According to Ofcom 71% of the UK has taken up broadband. This staggering number brings into sharp focus those who have yet to take the leap.

Scanning the report http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/753567/UK-internet.pdf  (for the Internet and web based content section) makes for futuristic reading. The new age has officially arrived. Less time passivly consuming and more time creating seems to be the new way. Web 2.0 has arrived. Many of you reading this will thik to yourselves “So?” yet one must remember that if you are reading this then you are in the minority. 74% of people aged 65+ feel that they are not confident users of the internet. This age group constitutes only 6% of the active internet universe yet according to the National Statistics Online by 2034, 23% of the population is projected to be aged 65 and over compared to 18% aged under 16. Of course by 2034 some of us reading this will be in that 65+ age bracket.

I still can’t help wondering what the 29% of the population who haven’t yet made the leap online are thinking.

Of course, being online is hald the question. What are people doing online once they have achieved connectivity?

Social networking now accounts for a quarter of all time spent online.

Some 37 per cent of over 55s use email each day and 47 per cent use it weekly.

Usage of instant messaging declined from 14 per cent to 5 per cent.

Back when I was in art college all the photographers used to make collage views. In these digital times this doesn’t seem to be so popular. However, being somewhat old school in my thinking I took the series of pictures above on my phone and pieced them together.

As you may have worked out by now, I have a new home. When I’m not organising for the Workers’ Educational Association you can find me up in Room 2 at the Broadway in Nottingham’s sunny city centre.

Pop in for a coffee and a chat. I am usually about on Mondays and some Tuesdays.

For information on the Broadway please visit: www.broadway.org.uk

71 bus Sherwood Rise to Victoria Centre 8:30am

Set up

Of the 34 people on this bus 12 are non-white. Of the 26 cars that overtook this bus on my 14-minute journey 23 were single occupancy, only 2 were non-white drivers. 30.8 % of my neighbourhood is non-white. Yet 35.2% of the bus passengers are non-white and 8.6% of car commuters who overtook the bus are non-white.

Conclusion

Either: Non-white commuters are more environmentally aware and are acting to save the planet

Or: Non-white commuters are predominately working in jobs that do not come with the perk of a city centre parking space

Either way I thought that this was interesting.

Related Links:

http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/

(Find your own statistics)

http://www.hostsrv.com/webmab/app1/MSP/quickmath/02/pageGenerate?site=quickmath&s1=numbers&s2=percentages&s3=basic

(Percentage Calculator)

A few people have asked me about Twitter. I have to be honest I didn’t get it. I know that its good, life changing and world beating because everyone says so. I have even taught folks how to set up their accounts. Today however, I saw the point.

I’ve had a Twitter account for about a week now. Obviously I looked for friends and acquaintances to follow and just left it at that. At the time of writing I have 5 followers and am following 11 people. Hardly world beating. However, as the saying goes, with a long enough leaver one can move the world.

Here is how my leaver moving moment came about.

Late Sunday evening: Popped 50 Good for Geeks mugs we had kicking about onto eBay.

Monday morning: Shipped the first 2 sales.

Monday lunchtime: Installed Tweet Deck and resolved to get tot the bottom of this Twitter thing. (www.tweetdeck.com)

Monday late lunch: Posted the following on Twitter: “By popular demand (+ lots of nagging) Web Safe mugs for old skool geeks http://bit.ly/afj3su spread the news!” This went out to my 5 followers. (http://bit.ly is a neat way to make a long web address short, important when you only have 140 characters to play with)

Monday (still) late lunch: One of my followers re-Tweeted (RT) my advert to her 767 followers.

Monday (still) late lunch: One of my followers’ followers did likewise to their 515 followers 

Monday (still) late lunch: Creative Nottingham (creativenotts) did the same to their 1080 followers. In the space of   15 minutes my small eBay advert has reached 2362 people. Admittedly some of these people will be in the same lists but non-the less, I am a Twitter convert.

Monday afternoon: I notice that another mug has just sold.

We’ve all done it. Walked into a fast food burger joint, looked up at the brightly lit photo menu and chosen in anticipation of something hearty, mouth-watering and good. What is dished up two minutes later is limp, mean and bad. We’ve all bought the dream and come away disappointed.

Good on all levels takes experience, craft and time particularly when it comes to projects.

These are some basic points to think about to ensure that the project delivery meets expectations.

What is it?

What is the project goal? This is not as easy as it sounds. In trying to define the “what” one encounters all the related questions.

What is it? We want to build a website for our organisation.

This is a good start, however in the example above there should be further steps before commissioning a design team. The next two questions should be about “who”.

Who are we?

For many organisations this can be a stumbling block. A neat description for the “who are we” may have been written for the business plan and repeated in pitches and bids but not seriously considered and revised. This is frequently the cause of a disparagement between the published organisation offer and the customer experience.

Who are they?

Who are the people that the organisation needs to reach for its very reason of existence? The service users, clients, customers, members and associates. They all have needs. They all want a good deal. They all need to feel that they have benefited from an encounter with an organisation. They, What and We form the trinity of project expectation management.

