Storifying Media

People 'ify'-ing stuff.

It's been happening a lot, 'gamifying' being a big thing over the last few years.

This week's sandbox focuses on storyfying...well...stories.

We were telling the story of the Goldsmiths election day through live, multimedia uploads curated through Storify.

By curating media and content from across youtube, twitter, instagram, facebook, foursquare, audioboo, amongst others, we were able to build an ongoing story.

It was great to have an inspirational @Documentally, Christan Payne to show us the ropes and guide us through the best way to utilise the tools available.

Take a look at the story below.

An Original Idea

Coming up with an original idea. Some say it is impossible.


My latest project work says it's necessary.


I am working on two different projects.


My Digital News Writing class has me researching the Olympic Borough of Waltham Forest in search of new news in relation to the noisy sports event moving into their back garden.
I expect I'll be hounding local shop owners and kids playing football what they think and if they have heard any new news which is newsworthy for our upcoming website to sit alongside the existing east london lines site run by the MA Journalists.


The Digital Sandbox class project has troubled me.


I'd say I am a decent 'ideas man'. Granted these ideas are normally hair-brained, inherently stupid and contextually redundant, but I can come up with a few (anyone remember my lunchtime stuffing-muffins?!).


We have been set the challenge of coming up with a [news] theme, then using google keywords to find our niche, hone in on an idea for our ongoing digital escapades for the next year.


Where do I start?


There must be a website for literally everything.


This is the whole point of a 'googlewhack'.


I was stumped.

Not even a nibble of an idea-lett.


"I forgot better shit than you ever thought up", I can't help but envy Kanye West's mind sometimes (!).


Maybe I was going at this the wrong way. Instead of looking for an original idea, I should instead be looking for a new way of delivering.


We had a really interesting guest lecturer in the form of Neil McIntosh, Deputy Editor of Wall Street Journal Europe last Monday, who spoke about invention and innovation. WSJ's new 'Live' app was particularly impressive, as was it's popularity to them.



By Friday the world had lost one of the greatest ever innovators.


I think Stephen Fry perfectly describes how he was so good at what he did, 'Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers and he didn’t invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish'.

He spoke about the Knight-Batten Award and what it looks for in a journalist/medium. The words included;
'engagement', 'sharing', 'interactions', 'conversations', 'meet information needs', 'actively involve'.


I looked at what I was interested in and mind-mapped from there.


Although I'd love to cover the latest in tech, and would be fascinated and could geek out over NASA/ISS/ESA press releases, I'm not directly involved and would be reproducing their content with my comments pasted over the top.


Then in our lecture preceding Ed Roussel's talk on innovation in Newsroom, The Swiss Ramble's blog was mentioned. This economist by day, football analyist by night tore apart Arsenal's financial situation and looked at football from an economists point of view (it's long but take a deep look when you get a moment - its engrossing for football and economics fans alike!).


From there I have been playing with the idea of creating a case study based website, looking at either the up and coming young players based at the London clubs, or to focus on the U18s set-up as a whole, using the London clubs as  examples.

The majority of the work will hopefully be going up onto Kicked in the Alberts which is my pet project. I'm looking for football contributors to pen articles for it so if you're interested get in touch.


One thing I've learnt from both McIntosh and Roussel is that media organisations don't get much, or see much value in the comments and message boards sections. Roussel admitted much is 'outsourced' via integration through Twitter and Facebook. I find it quite amazing how there is only a very small percentage who actively invest time in commenting, but we can only look to YouTube as to why media companies may not take much inspiration on future debates, content and delivery from these posts.

Sports Photography

Creating your own server

Today we've looked at creating our own servers.


We began by pinging the servers of some household names (google, facebook, twitter - the slowest, who'da thunk?!), then following the route of a packet between here and the US servers, and then having a look at the new IPv6 addresses including facebook's '2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3'.


Using Python once again, we created a script which is akin to Tim Henman's famous serve *run to the net* and volley approach.


By running our two scripts each in its own terminal window we could try and connect to a newly created socket, printing on the server side the sent & received data, and on the client facing side, printing a personalised message (in red here).


Here is "Tiger Tim's" serve[r].


Socket script


import socket


s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)


s.bind(('127.0.0.1', 4900))
s.listen(1)


client_socket, address = s.accept()
print 'received connection from ', address


while True:
   data = client_socket.recv(4096)
   if not data:
      client_socket.close()
      break


   print 'received data', data


   bytes_sent = client_socket.send(data)
   print 'sent:', bytes_sent


s.close


And here is his volley (in a very abstract and perhaps incorrect analogy).


Connection script



import socket
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.settimeout(5)
s.connect(('127.0.0.1', 4900))
s.send('Bugger off!')
print s.recv(4096)
s.send('Oh, okay. Come on in...')
print s.recv(4096)
s.close()

In a typically British Semi-Final kind of way, my first attempt crashed out, causing an outcry of (albeit, excpeted) anguish and demoralising anti-nationalism.


Why I hear you cry?


Because I spelt 'True' with a non-capitalised 't'.


Once again, Python had spanked me with its racket of discipline and grammar.

*spank* An artists impression of Python giving me a once over using my Henman metaphor.

I will learn soon enough to avoid the wrath of Python. And people shall flock to a hill named after my coding...

...only to leave with a bitter resentment of losing days to rained-off exasperation, filled with the false hopes of being part of a moment in history.

At least will be strawberries and cream.

Cheering on Java vs Snake.

I also managed to sort out my public folder on the University server.

It can be accessed here.