stephen blyth’s blog

The Go-Betweens album I last thrashed on the turntable was “16 Lovers Lane”, released in 1988. This was the band’s sixth and final album from their first time together. Typical of their aching literary pop it’s easy to be swept out to sea when listening to it.

Since those heady days I’ve been wary of revisiting my old musical stomping ground so I’ve basically avoided any new Go-Betweens music. During the 1990s I didn’t bother getting any of the band members’ solo efforts, and I ignored the albums released during a second coming from 2000-2006. Nor have I been playing the albums which I’ve miraculously clung onto in their original vinyl despite carting them from flat to flat over the years.

My avoidance ended yesterday. During a download frenzy from emusic (where I got 75 bonus songs for returning to the mp3 music service on top of the the 30 I paid for) I came across a copy of Robert Forster’s third solo album, “The Evangelist”, released just a week or so ago.

It’s a particularly poignant album, as it includes songs he began writing with Grant McLennan, a former Go-Between and Forster’s song-writing partner of 30 years, who died suddenly in 2005.

You can hear the pain. With Forster still singing in his plaintive, angular tones, the emotion is very raw but now surrounded by pretty arrangements.

Forster has also written and talked about the sadness sitting not far from the surface on the new album. A couple of weeks ago a long article appeared in The Times of London (see “Former Go-Between Robert Forster pays tribute to his mate with Evangelist”), plus there is an interview and some songs on a Times music podcast recorded in February and an interview in the Australian newspaper (see the “Flying Solo” video).

As I dive into my back catalogue of Go-Betweens albums it’s remarkable how memorable and unchanged Forster’s voice is. On “Spring Hill Fair” the vocals are crystal clear laid over a sparse sound with jangly guitars, a loan stop start snare, and at times plodding bass. It’s 4/4 rock and roll, but mostly slow and sardonic. On first re-take, the music has survived remarkably well.

Up shortly - when the album finishes downloading from emusic - a 2006 concert recording from the Tivoli in Brisbane.

I’m enjoying dusting off the old albums and listening to the profound (some would say earnest) lyrics. On being reacquainted with the Go-Betweens my mood is kinda subdued and reflective, not melancholy nor am I dancing on rooftops. Very fitting for a dull, spare autumn day.

PS. As the coincidences continue, this morning Julian showed me the recent two album set featuring a disc each by McLennan and Forster. Despite the evocative packaging and catchy tunes, I’m trying not to re-ignite my Go-Between tendencies, so I won’t be getting a copy of it.

PPS. For more history, a discography, past tour dates, news, etc see: The Go-Betweens on wikipedia and a UK Go-Betweens fan site.

After a successful yMedia challenge in Auckland last year, Pamela and the team are expanding. The challenge matches web savvy students with community groups who develop a practical website or make use of online tools over a two week period. Both Wellington and Auckland community groups are invited to participate this year.

Participating organisations last year ended up using pay per click ads, creating bebo and facebook accounts and updating websites. The video interviews with each team tell the story far better than words alone.

To get get yMedia Group help using exciting emerging digital tools, to engage with young people, and connect with new volunteers, staff and stakeholders, there is a one month opening for community groups to sign up.

According to the publicity blurb participating groups can:

• Profile your organisation on the yMedia Challenge 2008 website (to be launched May 30)
• Attend the two yMedia 08 Workshops
• Receive newsletters detailing emerging tools, advice from digitally-savvy young people and insights into what other groups are doing with digital technologies
• Have the opportunity to be selected for the yMedia Challenge 2008
• Be invited to networking events with opportunities to connect with other community groups, ICT industry, students and government
• Have the opportunity to advertise for ‘tech scouts‘ / volunteers on the yMedia Challenge 2008 website

Find out out more, including details of the small contribution, at: www.ymediagroup.org/community.

At my hands-on wikispaces workshops at the Engage your community mini-conference on 22 April, a couple of participants raced into action and set up trial Wikispaces for their organisations. Wikispaces covering accessible parking, a walking school bus and the Otorohanga arts project went online within the 75 minute session.