In project terms we are discussing the relationships between the senior user, the senior stakeholder and the project its self. 

As a good friend of mine says when a brief hit the mat, “They’re looking for the moon on a stick.” A little attention to They, What and We will save a project plenty of time and money leaving the project delivery team open to get on with making everything gorgeous safe in the knowledge that the project is owned and has definite purpose.

As an aside, I made the burgers pictured on July 4^th 2009. They were as good as they look.

It is always a pleasure working with the East Midlands School of Social Entrepreneurs. Since attending the school as a student a few years back we have continued our relationship, delivering media with a social conscience in the form of e-promotions, blogs, sites and even old-fashioned print.

Our latest collaboration is the delivery of a two and a half hour workshop about social media, web 2.0 and social networking to a select group of social entrepreneurs. The challenge for me is that the host venue has managed to block a whole host of social networking sites in a bid to protect learners from the big bad world. 

There is plenty to talk about when it comes to the use of social media by social groups, with or without access to demonstration sites. We shall be covering communication strategies, cost verses effort, evaluation of performance. A tall order for the timescale but if I can leave the participants with a solid grounding and pointers to some ready next steps then the workshop will not have been in vain.

Last October (2009) I did some work with the Plexus Media team to produce a rationalisation for Bulwell Toy Library’s website update. The site was duly produced and published replacing a site that had stagnated and not been updated for a few years.

The Library have begun to use the site in earnest now, it is updated with organisational news and issues on a reasonably regular basis. The site caters for three main audiences, parents and carers, professionals and funders.

What has changed for Bulwell Toy Library in the past six months since the site has been overhauled is the change in perspective on what the internet can do for the organisation. In the Spring 2010 edition of Playworks’ Play News Steve Parkinson is quoted as saying, “As our website shows we are not just a toy library. We work as a “virtual” family centre. Without the difficulties that can come with offering services in a building or centre, we can support families in places close to where they live and do it in a way that they choose, and help us with.”

On behalf of Plexus Media and myself we wish Bulwell Toy Library the very best with their future online endeavours.

Visit www.toy-library.co.uk

Visit www.plexusmedia.org.uk

Things have changed since I was a new starter in this field. In the late 90′s content management systems were emerging and everyone just had to have one. Static brochure sites were just so 1996. The snag was that to achieve the holy grail of a CMS that did what one needed in a manner that one wanted proved to be elusive for clients and design teams alike. Many are the millions that have been poured into this conundrum.

Sitting here in the early 10′s things are decidedly different. Designers have been largely liberated from the clutches of the programmers for the majority of website developments. That is of they choose to be. Working mainly in the public and third sectors has meant that the commissioning of propriatorial CMS is frequently not an option for financial sustainability reasons. This has left the open source route to delivery.

Recently I was in conversation with ScreenLit, Nottingham’s premier film festival. The need was to create a site that delivered on a number of fronts in not enough time. The discussion ranged around phrases like ‘legacy’ and ‘flexibility’ and ‘must be online by…’ and ‘tight budget’ as such conversations do. My recommendation was to pay for intelligence and not for technology. With neither the timescale nor budget to develop or customise a robust CMS to drive the site the commissioner should look at commissioning a system that was ready to go, that would deliver most of what they wanted immediately and spend their budget on the interface design and writing.

The Nottingham based team 13 Souls stepped up and delivered a WordPress system that is maintained by the ScreenLit team. The site functionality is driven entirely by widgets and plugins. A popular phrase for the project is, “Its all about widgets and plugins!”  The whole budget was spent on ensuring the design and message were as crisp and attractive as could be. All of the driving technology is free to use and open source. The festival has events that have sold out entirely from online ticket sales. The Nottingham Evening Post reported that the opening night gala of ScreenLit Festival of Film, TV and Writing has become the fastest sell-out in Broadway Cinema’s history. The site is a festival tool that can work all year and not just a month before the festival opens. Next year it is simplicity itself to redesign the site to be in keeping with whatever the current trend in film festival websites will be.

Link: www.screenlit.co.uk
Link: www.13souls.com

Following on from an earlier conversation I was asked by Steve Little over at the Broadway (Cinema and Media Centre Nottingham) to support his Young Screenwriters project.

With audience, budget, deadlines and maintainance considerations we plumped for our old third sector favourite, WordPress. Steve is now maintaining the site himself.

For more about the Young Screenwriters project visit http://www.youngscreenwriters.com

Recently I’ve been working with Ellen Carroll over at Nellie PR to develop a  social media strategy for clients. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Social Media Strategy.  The document threw up all sorts of issues, particularly over definition.

• What is social media?
• Where does a strategy end and a plan begin?
• Is the host platform stable enough to host a social media strategy?

All good fun. After a good stretch of desk research, auditing and plain old discussion the strategy document was delivered last week to a receptive client.

For more information about Nellie PR please visit www.nelliepr.co.uk