I’m just someone who’s been blogging for a while, writing for a little longer and spots the important stuff when it comes along. In many ways I’m the same person I was when I started messing around on the Internet quite a few years ago and yet now I’m approached on a regular basis to do some weird and wonderful things. I haven’t changed the signal that I’m broadcasting all that much, but social media has certainly amplified it.
On Friday afternoon after a very successful social media cafe at its new home in the ICA I received a phone call from the Thomson Reuters news agency. I was asked if I wanted to come into their offices on Monday morning for a NewsMaker event with Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister.
Sure, I said.
And here I am now. In the same room as one of the most important people on the planet and simply because I tend to use a series of online tools and platforms that anyone reading this also has access to.
If you go to http://ourmaninside.com/ you’ll see that Christian Payne is with me. He’s one of the very best social media practitioners that I know. Yesterday as we spent the day here at Reuters working out exactly what this meant and what we could achieve, we were asked by a series of people what exactly it is that we do.
It’s a very good question.
Today we help to demonstrate how forward thinking and innovative a huge organisation like Thomson Reuters can be. I’m as out of place here as I was in Cannes when a similar set of people wanted to try something new and put me in the same room as Stephen Spielberg and Harrison Ford among others. That was a spectacular success not because of the names involved or the fact that I have a crazy job, but simply because we removed some barriers and allowed people sat at home to join in what would have otherwise been behind closed doors.
Today we’re taking a similarly high profile event that is already being broadcast worldwide (you can find a feed on the Thomson Reuters site as well as Christian’s blog) and seeing what we can add to the mix. With Gordon Brown due to start talking on the present economic crisis what can two beardy blokes with a few laptops and small cameras possible hope to add?
Well nothing directly on what is about to be said. I have as much interest in current politics as I did in marketing movies. I’m here with Christian to start conversations around the NewsMaker event that are currently not part of Reuter’s remit. I sincerely hope that following today the idea of getting these events discussed on social media platforms such as Twitter, Seesmic and Phreadz becomes a natural part of the news media’s roadmap.
Broadcasting on such a scale is brilliant. Listening to the conversations those broadcasts generate is even better.
And a happy side product is that we legitimise a little more the work we do (and by we I mean not just Christian and I, but all social media users) and the platforms we live and play on.
And hey look - I just used a free iPhone app to break a huge event. Don’t you just love living in the future?
Talk to Christian and I on Twitter right now and we’ll keep the conversation moving along.
Carbon Black is an Englishman well known for not at all acting like one.Nellie Bly
In 1909 French industrialist, banker and humanitarian Albert Kahn travelled to Japan on business and returned with many photographs of the journey. Having already used his unique peace garden as an example of diverse but unified life he turned his mind to the power of photography. His journey and the sights he captured on film prompted him to begin a new project collecting a photographic record of the entire Earth. He sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using the first colour photography, autochrome plates, and early cinematographic equipment. Between 1909 and 1931 they collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film. These form a unique historical record of 50 countries, known as “The Archives of the Planet”. This endeavour and the resulting beautiful photographs and film were the subject of a BBC documentary series entitled Edwardians in Colour.
The archive is still in storage in Paris. Kahn died a ruined man and is now best remembered for the gardens he left behind rather than the dusty old photographs that are for the most part still locked away in his often overlooked museum. Meanwhile the exact art of capturing colour images using the same technique as Kahn’s photographers has been lost. There are, however, some beautiful examples of the results on Flickr.
In 1909 Kahn travelled from France to New York City via ship. The majority of passengers below decks were hoping to escape persecution and find new lives in America, but held on to centuries old beliefs and carried their superstitions with them. It’s on this journey that the story get a little curious.
Worried about the dangers that new life in America may bring and distressed by dime novel stories and rumours of the most rank kind, something was accidentally set loose aboard the ship. Originally brought about as protector whatever was released proved difficult to control. 16 people died before the ship came to dock in New York City.
By that time Albert Kahn had learned two things; the world was not as easy to collate as he had believed and evil does indeed exist. The only man he’d seen stand up to it was a British traveller with an unlikely name: Carbon Black.
