Consider The Library

Culture Hack North was held in Leeds last weekend and following the success of Culture Hack Scotland and Culture Hack day in London, the 24 hour event saw a flurry of talented developers working on cultural data as well as a programme of high quality short talks on digital culture…videos coming soon.

There was a very good write up of the event in the Guardian and for all the great output I want to bring your attention to one in particular…simply because it is genius.

It’s called Consider The Library and is an extension which you can install into Google Chrome browser. And what it does it that when you are browsing the web and the page you are on has an ISBN number, if your local library has it in stock you get a little pop up window saying which library has it.  Therefore raising the profile of the great work libraries do and also saving your money since you may have just been about to buy the book on Amazon or wherever.

If you use Chrome you can try it now at http://considerthelibrary.co.uk/ – it currently works only against Leeds library data but could be extended to the city you live in soon since many regions use the Talis Prism data service that Leeds does.  It was created by Jonathan Powell and Alex Wolf and is one of the best examples of simple but brilliant cultural hacking.  Ever.

Festival Backstage

With the exhilarating Jazz&Blues Festival now over, the Fringe, the Tattoo and the Art Festival having kicked off and the International, the Book and the Mela still to come the summer festival season is now in full swing.

Here at festivalslab HQ we therefore thought that we should get in on the action so for the remainder of the summer season we shall take part in our own way and post as much as we can about all the innovation stories we see in and around the festivals…or in other words a festival of blogging!

Let’s start with this: the exciting Festival Backstage project at Edinburgh International Festival produced in partnership with Napier University and Standard Life.

Here at festivalslab its a constant honour to work with the festival organisations which all have such amazing people behind the scenes which help make these festivals happen.  Therefore it’s so terrific to see such an extensive project capturing and sharing these stories.

eif.co.uk/festivalbackstage is therefore well worth keeping an eye on as more and more great content emerges.

Distrify and the Film Festival

Many of you will have noticed that the Film Festival launched it’s exciting programme last week.  What however you may not have noticed is a really elegant innovation they have embedded into their online booking.

Distrify is an exciting Edinburgh-based startup led by Andy Green and Peter Gerard which – based on their own experience as independent film-makers – empowers filmmakers by allowing them to make sales through trailers – one of the most common points of discovery, especially in the social web. And what is especially exciting about their business model is that anyone who embeds a video and their embed returns a sale…they get 5%. Simple.

So we’re delighted that Distrify have partnered with the film festival and so you can see distrify’s deceptively simple (but very clever) tech in action but clicking the screenshot above and playing the trailer.

New report on Digital Audiences

This is pretty essential reading as a baseline understanding of digital audiences for cultural organisations. It’s MTM’s report on digital audiences for the arts/culture in the UK which has the very headline results that:

The findings from this report clearly show that the internet is changing the way we consume, share and create arts and cultural content and experiences. As a result of these changes, arts and cultural organisations are faced with a dizzying array of opportunities for broadening and deepening their engagement with their audiences.

The internet is a marketing and audience development tool, but also a core platform for booking tickets, distributing content and delivering immersive, participative arts experiences (be that a Twitter book club, a location based mobile app guiding us through an exhibition, or something entirely different). However, this research also shows that the direct revenue opportunities associated with many of these opportunities can be limited. Although exciting, the internet can represent additional cost without any guarantee of additional revenue: arts organisations will need to strike a balance between ambition and pragmatism when deciding where to invest their money in digital media.

One area of investment which can yield clear financial returns is marketing and audience development. The internet is a key route to finding out what is on and then filtering and planning attendance at live events. Arts organisations that are skilled in digital marketing will (all other things being equal) see more people through their doors than ones that rely on a brochureware website and email newsletters. Equally, it is important not to relegate the internet to the role of marketing channel. Our respondents saw the internet first and foremost as augmenting the live experience rather than replacing it, but this did not just mean providing listings and e-ticketing. The Leading edge segment welcome and already use the (sadly few) genuinely immersive and participative arts and cultural experiences that are already available online.

This report confirms that there is an appetite for the sector to innovate and create a new generation of experiences that take advantage of some of the internet’s unique characteristics – however challenging that may be given the current economic climate. The opportunities are exciting, but they do represent an additional cost. Arts organisations will need to strike a balance between ambition and pragmatism when deciding where to invest their mone It’s MTM’s new report

Still lots of questions and not necessarily news per se, it’s great data and worth reading.  And you can find out much more about the report, including some video here.

