My Digital Notebook

And the walls fall down

Digital publishing has come a long way. Six years ago (or so) all websites and blogs could only be updated from computers that were connected, with long lengths of cable, to the nearest telephone socket.

But then along came Wi-Fi. Suddenly the Internet was in the air all around us. You could hook up your laptop or, more recently, Smartphone, whenever you got a sniff of it and suddenly all the old boundaries of digital publishing tumbled down.

The mobile Internet meant that people to could publish on the fly from almost anywhere. And when I signed up to the Africa Rally – sometime early on last year – I wanted to do just that.

The Africa Rally

The Africa Rally is best described as a charity touring event, which is organised by a company called the Adventurists. The aim of the rally is to successfully drive from England to Cameroon in Africa in an old, unsuitable or amusing vehicle. I signed up with two old friends and we decided to have a go in an old VW Beetle. Our team name was to be Camervroom.

Blogging it – (problems)

Such a long and peculiar journey immediately struck me as excellent material for a blog. A blog would help us to stay in touch with family and friends at home, it would remain as a record of the trip after we had finished and it would serve as a new publishing challenge – just enough to satisfy my ongoing Internet addiction.

But there were lots of problems. The journey was (at best) going to take a month and to stop each evening and compose a reasoned blog was going to be too time consuming. Even if we did find the time and my two friends did have the patience (which they wouldn’t have had), the likelihood of finding an Internet cafe whenever I wanted one in various corners of Africa was low.

The obvious solution was to cut out Internet cafes and blog via telephone. There are lots of powerful telephones available at the moment and, in particular, the iPhone has about as much publishing clout as an entire newsroom would have had just about a decade ago. You can take photos, shoot video, record audio and send email on the iPhone, all in a few jabs of the finger. In addition it records useful meta-data as you go, including geographic location, local times and date – all of which comes in useful if you want to do some data mashing later on.

Still, taking an iPhone along to Africa is certainly about as stupid as it is clever. On the rally we were passing through 12 different countries, each of which had perhaps two or three different mobile service providers. Any concoction of these may or may not work, depending – or so it seemed – upon a million different capricious factors.

On top of this you have the problem of cost. Everyone has heard horror stories of enthusiastic holiday makers generating enormous telephone bills in just a few short days in Mallorca. Add on to this the fact that an iPhone is just the sort of expensive, desirable object that you shouldn’t carry out of the country, and all things considered it could end up a dysfunctional waste of space.

Blogging it – (solutions)

Enter Posterous

Posterous hasn’t been around that long. In fact, it was only launched in May last year but it has quickly grown in popularity as one of the best platforms for mobile blogging or, more fashionably put, lifestreaming.

The idea is simple. All you have to do is send emails to Posterous and thereafter it is the software’s job to make sense of the message’s content and cobble it together into a post.

For example if you take a picture on your telephone and then email it to Posterous, within a minute that photo will have been blogged alongside any accompanying text that you include in the body of the email.

Here is a good explanation of how to get the most out of Posterous.

All in all, a blog can be prepared, posted and published within about two or three minutes and you can post to Posterous from wherever you phone allows you to connect to the Internet. A decade ago people wouldn’t have believed it.

Connectivity

So Posterous worked for the blogging software, but what about connectivity? Well, I called O2 who are my mobile service provider and told them that I was going abroad and that I wanted to use my iPhone to connect to the Internet. For £50 a month they set me up with a bolt-on package called Date Abroad 50, which allowed me 50 Mb of data, downloads every month while I was out of the country.

(For a full-scale blog for a month, this isn’t quite enough. But if you are careful (you can monitor how much data you are downloading by studying your telephone settings) and just use the phone to send emails then it should be a good amount to start off with).

Connectivity Again

So. I had a phone with the potential to write emails, record videos and sound and take photos. I had Posterous which had the ability to take all of this information and process the code into a meaningful post and I had a bolt on package from O2 that allowed me to send data while abroad at an affordable price. All done.

Or not.

The iPhone worked perfectly in France and Spain and fitfully in Morocco. After that the cellular network quite predictably fritted in and out continuously. It didn’t work in Senegal, worked a little bit in Mali, failed totally in Burkina Faso and Benin, reappeared dramatically in Nigeria before vanishing again in Cameroon.

In countries without sufficient network coverage I was forced to resort to WiFi. This was a more tricky task, but luckily West Africa has an enormous number of unsecured wireless networks that usually pop up at opportune moments, most of them in hotels, banks or on the streets outside governmental buildings. Three minutes stood outside one of these buildings in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Benin or Cameroon was long enough to post a brief update. And usually that was all that was needed.

Real time rally – some observations

I posted 84 times on the Camervroom blog – most of these coming on the road and in the last month it has been read by around 4,000 unique visitors.

I’ve always thought that a good definition of a successful blog is one that has more total comments than total posts – and Camervroom, with more than 100 different comments, passed this test easily.

There were many benefits of using Posterous – its ease of use and reliability were the main ones, but another little quirk that worked particularly well was its ability to detail the geographic location of a post, making it easy for people to see exactly – to the very spot on a street – where we were.

Lesson learnt

For me, working in digital media, there are a couple of lessons to be learnt here. Firstly, people want to know what is happening in real time: writers, content producers, journalists and whoever else should be willing to occasionally substitute the overall quality of a piece for the amount of time that it takes them to get it out.

This change can be reflected by the frequency of posts, but also in the style and mindset of the writer. An author can write in the present tense instead of the past tense to give a sense of an ongoing journey, they can end a piece without reaching a conclusion or post a picture without an explanation.

All of this flies, of course, in the face of creating a fully coherent journalistic piece, but lifestreaming is something quite different to that. Simply put, you don’t always have to finish with a conclusion because your reader will know that you are going to be back soon.

Secondly, if you are going to have a go at lifestreaming then it is a good idea to experiment with different types of media. By this I mean audio (podcasting), visual (photographs) and video, and the very best applications to use for anyone with an iPhone are Audioboo and You Tube to help you do this.

Thirdly, think about your readership. Posterous is very good at sending out automated updates across a host of different platforms: Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and so on. But does everyone in all of these communities want to know about what you are doing three times a day?

The best bet, until you know otherwise is to manage this yourself manually otherwise over-publishing will be seen as spam and any effort that you are putting into doing something may well have negative consequences.

Micro journalism

I attended Journalism.co.uk’s News Rewired event on Thursday and was interested to hear Greg Hadfield, someone that I hadn’t ever heard of before, say something that I agreed with completely.

He said, journalism is now much more about individual journalists doing little projects than large organisations and enormous projects. And I think that using Posterous for little projects like this is a perfect example of that.

Ok. This was a rally and a holiday, but the same methods that I used on the Africa Rally could easily be used by journalists on projects abroad, by aid workers at the height of a crisis, by managers at a business conference, or by a music journalist on the road with a rock and roll band. You could imagine each of these resulting in excellent pieces of journalism – micro journalism if you like.

Ingredients for a lifecasting blog

• Download Posterous, set up your email to post directly and Google Analytics (optional)
• Get a Smartphone with the ability to connect to the Internet
• If you are going abroad you need to agree a roaming bolt-on with your mobile service provider
• You need a USB cable to connect your telephone to fixed computers when you get the chance (in Africa I took my USB cable everywhere and it acted like a wonderful umbilical cord between this world and the virtual one)
• Make sure you have some good telephone insurance

Cost

All told, in one month Camervroom cost about £150 in additional telephone bills. Just about everything else was free and as it is going to be staying around for as long as the Posterous servers exist (fingers crossed), then I don’t think it is a bad investment at all.

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Links: The Camervroom Blog