75 minutes sounds a lot of time to cover the basics of editing a wikispaces page. Because I was foiled somewhat by not being able to use my teaching aids (the curse of Apple users I suspect) my plans had to be adapted off the cuff. I supplied participants with text to enter into the wiki and planned to walk through the basic editing process. This didn’t happen as I envisaged but everyone seemed to cope. It’s amazing how resource people within the group will surface to share what they know given the chance.

In the end we achieved the goals I set out: introduce people to wiki editing including embedding multi-media such as You Tube clips, and getting people to think about how a wiki could suit project work, or their organisation more generally.

The resulting Engage your community wikispace is still online. (NB it needs some work to be fully accessible, a topic we couldn’t cover in the time available.) For a copy of the workshop presentation and notes, see my training page.

A couple of the things I neglected to mention were:

• wikispaces is run by a profit making company from the USA. They’re big but nevertheless subject to takeovers (like Yahoo) so it’s not totally secure long-term, and to earn a buck they do run Google ads on the free websites.
• for wikispaces organisers you’ve got lots of powerful functions (eg messages to group messages, customising the skin, manual back-up, mass uploading of files using WebDav, etc)
• it’s easy to delete an account from wikispaces: login and go to your “My Account” page.

I’m running a 45 minute version of the workshop in a couple of weeks, with modifications based on what happened in Kirikiriroa Hamilton.

I’m planning to list any wikispaces that are publicly available, if I can find the website addresses.

PS Miramar Mike’s help during the workshop was fantastic. Thanks heaps!!

Thanks to Zara, plus a press release from David Cunnliffe, I’ve found out that government today started consulting on the second edition of the Digital Strategy.

55 people on the Digital Future Summit 2.0 facebook group received a short alert from Zara letting us know that we can have our say.

Using online tools has been a feature of the Digital Strategy refresh. Presentations at the Digital Summit held last November are online, as is the summit blog, and a room on/in secondlife. A Digital Summit summary is available .

Up until 12 May anyone can edit and discuss the draft document on a the Digital Strategy wiki.

I’m still digesting the wiki terms of use. There are lots of rules, including the need to login before making comments. Somewhat ominously MED staff reserve the right to intervene as appropriate.

I’m hoping to get beyond how to have a say, to thinking about the substance.

In preparation for the workshop I’m running next week I’m looking for examples of what wikis are used for. What I really want to find is examples of New Zealand community groups with a wiki, private or public.

So far, I’m struggling to find anything run by a New Zealand community group. Within government there is the Police Act Review wiki and SSC’s online participation community of practice.

What I thought was a whole wiki set up by Show Jumping New Zealand, is actually just an article hosted on the New Zealand Wikia. Wikia, I now find out, is “a community destination supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. We currently support over 5500 communities in more than 70 languages.” Many of the community and voluntary organisations listed on Wikia only have a name, many with just a blank page.

Searching on Wikispaces, I come across the Quit Group, a charitable trust running quit smoking programmes. Not much to see, and when I look at the history page: last edit was on 10 November 2006. An idea that didn’t quite get off the ground perhaps.

Fortunately I do have one example. The project being run by a consortium of national organisations developing an online collaboration platform is using a private Wikispaces wiki for its governance group. I’ll keep looking but I’d love to hear of any examples from Aotearoa, to balance up examples from the four corners of the world.

On a more promising note, I’ve installed an application to create movies of what I’m doing on my monitor. Screenflick makes it easy to create multi-media for training. It’s straightforward to use with lots of options on how to save movies. This programme is for Mac OS X, I’m not sure if there is a comparable application available for Windows or Linux systems.

Look out for my presentation, due online next week.

Update: Sam suggested by email I take a look Justwiki, which is run by the The Social Justice Commission of the Anglican Church. The wiki lists loads of useful resources which registered users can add to and comment on.

