There is now an excellent presentation on YouTube of the model of a sustainable organisation (MoSO). This is from the Deming special Interest Group of the Chartered Quality Institute. It intends to update the presentation of Deming ideas. So far some of the feedback has suggested that starting with Deming would be just as interesting. The model is supported on the website with a lot of material but this visual explanation of the essential model is a good place to start.
I have previously posted to YouTube some short extracts from presentations. The production values are fairly low, just a record of what was said. There is a better one on the official CQI site
I am trying to promote the hashtag #cqimoso as a way to find anything relating to the MoSO model. So far Youtube thinks I mean "chismoso" but it will include the four videos I have tagged so far. Not sure what "chismodo" refers to but there are thousands of views. #cqimoso may get better established over time.
I have stopped subscribing to the Guardian. I lost confidence over the Guardian Talk decision and presentation. Today I caught up on Peter Preston. He claims that newspapers will still look to print for most of their revenue
I did buy a Guardian on Monday. I will buy it on occasion. Roy Greenslade reports that ABC are getting more income from digital numbers, around 30%. So integrated reporting will be the trend. But some news organisations are avoiding revelation. Times paywall results a bit of a mystery for example.
It is possible that ABC income will come from new sources, not the classic news organisations.
Eventually I did find the Green Man. On Phonic I heard that he was on Topsham Road so I walked as far as Countess Wear roundabout. Later I found out he turned off towards Heavitree where I started. Still I got a bus to the city centre and eventually he turned up near the cathedral. Video still to be edited but here is one from previously
More on wheely Wild Show Thursday. Phonic worked out really well but my signal faded in and out. I had to phone the studio for clues, not to report a sighting as they expected.
esterday the test on streaming to live radio went ok I thought. I guest sometimes on the Wheely Wild Show. Ahead of Analogue to Digital this Saturday, where Soundcloud have a stand, I found a track that loaded ok with only a slight pause. JD tells me it would be better to download it and make sure there are no gaps. Also Soundcloud moves on to the next track so you need to fade it out after the one you want. But the integration with Web is quite possible. I notice that Soundcloud has a free offer but also various levels of charge and support. I hope to ask them what the benefits are. It seems a lot of sound technology is available in consumer versions. You can upload direct from a phone. So what is on offer from professional studios?
We also played "You're the Buddha" by Howard Jones. This is available for download from his website. It could be used as part of a video mix. I think this is legit but my question for the panel is what musicians actually think about the reuse of tracks. On Isca Obscura the Vimeo version is Creative Commons so the Beth Gibbons music is included in this. It would be good to know what she thinks about options on a mix.
On a previous Wheely Wild Show we played Gaia by Hum. I think this would fit with the Green Man section of the Isca Obscura images. The mood changes but the original sound stays the same. The Howard Jones track might suit the bright lights on the cathedral front featured by IDAT. This only happened on one evening so was many people missed it. Maybe it will happen again one day.
On Monday Phonic FM will connect with the Green Man in Exeter. Not sure how this will work. But there should be some sound and images. I will report back to the Wheely Wild show on Thursday morning.
The VJ aspect of Animated Exeter could have been further developed. Material from Isca Obscura may fit in to a future mix. This could be a considered video edit or a combination on an occasion.
but what mainly interests me is how the event can be reported through the Wheely Wild Show and other presentations on Phonic. The Phoenix building is not suited to cable so previous attempts to connect things have failed. But if wifi works on all levels and Phonic has network also then maybe this is worth trying.
There could be direct interviews in sound in the Phoenix Bar and broadcast on FM. Actually a mobile phone might work just as well. As would a video camera with an edit for next week. Oh dear I am going off in speculation, this could end up as confusing as the previous post. anyway I hope to have a clarified version of this idea in time for the Wheely Wild Show this Thursday between 10 and 12, (I may not get there till after 11).
Meanwhile one of the exhibits is Soundcloud, seems to be a social media approach round sound clips.
I have shown the premium link as this is a pro show. You can load directly from a phone but my question is what is added by professional support? I think sound recording should be possible on any budget. Conversation to be continued.
I have tried to check some facts with the Guardian but no response so far. Probably a blogger is not suited to the media enquiries scope.
