Augmenting reality in London

posted with vodpod

As I discussed a few months ago, augmented reality could change the way we travel. In fact, it’s so futuristic that I fully expect it to make a small tear in the space-time continuum and eventually destroy Switzerland. Anyway, I played around with various AR apps in London for the Guardian, and as far as I know, most of Central Europe is still there.

Stop! Hammer time

By some strange aligning of everything that is good in the world, I was invited to talk on the Stop! Hammer Time podcast on Wednesday. Yup, I was actively encouraged to talk crap about West Ham for 37 minutes. In many ways it was a form of therapy; like a cathartic West Ham vomit. I felt considerably lighter when I emerged from that tiny little office on Marylebone Lane.

The podcast was hosted by Sam Delaney, who is the editor of Heat Magazine. In the pub afterwards we agreed that he could stalk me on my next holiday and pap me naked on the beach. I was joined on the panel by Jim Grant, a school teacher from Sevenoaks, who offered me nothing.

We discussed the horrifying possibility of a Gold-Sullivan takeover, our superbly bad performance against Man United, and the fact that Katy Perry recently sang “Bubbles” to Russell Brand (having already worn a West Ham basque to the EMA awards).

Added extra: Caribbean camping for the NYT

This weekend I had a spread in the New York Times Travel section on camping on the Caribbean island of St John. The article focuses on the Maho Bay Campground, a truly special place that, as things stand, could disappear in 2012 when their lease expires. Their only hope lies in the Trust for Public Land, a non-profit conservancy that could purchase the land on Maho’s behalf.  Read more about their campaign here.

The NYT also ran a slideshow on the island, as snapped by NYT photographer Steve Simonsen. Steve is a truly multi-faceted chap, dividing his time between travel photography and being Stoke City’s reserve goalkeeper.

A little extra
Anyway, here is a funny little story from the island, that didn’t end up in the piece. It features the father of the atomic bomb, an Orthodox Jewish sect, and footballing policemen.

Is hyperlocal all hype?

Hyperlocal news is going hyper. Monday’s news that Outside.in has raised $7m from CNN is the tip of an increasingly large iceberg, as detailed by hyperlocalblogger.com:

CNN invests in Outside.in … MSNBC buys Everyblock.com … the New York Times has launched its hyperlocal effort called “The Local” … AOL has its hyperlocal project called Patch … the Huffington Post is getting into hyperlocal blogging … the Seattle Times is collaborating with hyperlocal blogs … Fisher launched 43 hyperlocal sites in Seattle and is expanding that model in other areas … the Guardian (UK) is starting a hyperlocal news network … other UK newspapers are also going hyperlocal … and so on and so forth.

So what’s happening here? And does it all add up?

The “need” for hyperlocal news, and the enticing gap
The existence of hyperlocal news is morally vital. The accelerating decline of local newspapers leaves a dangerous void in its wake – a void in which, as Clay Shirky has predicted, “casual endemic corruption” flourishes in the absence of a fierce journalistic watchdog. Thus there is a “need” for hyperlocal news. That need, it is believed, will be served by a new breed of ‘citizen journalists’ blogging from their bedrooms.

But the void left by the decline of local newspapers is not only a moral one, it is a financial one. Big media organisations are noticing this, and see the perfect opportunity to come to the rescue of small communities bereft of a local watchdog, while simultaneously expanding into new revenue markets and audience streams. In an ideal world, large news organisations would be able to corral thousands of local bloggers and sources into their very big tent: an army of “correspondents” manning incremental parts of a gargantuan news organism.

How to become a journalist (BETA)

Yesterday a 22-year old graduate impressed me more than anyone has in a while. Wondering into the Guardian offices (where I am drafted in semi-frequently as a freelance writer on the Travel section) a smartly-dressed Tom Gockelen-Kozlowski handed me a small business card printed on thin paper. He did the same to every person who passed through the revolving doors on York Way and into the Guardian.

The card introduced him as an “unemployed graduate” looking for “work experience and employment”, and included his email address, his blog address, and his phone number. I sought out Graham Snowden, who edits the Guardian’s Work and Graduate sections, and suggested that it could be a decent story for him. I wasn’t the first. Graham dashed downstairs and walked him into the building, and by the end of the day Tom had written his first blog for the Guardian. Good on him.

I get a lot of emails from people asking if I have any tips on getting into professional journalism, and Tom’s chutzpah has nudged me into writing this post. The following will by no means guarantee entry into a profession that is currently firing a lot more than it is hiring, but hopefully it helps someone.

Wikipedia is a danger to bagpipe enthusiasts

Wikipedia is possibly the best thing the Internet has produced. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a propagator of false information concerning nontraditional bagpipe usage.

