Up north, spreading the word.
(GBR) Yesterday, MediaSnackers Education Officer delivered a couple of short talks for the BBC in Manchester (thanks to Phil for inviting us along):
In June 2007 BBC Northwest held a Technology and Audiences day aimed at increasing BBC staff awareness regarding our ever evolving audience requirements. Barney Grenfell from MediaSnackers was a key contributor at the event, explaining how content is consumed and communicated particularly amongst our younger audience. Barneys' brief was to assume little or no awareness regarding our online audience and it was evident throughout the presentation that many of the facts and trends presented were an absolute revelation to staff, proving a great talking point amongst staff.
Phil Bromley, Production Editor at BBC Manchester
I managed to make my way up North despite the atrocious weather (there were a few people on my train heading back to Hull from Glastonbury, no idea how they faired). Unfortunately the talks were not as seamless as the journey. I was pretty much raving about all things hi-tech and new media, today I was party to the downside of this, which is that whatever is tech and cool can go wrong and (usually at the worst possible moment) does go wrong (apologies to anyone from my first audience who is reading this, trying to demonstrate new media and ICT stuff without any new media or ICT is a bit like trying to juggle without balls… you get the idea).
One of those things and nobodies fault.
I did get to see HD TV in action on a 26 foot screen though, and it is awesome! Definitely something to watch out for on the media horizon. I also got some interesting insights into how a major media company has to change its approach to production values and indeed production in line with changing technologies.
In my bit (a ‘chalk and talk’ session as DK calls ’em) I mentioned RSS and was surprised by the number of people who hadn’t even heard of it. Surprised because the BBC have a great RSS service and I just assumed everyone who worked there would know about them, like maybe they did a staff announcement or something: “our website features RSS feeds, as do other websites, please avail yourself of this new technology…”
One person asked (paraphrasing): “If RSS is so good why isn’t everyone using it?”
The simple answer to this is people don’t know about it and until they create the technology to do nationwide staff announcements they probably won’t. In the meantime it falls to people like the MediaSnackers team to say, ‘look this stuff is cool, check it out…’!
Here’s the educational link:
If you are someone who knows about RSS your homework for today is to tell someone else about it.
If you don’t know about RSS your homework is to find out more.
Posted by Barney