My question is about the Guardian structure. Meg Pickard has stated that there is no connection between the closure of Guardian Talk and the purchase of Unlimited World. I can well believe there are disjointed bits for making various decisions. But at some level there is a policy made about priorities. Close down general stuff or local papers. Open up more in business to business. something like that. It would be interesting to know more about how this works.
From the website it appears that the Scott Trust has a concern for journalism. But journalism is changing. Citizen journalism for example is well worth considering I would think. Is there any official policy on this?
The Evening Standard has reported
It looks like an explanation has emerged for why The Guardian has abruptly closed its online Talkboards last month with little explanation after 10 years. The print version of the paper yesterday ran a prominent and very grovelling apology for publishing "a number of defamatory, untrue and abusive comments" on the readers' comments website. It is thought that The Guardian has reached a legal settlement with a private individual concerned. Unusually, those involved at The Guardian refused to comment.
So the sudden crisis theory may have some basis. But there is still the policy issue of what priority there is for talkboards and user generated content or whatever it is they like to call it. The statement that after a period of review they do not want to support a separate platform makes sense also. Further explanation would still be welcome.
Meanwhile there is no reluctance to risk the legal costs of reporting on phone hacking etc.
Quite right too, and well done on Wikileaks but the #guardiantalk story is in contrast. The "no comment" - (just go away) approach has so far been a great success.
So I would welcome any information about the Guardian structure and how these decisions came about.
Also, another fact I tried to check. It seems to me that Jeff Jarvis is writing less for Media Guardian. Is this a budget cut as with Simon Caulkin from the Observer? Or is it the sort of thing he writes about? So far nothing on Buzzmachine about #Guardiantalk but always worth checking, you just have to apply the ideas to your own situation.
LikeMinds are not at SXSW and also not in Exeter as far as I can tell.
Just to check out what is happening i will try out #edgex during next week. The Bowling Green is on the edge of the Exeter area tended by the City Centre Manager but there will be something on St Patrick's Night, whichever night that is. Starts Monday in London apparently.
Pyrates have cancelled, but Captain Gallows is never far away for long.
I nearly put Networking in the subject but this needs to work as a tweet, not sure of the wordcount.
Also broadcasting is the thing. Networking is all about cables and the chance of actual cable around the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter as probably passed. The walls are too thick, the design too ancient, the distances too great between the performance spaces, the video edit digital resources at the back, and the sound recording and radio studios in the basement. Somewhere in between are the galleries and bar / cafe that can also be used for conversation.
Last week on the Wheely Wild Show there was a broadcast from an mp3 attached to email (Gaia by Hum) not that unusual but it suggested other possibilities in later talk over coffee. Could there be a Skype connection round the building given that wifi seems to work ok? Skype video is not up to broadcast quality but helps towards better talk.
Analog 2 Digital is on Saturday week and fills most of the ground floor. I am not sure who is in the Phonic studio but it is always possible to send an email to studio at phonic.fm And a podcast can always be edited later if nothing much happens on the actual day.
Video shows previous web connection in Phoenix bar, actually from the basement. The VJ aspect of Animated Exeter could be shifted in space and time. Links welcome around this sort of topic, we need examples of video from actual VJ events.
Topics at Wheely Wild show include ways that broadcasting technology can be available to people of various abilities. There will be more detail on this later. Access to the basement is possible in a wheelchair but not that easy. So if sound access can be extended to more of the building it would help. But what other bits of kit are available?
Phonic often broadcasts sounds recorded at live events. But sometimes the sound quality is not good enough for broadcast. Some tips and tricks would be welcome. Obviously Analog2Digital has a base in a pro studio but my opinion is that social media should be encouraged. There will always be a role for professional editing to sort out the mishaps later. So why not offer some help to start with? Conversation to be continued in Phoenix bar / Phonic studio.
Anyone who supports the losses from so much print cannot be all bad.
Hardly any mention of MySpace. But a welcome for the idea of news for the iPad, back to broadcast as an intent.
I think MySpace is still ok for most music bands. The trouble is that Murdoch has not been a good public presenter for where MySpace could have gone. When he argues that only professional journalism has any value, then the tracks from unknown bands are not an obvious fit, even if they are well known a few months later.
Similarly the Guardian web presence without Guardian Talk may not fare so well. Former Guardian readers may go somewhere else. Just my guess.
