Songs of Anger and Hate

Not angry, just frustrated Photo: Rooners/Flickr

 What do you do when you're having a frustrating time of it at work? Perhaps you reach for an extra beer in the evening. But what if that's not enough? Where do you and your sense of righteous indignation go next? Well, if you're an ever so slightly sad music fan like me a good option can be to dig deep into your collection for some tunes that speak to your situation and maybe even give you some encouragement to keep on keeping on.

To paraphrase everyone's favourite Canadian poet, and in no particular order, here are my songs of anger and hate.

Every Picture Tells a Story

Wet Night in Birmingham: from one of my recent Photo School assignments

 (Please excuse me for giving this post such a hackneyed title. I blame Rod Stewart's recent whirlwind of activity to promote his latest Christmas wares. I can't promise things will get better from here on in but I will certainly try.)

I am writing this post on a wet Saturday afternoon in Birmingham. What light there was earlier is beating a hasty retreat, leaving in its wake nothing but a grey and dreary expanse. Despite the weather's best efforts, however, am feeling upbeat and energised. What can explain this state of affairs? I can only put it down to having got myself along to Matt & Pete's Photo School this morning.

Since moving to Birmingham earlier this year I've attended Photo School several times already and have learned something new about photography each time. I'd like to use the rest of this post to show you some of the photos I've taken at Photo School and share what I've learned from Matt & Pete.

Getting n0ticed in Birmingham

Since I left you

As part of my ongoing efforts to get out more and feel more connected in Birmingham I got along last month to Birmingham Social Media Cafe, a regular get together of people interested in exploring creative uses of  blogging, Twitter, Facebook and other tools. At the meeting I was introduced to n0tice, a digital update on the trusty community noticeboard which is aiming to be the place where you share "what's happening near you?". Since then, I've been playing with n0tice to see what it has to offer. Here's what I've learned so far.

First Impressions: what did I n0tice?

The first thing to say about n0tice is that is there is a lot going on. While the stated ambition of n0tice may be laudably simple, to allow you to share what's happening near you, the way it approaches this task is multi-faceted. From what I have learned so far , n0tice consist of:

• A public-facing n0ticeboard service, Here people can share and discover local observations, events and secrets in much the same way they might post an update on Twitter or Facebook, only with discovery being primarily driven by locality. People can access n0tice via a regular web browser but the service really comes into its own on the iPhone and Android mobile apps.
• A developer-focused API. Over at n0tice.org there are plentiful examples of the various different ways the technology behind n0tice can be used to power other services and activities. n0tice.org currently focuses on crowdmapping, community noticeboards and using n0tice to host a social classified business.   

Getting to grips with n0tice

 So far, I've had a bash at using both the public-facing and the developer-focused sides of n0tice. Of the two, I would say the developer side feels the most well-considered. Using the helpful 'how to' guides provided, I was able to quickly set up my own n0tice board dedicated to street art in Birmingham. With a minimum of trial and error I was also able to link my n0ticeboard to Google maps so that posts were rather niftily pinned to various locations around Birmigham. Embedded below are the fruits of my afternoon's labour, which I was really quite proud of.

From little acorns.... my first n0tice board

View Larger Map

My first crowdmap of Birmingham Street Art (the crowd so far consists of my posts  but I can hope)

Reflections on n0tice

While I was quick to understand n0tice's potential as a web infrastructure tool, I was less clear on what everyday users would make of n0tice as a mainstream service offering. Given the fact that I and most of my friends already spend a sizeable proportion of our free time on social networks such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, I am not convinced people's desire to know what's happening nearby is make n0tice, in its current form at least, an essential destination.

 Right now the immediate user experience for those who do venture upon the service is also a little uneven. For starters, it would be quite easy for people to confuse no0tice.org, the home of n0tice's developer resources, with the public-facing n0tice.com site.

Once you're on the main site, n0tice.com, it's not immediately obvious what to make of the various posts, as initially they are not filtered according to your location. Of course there is a button you can press to filter by your location but it doesn't immediately strike you as something you should need to do.  I experienced a similar kind of confusion when I went to post a report on n0tice, as a result of if not being immediately obvious whether my post would be visible to the whole n0tice community or restricted to a particular n0tice board. In themselves, these points of confusion may seem pretty trivial (I'm working on the whole pedantry thing) but the service design will need to be sharpened if n0tice is to expand beyond the ranks of social media practitioners and early adopters.

The good news is the issues I have is much to like about n0tice, particularly for developers and those wishing to incorporate n0tice technology within websites. I was chuffed at how easy it was to put together my own n0tice board for street art in Birmingham. I was even more chuffed when I was able to follow the clear instructions on n0tice.org and overlay my posts onto a Google Map, something which I had previously considered to be the preserve of out and out techies.

n0te to future self

 Looking to the future, I feel n0tice should focus on developing its offerings to developers and publishers. By doing so I believe n0tice technology could become part  of the everyday infrastructure of the web. I'd love to see n0tice technology incorporated within the social networks that I already use, so that I easily share and discover local content without having to invest additional time and effort. Doing so would, I hope support n0tice financially and enable the refinement of the service's consumer offering.

Two weeks or so after being introduced to n0tice, I remain intrigued by the service and the possibilities it offers. I will continue to experiment with it, both in my spare time as well as in a work capacity at Groundwork UK. I look forward to seeing how the service continues to evolve and improve.