Here’s a story. A few years ago, me and my buddy Hugh were busy working towards our degrees at Manchester University. As is the habit of students busily working towards degrees, we decided to write a song, hoping that it would be considered as Britain’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. It was entitled “Today is Yesterday’s Tomorrow” and was quite the hit in our flat.

Hugh decided that our smash should be anointed with the Wikipedia seal of approval, editing the List of nontraditional bagpipe usage entry to include our smash as the sole item in the rhythm and Blues section, reading:

The rhythm and blues band BenjiHugh’s 2009 song “Today is Yesterday’s Tomorrow” featured a large bagpipe solo towards the end of the second stanza.

Hugh has been updating the entry each year, as in many ways the song was timeless. For reasons that will soon become clear, here’s a recent screengrab:

Recent work

© 2009 Listen to Africa
I’m currently working on some exciting videos and long articles, more on which soon. In the meantime, here’s some smaller, but equally exciting thingies I’ve done:

• I chose Listen to Africa as the Guardian’s Travel Blog of the Month. It is a truly fantastic blog, involving two Brits’ journey across Africa by bicycle, recording audio, taking images, and tweeting as they go. The image above is from their Maghreb in Monochrome gallery. See my other Blog of the Month picks here.

• I wrote a piece about the four obscure new entrants in this year’s Champions Leage for the New York Times Goal blog, which was also printed in the Sunday sports section last week.

• I did a little piece for the Guardian on the Vendys – New York’s annual street food competition.

In defence of flashpacking

Image: Lucas Janin on Flickr / some rights reserved

A BootsnAll post ran a few days ago questioning if “flashpacking” is killing the art of backpacking. It pissed me off. Here’s a few highlights:

• “Flashpackers… often avoid public transport and opting for hotels over hostels”

• “By researching and booking things online it takes out much the challenge of trying to cope with the unknown.”

• “Flashpacking for me, seems like a style of traveling to simply “tick the box” and to be able to say “I’ve been there“, which completely missing the point of independent travel.”

• “Traveling without taking local transport carrying laptops and expensive gadgets means that you can’t be as adventurous.”

Allow me to be annoyed:

What art?
First of all… the “art” of backpacking?! As in there is a right and a wrong way of doing it? This reeks of the worldlier-than-thou snobbery which is one of backpacking’s worst habits. I’ve done this, this and this… aren’t I bloody amazing and spontaneous?!

What a load of rubbish. If my years of backpacking have tought me anything it is that people travel many different ways…and, frankly, as long as they aren’t doing anything abusive, good luck to them.

Coming soon: A journalistic ‘state of nature’

According to many…the perfect storm is approaching. The winds have been whipping for a while. But there’s a problem. The Old King is dying… but the New King, apparently, isn’t quite ready yet.

Clay Shirky, the harbinger-in-chief of newspaper death, encapsulated the problem at a recent Harvard Shorenstein Center talk:

“We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models will be put in their place.”

He’s right. But, intriguingly, he also slings in a caveat. Shirky imagines a time in the future when everything is hunky-dory, and a broad conglomeration of multiple news organisations will “overlap and provide a small percentage of journalism individually, but taken as a whole, represent the same position of accountability held by newspapers in the 20th century.”

Perhaps. But until then, we’ve got a problem.

So what’s going to happen in this imminent limbo stage – when journalism enters an intermediate ‘state of nature’? Allow me to imagine…

1) The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges

Paywalls and micropayment schemes begin to appear on news websites. A few of them make a decent stab of it – News International in particular, as they have a competitive advantage. As Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy suggests, Murdoch’s sites begin corralling in Sky News, Sky Sports, Fox as well as umpteen other publications and broadcasters that it owns, offering an attractive package behind the wall. Jason Wilson’s idea (aired at NewMatilda.com) that News Corp will “draw on its corporate experience with pay television to leverage audiences and money using niche content of various kinds” kicks in, and, for a while, it all seems to be working.

Desperate to lure readers beyond the paywalls, the organisations that enacted them scramble for scoops. They get dirty. They hunt for drug scandals and nip slips like never before. Investigative journalism becomes feral. They get some real goodies.

Infuriatingly, the exclusives start being screengrabbed and hijacked on pop-up sites. A black market for scoops emerges, fuelled by the free-for-all web evangelists and cottage hackers. But readers don’t care if the scoop they are reading is 14th hand and poorly delivered, because they’ve still got it. As Shane Richmond notes in the Telegraph “it doesn’t matter that versions of the story on free sites “won’t be as good” because they’ll be free, which offsets the loss of quality considerably.” (Google’s Eric Schmidt agrees)