As reported in the Bookseller , Nigel Newton - Chief Executive of Bloomsbury - has stated "With sales of digital devices such as the Kindle, Nook and iPad growing rapidly, 2011 will clearly be the year of the e-book."
Today I saw a large stock of Kindles in Exeter Tesco. This is reaching a wide audience.
Meanwhile I am not sure what Haymarket / Printweek are doing. They seem to be moving online but the content is still very strong on print culture. The Guardian used to be a source of information on new media but since they deleted Guardian Talk without warning or explanation it seems they may be going back in time and away from the transparency and mutualism associated with the web. So they may or may not make a transition as a news organisation.
Bloomsbury seems to be the leading example of a clear policy. They don't expect print to vanish, but digital sales are viable, could be 10 or 20% by the end of the year. This would have an influence on newspapers and business to business magazines. The statement by Nigel Newton is an event, stretching towards Xmas as it is validated.
In the print version of Printweek there is a code - bit.ly/pw-4tribute - and enough of a quote to show this is an opinion about Heidelberg and digital.
This is week three of the new Printweek. I thought they had moved online but there is plenty of variation in view. The blog is not very easy to find on the website but there is a link in the printed version to Jo Francis on the decision from Sky to increase email and reduce printed magazines for contacting customers. However, this is what she says
I'm not viewing this as some sort of wider death-knell for customer magazines in general, though. Sky has spent millions and millions of pounds on marketing to attract ten million subscribers to its services, now it wants to make maximum margin out of all those punters.
It is not a very positive sign though, is it? And the printed version of Printweek is full of partial items with a link to the website. what is the actual Haymarket view. I think it could be a very sensible take on where media is headed. But it could be more clearly stated.
Also I think the blog format could be better promoted.
Still mystified about the closure of Guardian Talk. After a week there is no change in the say nothing policy. Except that the Friday mentioned "a period of review". So probably not a legal problem, but what was in the review?
Losses continue presumably. Last June the FT reported that they were widening but not by much for Guardian News and Media, around £30m a year.
But what if the losses got to £50m or so? What if reserves only covered a few years? There will not be any results published till around June but the assumed reasons for the closure of Guardian Talk might be reconsidered in this context.
The business model for citizen journalism is based partly on the view that previous methods of journalism are not viable. Eventually the Guardian, or other progressive UK media, will develop a sustainable model. Readers of the Guardian are supportive but cannot respond given a complete absence of information.
SharkPatoo 3 March 2011 11:25AM Yes, but what does it actually do? You'd think that people who 'communicate for a living' would be able to do so. What is a social entrepreneur? And you've just dumped tens of thousands of regular users from your talkboards, why would anybody sign up to this when it could disappear at a moments notice? policywatcher 3 March 2011 11:59AM More to the point, is this acquisition in any way related to the rationale behind dumping the existing users? Perhaps a "social entrepreneur" is someone that GUT thinks can be "monetised" more rapidly than the GUT users... good luck with that. Jenny28 3 March 2011 2:32PM Ironically, if they'd made GUT subscription based, I bet an awful lot of the regulars would have signed up because of the sheer value and familiarity of it and its community. I know I would have. Whether I'd go for a different format remains to be seen, and if the community that seems to be forming around Notthetalk or thegraun.com takes off I don't know how many people would go back if any Guardian replacement version of GUT is a paid site. will787 3 March 2011 2:37PM Very good question from sharkpatoo above. Why would this not vanish in the same way as Guardian Talk? No answer so far. This is the thing about social media, conversation ------------------------------- No answer so far. Will the Guardian staff answer the question? They never contributed to Guardian Talk. Was that the problem that cannot be discussed? OK they don't have to tweet just because there is public curiosity. But the comments on the site that continues are supposed to get some sort of response. I think.
The deletion of Guardian Talk remains a mystery and inevitably subject to speculation. There are two apparent stories. From Monday the insistence that the reasons cannot be discussed suggest to some that there is a legal issue. Perhaps there is a super injunction from a celebrity preventing further comments of any kind. But if so why is there not some sort of response from other journalists? Often in such cases there is some form of resistance, perhaps a cryptic tweet from @arusbridger that others are only too happy to repeat.
