out of SE17 tomorrow with a drive stuffed full of more content waiting to be archived. But it’s best to be shared, rather than being scattered across various hard drives at the back of my loft. My system will no doubt need to change, probably next week when a new storage platform simplifies the process.

And so adding to the category of two people in this world - those that back up and those that lose data - I’d like to adda third: those who GRIN upon stumbling across the unarchiving strategy.

Some complete RANDOMNESS that has warmed me of late:

Online / Offline Safe Spaces

“What we’re creating online are social spaces, right? Places where people come together to have conversations. What we’re seeing is we just haven’t found the right social signals or social codes to make people feel that they have to behave a certain way in certain spaces online.”

@joannageary offers some wise words on the modern interweb and acceptable online social behaviour.

I rather like the analogy between entering different social spaces online. You moderate your behaviour offline as you go about your everyday life. There is a slightly different social you in settings such as employment, with your parents or on the piss at the cricket.

But essentially the core of what makes up the individual remains. You instinctively know what behaviour is suitable for each social setting.

Sort of.

And so why is it so difficult for some to achieve this online?

@joannageary then goes on to explore ideas such as online anonymity, cultural difference and making connections online.

“Even if your real name’s up there, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be a model community member because you don’t necessarily feel connected to the people you’re talking to. We need to do more to make people feel that connection.”

Imagine the first meaningful human communication and the lessons that we learnt after this. The online space has yet to collectively throw a single rock at a wooly mammoth.

Although that does sometimes happen online…

Much to learn.

Innovation, Innovation, Innovation

“The Public Service Innovation Camp will run in an unconference style where you will work in small groups to discuss problems that have been identified as getting in the way of solving social problems and then you will work together to develop new and genuinely different ways of addressing these issues.”

‘cos let’s face it - #localgov is pretty much fucked if it continues in the same economic and structural model that has limped along for the past ten years or so.

ACE work from @futuregov in getting organised to help motivate and find a new model that works for all.

For all the faults of localgov, it isn’t the BIG BEAST that it once was. Coalition cuts have seen to that. Time to find a new way of working, and one that probably is unique to each particular hyperlocal patch.

The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll

“I’m prepared to be bloody-minded about it, even to do without an audience to make the music I want. I’m not interested in the Laters… He’s a nice man, Jools Holland, but it’s not for me. My manager says: ‘Oh, but you’ll reach so many more people and sell more records.’ But I’d rather not, frankly.”

Paddy McAloon on being Mr Prefab for the past thirty years.

Good fortune then that the music that yer man Paddy wants to make is also the music that many want to hear. I’ve yet to really give Crimson / Red any serious consideration - and you must always give a Prefab album some serious consideration - but the timing of the release hasn’t been lost on me.

It was twenty-three autumns ago when Jordan: The Comeback saw me through from late summer all the way through until Christmas shopping. Strings, musical sweeps and doo-wop - if Crimson / Red is even as half-decent as Jordan then it must be job’s a good ‘un.

And yeah - the four-fer with @RobertElms was LOVELY at lunchtime today.

Yay. My @PrefabSproutNew four-fer suggestion for Friday has been rubber-stamped by @RobertElms. Ace.

— Jason_Cobb (@Jason_Cobb) October 2, 2013

Cold Water Whimsicality

“For the unheated lido swimmer (like me), the temperature dropping matters. It means that the water starts nipping at your fingers and toes. That putting your face in is a slap rather than refreshing; your fillings start hurting and you need a blast of hairdryer up your shirt afterwards.”

@jennylandreth on the JOYS of cold water swimming.

Fifteen degrees still remains the tipping point for me. The lovely lido looks as though it is about to take something of a southward dive.

I’ve been pondering a winter swimming membership to take me all the way through to the spring.

But, y’know…

A swim for me has to be functional. There is no such thing as a bad swim, but I want to start my morning with a sense of the physicality having been challenged (steady). I want my lungs to have benefitted from having put the lengths in.

I don’t want to splash around for half a length in the icy waters of Lake Brockwell, with the only alteration to my physicality being the boys in the barracks down below.

But there is a definite romanticism of outdoor winter swimming, and one that @jennylandreth captures with some grace.

Give it a month of being back indoors at Brixton Rec and I’ll soon be longing for the lovely lido once again.

Meanwhile, over in the South Eastern Transpontine territory:

Swimming with Dolphins

“I was slightly sceptical about whether the self-proclaimed Deptford Dolphins were actually going to manage to swim out from Watergate stairs to the nearby crane derrick in the Thames. But two of them made it on 22 September, and there’s a film to prove it.”

Diving into the tawny waters of the Thames down the river at Deptford is an outdoor swimming experience that I am happy to put on hold. It makes a doggy paddle at Brixton Rec appear like an apparition of Atlantis.

via @Transpontine.

Vincent Woz Ere

ACE research on Van Gough’s London, via @CabMirror.