In fact not only did Black face off against what the terrified crew were calling a golem, he scraped what was left of it off his boot, after a confrontation that left the rest of the ship’s contingent afloat in life boats, preferring the unknown dark water than the thing that Black happily met armed with only a single pistol.
The effect on Kahn was catastrophic. He’d been about to embark on a plan to enlighten the world around him, to once and for all show his fellow man that the far flung countries of the world held nothing for Europe to be wary of. He had in mind a grand exhibition that would reveal (and in colour no less) that we were all brothers under the same sky.
And yet before traversing a single ocean he’s been set upon by what he described in his diary as “a pure creature of darkness”. If one existed then there must be more. Suddenly his plan to send photographers out into the world seemed naive and worse still would obviously backfire as soon as his new technology caught one of these “beasts of the fantastic” in its stare.
It took him a week locked in a hotel room to fall over the solution. The Englishman who had so easily put down one menace had revealed himself to be some kind of mercenary. Kahn would hire him as trouble shooter for the many expeditions. As soon as the photographers ran into “something unnatural” then Black would be dispatched to dispose of it. And Kahn would document the destruction for future generations. A dark archive would be created that he would hide away until the world was enlightened enough not to be scared of such things…
And in the meantime his archive of light would speed on that happy day.
Extremely fictionalized events of Kahn and Black’s first encounter can be read in the now sadly very out of print ‘Carbon Black and the Unshaped Form’ (1944). Rumours and stories of Black’s exploits grew in a select circle of adventurers and academics, but the very real threat of a second world war soon dispelled what many deemed to be pure fantasy. By the time pulp authors such as Lester Dent were turning to these rumours for fodder for their own stories, Kahn was dead and Black was missing.
How a man born in a place so civilised could go on to live through so many fantastic encounters all over the globe only to be lost somewhere off the coast of Antarctica is a story that has yet to be told.
Over the last year I’ve been digging a little at a time through the history of Kahn and Black. Now after being in touch with the incredibly helpful people at the Kahn Museum in Paris I believe we may finally answer the plea scrawled in faded black ink by a ship’s telegraph operator. The message of unknown origin is now believed to be the very last words of Carbon Black:
Find me.
Note: This is obviously part of a much larger story, but also a little part of something far more important than the story of a man who may or may not have shot a Jiang Shi in the face. More to follow on all of this. But for now many thanks to the Moblog experts for helping me out with some coordinates for this post. Don’t forget to geolocate this entry.
I’m beta testing the Wordpress version of LifeCast from my iPhone. This represents a new mindset for me as I’ve hardly ever felt the need to liveblog much. Huge events such as the London bombing were the exception, but now platforms such as Twitter offer a more concise and interactive solution to firing up a blog.
However, just as I believe blogging hasn’t been replaced by micro-blogging or video blogging neither do I think new techniques kill off the old ones. And when new tech like the iPhone offers interesting ways for old dogs like me to learn new tricks then it simply means more strings to my bow.
Couple of things to note. The current version of LifeCast availabe via the iTunes store (for free) is already compatible with Blogger, Tumblr and Picasa. As I don’t use any of those platforms anymore I’ll be concentrating on text posts to see how the app handles formatting. Also wanna get used to typing on the iPhone. So far so good.
Full disclosure: I’m currently working on a number of projects with Sleepydog, hence the opportunity to get my mitts on this early. I’ve also had a chance to see some cool stuff leave the drawing board and am very interested to see how this all hangs together.
Depending where I am (which you’ll know via the post’s geolocation) I’ll probably be playing with this a few times a week. I’ll also write something about the potential of apps like this one which I think is going to be the real strength of the iPhone and Android.
As opposed to say pretending your phone is a fucking beer glass.
Quite a turn out plus we had cake and champers. I got the impression that the excitement about a move to the ICA outweighed any sadness at leaving our old quirky venue.
Do come along this Friday of you can. The sign up wiki is here.
And If you missed it last week then here are some bits and bobs from the morning including some excellent ukulele playing from Lloyd:
That should also give you an idea of the Flip Mino’s quality.