When I was studying for my politics degree I doubtlessly would have taken a course on the intersection of politics and the internet. Had something like this been on offer, of course.

Skip forward to 2008 this might have involved enrolling in a course by the farsighted Howard Rheingold (author of The Virtual Community in the early 1990s). He’s instructing a course on virtual communities/ social media at the University of California, Berkeley.

The course sounds brilliant. Imagine talking about how a 1960s commune influenced the development of the Whole Earth Lectronic Link (WELL) virtual community. Or about Habermas and the public sphere. Being the cyber denizen he is, Rheingold shares a series of lesson excerpts on his vlog.

No longer having the same amount of time to contemplate and debate as I did when I was a student, I rarely find for delving into the theory and praxis of cyberspace.

Then, out of nowhere, I find a book that makes me want to glug coffee and argue back and forth.

It’s with growing anticipation that I wait for “Here comes everybody” by New York professor and consultant Clay Shirky. The book is about the power of the internet for organising without organisations.

Even without a copy of the book I’ve found out quite a lot about it, including dozens of reviews. None of these have put me off yet but that could easily happen.

His schematic for describing the ultimate goal of the internet as being collective action is hugely attractive. And he seems to slide blithely by some of the web’s perils, such as the endemic marketing and disinformation by various elites. The examples don’t seem to have been drawn from activists in the traditional sense, but from regular citizens seeking to right wrongs.

I definitely think there is something worth talking about here. The promise of the internet to distribute power is in danger of being consumed by other purposes.

The more I look and scan, the less I feel the need to read the actual book. Though, as I found in the past after sitting in a lecture theatre listening to a professor up the front, actually understanding something only happens when you toss ideas around with other people and hear different points of view.

Aha! Maybe I could find some others in Wellington who also want to read Shirky’s book, drink coffee and rave.

All about Here comes everybody

Clay Shirky interview (mp3, 30 MB), by his publishers, 4 March 2008

Clay Shirky on Guardian Tech Weekly podcast, 25 March 2008

Presentation at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, video, 28 February 2008

“Does “Obama Girl” help Obama?” by Farhad Manjoo, Salon, 7 March 2008

Official Clay Shirky “Here comes everybody” blog

I’ve just been added to a website listing blogs about New Zealand and by New Zealanders. When I checked today (4 April 2008) there were 479 blogs on Kiwiology.

I’m sure in time they’ll have loads of advertising, but at the moment the site is uncluttered. And even though the people behind Kiwiology are a bit shy about saying who they are, they seem a nice bunch.

They want to hear from the NZ blogosphere. As they say, “We’d love to get the low down on what you think about Kiwiology and look forward to your suggestions.”

“Nice one, stu”, I’d say. Great to have a place to visit to find bloggers under the long white cloud.

Take a look, and if you blog or know of a good one, hit the submit a blog button.

I’ve been searching around for a Wilco bootleg. After seeing the band play at the Opera House on Easter Monday, there’s something about the energy and intensity of the concert I’d like to recapture.

Already I’ve heard a couple of their live recordings as Wilco are prolific sharers and have embraced the Internet.

Aside for the commercially released Kicking Television CD, a concert recording from 4-7 May 2005, Chicago, Wilco have broadcast a lot of live concerts over the Internet. Currently on the official Wilco Roadcase you can hear concerts from the Riviera, Chicago, 20 February 2008 and Tipitina’s, New Orleans, 5 March 2008, both available for a limited time.

Change channel to NPR’s All Songs Considered you’ll find a live recording for their show at the 9.30 Club, Washington DC, 27 February 2008. NPR’s artist archive for Wilco lists quite a few other interviews and studio sessions, but two previous concert recordings are no longer available.

Most of the music is only streamed so you can listen to it just when you are connected to the Internet, but NPR put out a three song sampler from their 27 February 2008 show as a podcast (Wilco live sampler, 16.1 MB mp3).