From the Friday there was reference to "a period of review" and the difficulty of supporting more than one platform. So how long was this period of review and who was involved? @arusbridger did tweet on Saturday to say that discussion would be possible from Monday so he presumably was aware of the decision. Did the review take a week? Was it just over Friday lunchtime?
If it was a sudden letter from a lawyer would it have arrived late on a Friday? Earlier in the week seems more likely. Lawyers like their weekends to be free of complication. The timing seems more likely to be chosen to minimise reporting from media working normal hours. The complaints from bloggers etc over the weekend matter much less. This story is designed to be forgotten.
One person who probably did not know anything is the Networker, John Naughton
His warning about cloud computing should surely have made a reference to the danger of talkboards suddenly being closed down. I wonder if he will mention anything next Sunday? Probably not. There seems to ne a policy not to report this story in print.
PenfoldDavid has reported through Twitter that the Guardian has recently purchased a social networking site - unltdworld. Will this suddenly vanish also? The difference could be that this is a form of business to business. The Guardian group has already got out of local media. Perhaps they are changing focus away from general interest. But they sometimes make decisions that fail to fit a later pattern. Could there have been a social networking site around the Technology Thursday copy? Will the Monday Media be closed down? Is there any online preparation for this?
It is sometimes claimed that the Guardian is a news organisation in transition from print to online. The finances of this are complicated and they may have difficult phases. The disaster of Guardian Talk will feature in this story. So any information on how they reached this decision or what they think they are doing could only be helpful.
I am still confused how little explanation the Guardian is offering. Editor brand dissonance is a theory to explain the difficulty of reading one thing online and then another in print. except in this case in print there is nothing at all. Unfortunately i think my notes on editor brand dissonance have been destroyed with the rest of the wreck that was Guradian talk.
Still, I have found a PDF backup from some time ago and there is now a topoic on thegraun
Somewhere there is a backup on the PDF version of the Guardian and the conferences organised by OhmyNews. They may turn up later but not the most recent stuff. Briefly the Guardian missed the potential of PDF. Why Peter Preston is surprised that the iPad is not the answer is another mystery. Citizen Journalism has not been reported in the Guardian except on a Thursday by techies and that has now stopped.
Not backed up is the question about the reputation of the OU. education is not on thegraun list at the moment. I will concentrate on Cloudworks. Not just OU contributions and includes academics from Europe and Asia. The Guardian in print is mostly UK university in focus and has yet to explore elearning.
Apparently in Twitter terms this has been closed down. Official tweets have stopped.
But it is still a mystery. The Guardian has some awareness of social media. For ten years or so there has been a talkboard and some people find out about it. Never promoted in print, unlike Comment is Free where punters are allowed to add little bits on the end of the column.
Theory a, pro journalists just don't like it. There may be a valid reason why it was shut down without any warning on a Friday. It was then decided not to explain or respond to enquiries till the Monday when more people would be available. Today I discover through tracing back a tweet from Spank the Monkey that there has been an update on the blog
He has got a point. Thing is, things are moving back in time. The print journalists are less polite about social media than ever. Peter Preston seems to think that reporting from Libya is only reliable when the war correspondents jet in from London.
The closure of Guardian Talk is a disaster. For a news organisation to tell the public please go away we cannot cope, try Facebook is not a good omen.
Catastrophic failure usually has a background of sustained management neglect. There has never been a response from Guardian staff to the issues raised. Perhaps indirectly but the communication was very remote.
this will look at bloggers and journalists in general terms. I don't see the point of the Guardian getting all techy. There is something about policy that needs to be cleared up first. The lack of explanation around the closure of Guardian Talk will be a case study for many years to come. Investigation continues.
I'm staying in Exeter this week but a dubious source, aka #dubsource .may get to the Publishing show at Earl's Court and also the Insight Technology Show at Old Billingsgate on Friday. Acrobat X will be there on Friday but the show seems intended for a general channel, not a publishing scene as such. But maybe most companies could do things themselves as consumer level stuff gets better. There are no videos in books because of the file sizes, not the mystery. Still no Acrobat Elements though. Why is it so expensive? Quark at Publishing can go straight to iPad apparently. Not sure #dubsource is the right person for this story, he still wants to print things out.
