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  • Sutton Coldfield Festival of Arts

… that I hadn’t found the ultimate displacement activity.

I should be mowing the lawn, cutting the hedge, tidying up the Sutton Festival of Arts website, theming my own website, and maybe spending sometime with my wife.

Instead I’m playing with I So wish and doing silly things like making a blog badge for my wishes.

Neat little site from Andrew Dubber and Stef Lewandowski.  What’s great is that in this very early release it’s very cute and simple.  Hope they can keep spam at bay without making it difficult to use. And  hope Dubber buys me a beer or two when he becomes a social network millionaire. 

What do you so wish?

Last night I attended the 2008 Showcase for Handsworth Library’s Urban Digital project.

Urban Digital started in 2007.  It’s a community media training programme, based in Handsworth Community Library (HCL).  Originally funded through SRB6 the programme provides access to training and equipment for digital media production in the following areas:

• Video production
• Photography
• Web design
• Graphic design

For the past two years I have been worked on the project as a tutor on the web design strand.

This year’s showcase featured a rich programme of short films across  a spread of genres as diverse as historical documentary, sci-fi and horror.

The film showing was followed by an award ceremony, officiated by Professor Roger Shannon, who has strong links to film making in Handsworth.  Roger commented on the creativity and dedication of the film makers, who achieved a great deal in the 10-weeks of training.  In particular he singled out the creative sound design techniques employed by the film makers (something which is commonly a weak point in the skillset of a new film maker).

In addition to this, I briefly spoke on the achievements of the web design class.

Hopefully somebody will give me some DVDs of the films to upload to You Tube, in the meantime I’ve uploaded some photos of the award ceremony and the red carpet reception that welcomed the students when they arrived at Library Theatre.

Now that SRB6 has finished, the team at HCL have to find new pots of money to fund this work.  Fingers crossed some of the people who came to the event saw the acheivments of these students, and want to back them to develop further.  In the meantime the kit is available for community use at HCL - just make a booking at the front desk (tel: 0121 464 1185).

So here’s my brief:

Sutton Festival of Arts is happening next month, over a wide range of locations and with a tonne of shows, workshops and exhibitions.  We’ve printed programmes, we’ve got a website, but I’m still worried about how people will navigate the day. So what we need is a new type of programme.

And here’s the solution:

I’m going to start using a twitter account for the festival.  We can use this twitter account in the normal way, to put some news out there, generate some interest, and hook up with some interesting people.  But we can also use it to keep people up to date on the day: “Shoot Panda?! are performing at the library”.

I know I’m going to be pretty busy that day, and I’m the only person on the committee or the volunteer crew that is bothered about this (geek? - probably).  So I’ve hooked up Tweet Later to this account.

The software allows me to schedule up to 60 tweets per hour (a spam avoidance mechanism apparently).  Set up of an account and linking it with twitter was simplicity itself.  Total set up time of about 5 minutes, and that included sipping on coffee.

Does if work?

Hell yes.  Better than I hoped.  But with some odd quirks.

I set up a tweet later every minute for about 15-minutes.  I expected each tweet to be a few minutes later than scheduled, and I’d have to build that into the programme tweets.  SMS tweets came through on the dot every time.

The odd thing?  My twitter feed on screen lagged behind the SMS by a minute or so.  Not a problem with tweet later though, just a twitter quirk I’d never spotted (because I hadn’t been looking).

Of course just because this worked on a quiet Saturday morning, doesn’t mean it will definitely work when I need it to on July 12th.  There are three possible bottlenecks which may reduce the usefulness of this service: twitter, tweet later, mobile phone networks.  If either of the three are busy, the messages may not get through.  Still, it’s got to be worth a shot.

Tweeting Later? Are you mad? Nope, it makes sense.

Tweet Later seems to be the antithesis of what twitter is about.  It advertises itself as follows:

“Stuck on an aircraft? Back to back meetings? Taking vacation? Running errands? Playing with the kids? Keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you’re not in front of your computer.”

My understanding of twitter is that it’s about immediacy, not pre-determination.  But I think I’ve found a place for Tweet Later: it’s killer app.  The festival is largely pre-determined so I can use Tweet Later to build the backbone of the communication for the day.  I can then use my mobile in the field to update and finesse that structure as we go.  Sounds good to me.  I’m off to schedule some tweets.

So ukhost4u have shut down the hosting we use for newmusicstrategies.
Some perspective on this, from the point of view of a hosting business.

We’ve been trying to move away but their left hand (the transfer out department) isn’t talking to the right (the billing department) and neither is talking to us. The result of this is that the all powerful billing department has decided something needs to be done. Some protectionist mechanism has kicked in, to stop us using the domain name and “costing them money”.

And that’s the dumbest thing ever.

Back in the bad old days when I worked out in industry proper, rather than with Dubber, we dealt a lot with hosting. We had preferred suppliers and everything. The hosting provider we used back in the day was small. Tiny. But there was enough slack built into the system to cope with this sort of problem. Advanced billing. “Positive renewal confirmations” (asking the customer if they could confirm they definitely want another year’s service). These all meant that the customer was being served.

ukhost4u would perhaps argue that they’re too big to to have this level of dialogue with their customers. Now I’m going to make some assumptions about our friends at ukhost4u:

1. They have a lot of customers

2. But not as many as godaddy

So that being the case, it amazes me that we’re getting feedback on the issue from godaddy whereas all we get from ukhost4u is stonewalling. It’s not even godaddy’s problem, and they can be bothered to talk to us.

Let me go back to the bit about “costing them money” and that’s where this thing trips over the dumb line backwards. ukhost4u have this really fine line. As Dubber quoted from the call centre guy: “No the payment is due today. We haven’t seen it, and so we’ve shut your site down.”

Let’s be really blunt about the economics of hosting here. Yeah it’s pretty cheap for us to buy right now, but then so is the cost of hard drives. Hosting companies have pennies of overhead per hosting account, and the gross profit margin on each contract is pretty immense. I know this because I know how much mark up I could put on hosting I was reselling.

Yep, that’s right your hosting has massive retail and massive wholesale mark ups on it.

There is so much fat to trim on the hosting cash cow. And you have to take the rough with the smooth. We used that fat profit to write off a few deals down the line. You know, when all the talking to customer stuff failed, we’d renew their domain name for another year, try again to talk to them, then when we’d done our best, we’d let it go and make a tiny wee loss.

We did that because it was the right thing to do, because we’d built room into the system and because we didn’t want to piss off prominent bloggers.

You hear that? Could be pennies dropping at ukhost4u headquarters…