If that’s not enough you can find gig photos on flickr taken by various photographers (see wilcobase), and set listings of concerts stretching back to their first ever concert in 1994 (including the set list of the Wellington concert). Oh yeah, don’t forget about Wilco on myspace.

Plenty to choose from and browse through but nothing comes close to actually being there (c. 1996).

BTW: The critics highly rated Wilco’s New Zealand shows. Russell Baillie, reviewing the 25 March concert in the NZ Herald, concludes that while Wilco “…may have been preaching to the converted, their performance answered all our prayers, and then some.” The Dominion Post’s Simon Sweetman was similarly entranced: “One of the greatest shows I have ever been a part of” (see Wilco in Wellington).

I didn’t need convincing.

Photo credit: Mahinty on flickr.

A few weeks ago, Josh Campbell posted a short video to You Tube showing some of the dangers of cycling to work, called Biking in Christchurch. (Warning: content may offend!!)

It’s not churlish, buffoonery, like the horrible tv reality programmes. But deadly serious. The 2 minute 57 second video records many near misses. It’s enough to give you second thoughts about cycling.

Now, the story doesn’t end there. Just a week after being posted on You Tube, and propagated through various networks (including by Dave who I met with today), Josh was on national tv talking about his experiences. On 10 March the TVNZ Close Up programme featured a clip on Cyclists v motorists.

Scary as the ‘experience’ from Josh’s handlebars is, I really like the fact that it’s not words or analysis, but a visual story. With no commentary or soundtrack I’m not manipulated into any particular reaction.

So, take one short video by one person freely hosted on You Tube and you get lots of people talking about a serious issue. Helmets off to Josh.

Even before George Monbiot started his interview with Sean Plunket as part of the 2008 Readers and Writers week, the British journalist and climate activist had made a big statement.

Monbiot declined to travel to Aotearoa to speak. Instead, he agreed to participate only by a video link. This decision was based on his conviction that air travel should be avoided because of the disproportionately negative impact flying has on climate change.

And there he was, beamed larger than life onto the cinema screen above Plunket’s head last Saturday.

It didn’t take long before more big statements were being slung around. Provocatively, Monbiot said we can’t shop our way to carbon neutrality.

“The first thing is to see yourself primarily as a citizen, not as a consumer. We’re not going to solve this problem simply by consuming better,” as he said in an earlier talk.

Typically he said new products supplement existing products rather than replacing them, and the rate of change of individual behaviour change is too slow and sometimes even counterproductive.

He argued that it will be only when citizens put pressure on their governments to reach an international political agreement, will there be any chance of preventing run-away climate change.

Revivifying democratic participation, something Plunket described as revolutionary, is the foundation for responses to climate change.

Afterwards, trying to digest Monbiot’s analysis and barbs, we talked about what is to be done. As I’m not so keen on joining another committee at the moment, I wondered about participating in local community activities (such as Friends of Owhiro Stream, Brooklyn Gardeners, etc) or perhaps adopting the ChangeMakers 5-10-5-10 recipe along the lines:

5 - spend 5% of your income directly supporting citizenship action that inspires you
10 - do ten actions in the next year on your personal passion in citizenship action
5 - spend 5% of your time on active citizenship tasks
10 - join with ten other people to create a learning community to support each other’s work for change

To get a taste of what Monbiot talked about at the Festival you can find a few other talks or interviews with him listed below.

Even if I feel I’m walking on hot coals, especially since I flew down to Christchurch within hours of hearing him speak, the message is sinking in.

Links

What Australia Should do to Stop the Planet Burning, presentation to Friends of the Earth, Melbourne, 3 July 2007

Interview by Paul Jay, four parts, RealNews Network (USA), 1 May 2007

“If We Don’t Deal with Climate Change We Condemn Hundreds of Millions of People to Death”, Democracy Now (USA), 18 May 2007. Video, audio, transcript.

Global Democracy, ABC Radio National (Australia), 11 November 2001