Storytelling Smackdown: Ivy4Evr vs NTLive

Last week I took part in two radically different storytelling experiences.  And because both would consider themselves innovative I thought I’d tell you a little bit about them and what I thought.  So first up is…

Ivy4Ever

Ivy4evr is a Channel 4 new project with Blast Theory.  The blurb will tell you that…

Ivy4Evr is an SMS drama for teenagers.  After registering your mobile number and email address on the Ivy4Evr website, participants begin to receive SMS messages from Ivy – ranging from quick updates about the minutiae of her life right at that moment, to pleas for help with her dilemmas about friends versus family, college and band commitments. You can reply to Ivy as often as you like, and the more you do, the more you will hear back from her.

The project uses a medium that is ubiquitous in the life of British teenagers – SMS. Blast Theory’s research with teenagers has shown that the majority have pay-as-you-go or prepay tariffs that offer large bundles of SMS messages each month, making messages much more affordable than even a short phone call. The pithy, asynchronous, quasi-anonymous nature of SMS is ideal for intimate conversations and, in contrast to the ephemeral nature of voice calls, text messages can be kept and shared. Ivy’s story and her interactions via SMS balance the potential intimacy of one to one conversations with grotesque, laugh-out-loud messages that you have to show to friends.

In addition to the central narrative that runs through each seven-day episode, there are a number of themes that you can explore with Ivy in detail if you choose. Once you express interest in one of these areas, some of which include music, family and pregnancy, you can enter an intimate dialogue with Ivy to discuss it further. As these conversations build, the messages become more personal and intimate, with each participant able to decide how far the conversation will go.

Ivy4Evr’s main themes are sex and drugs, with Ivy offering a distinctive voice with learning outcomes that go beyond what is currently available. The project does not take a moral position on sexual promiscuity and drug use, but instead offers a realistic, personalised and private space for young people to explore these issues. The story aims to immerse participants in Ivy’s dilemmas and asks for opinions and views, allowing participants to explore these questions for themselves.

I was part of the week-long pilot which ran last week with about 5000 other people.  So if anyone overheard me last week saying that I’d been receiving intimate text messages from a 13 year old girl hopefully this should explain it.

Now for the the challenger 

NTLive

NTLive is the showpiece innovation project from the National Theatre where live performances (in this case Complicite’s a Disappearing Number) from Plymouth) is livecast to cinemas around the world (in my case, the GFT in Glasgow).  It doesn’t really need too much other explanation since it’s really only just live theatre in the cinema.

The Verdict

Given this is an fairly arbitrary competition in that the only thing connecting them is that I experienced them this week (oh, the conceit of the blogger), the criteria by which I’m judging them is also fairly arbitrary. They are:

1. Innovation
2. Impact
3. Experience

Innovation.  The way I measure innovation is that the more innovative something is, the more closely held a rule that is being broken.  The rule being broken in NTLive is that live theatre can only be experienced by those inside the theatre.  The rule that Ivy4Evr breaks is immersive theatrical experiences cannot happen by the basic medium of SMS.  

 Winner: Ivy4Evr

Impact.  This criterion is all about how other organisations can take advantage of the models being demonstrated here so that the learning can be taken to scale.  The fact that not many cultural brands have access to a global cinema distribution network should make my decision fairly obvious.  The learning from the C4/Blast Theory is still clearly early stage but I see some great potential in taking experiences that feel very intimate to scale.  And that’s very exciting.  Although I certainly wont disagree that if the NT gets the business model and pricing right then NTLive would have a great impact on the organisation itself

Winner: Ivy4Evr 

Experience.  How did it feel?  Now A Disappearing Number is one of my most favourite plays ever so I was excited to see it again – it really is a remarkable piece of work – love AND maths, can it get much better?  So I really did enjoy the NTLive experience despite my being somewhat frustrated at times that I only had one point of view chosen by the producers and couldn’t see/feel the wide stage.   But when it comes to novelty and taking me to a new place, engaging with Ivy and being part of her story as both observer and respondent was really very well done.  To the extent that while I knew certain bits were automated, other elements could have been written by hand/thumb directly in response to my engagement.

Winner: Ivy4Evr.

So that means the winner of this particular smackdown is er….Ivy4Evr