Community Media

Heritage and Health walked hand in hand as a small team visited Marske to take “Digital Postcards” today. The walk began at Winkies Castle Folklore Museum and followed a route set up by Joan Russel. Joan had made up a book of the route complete with heritage images of several locations and the team set off to take current pictures of each site.

Above, the team prepare for the photographic march. Joan gave a running commentary on what proved to be a most interesting afternoon. When we reached the beach we got talking about Marske Fishermans Choir and then the fishing industry in general which prompted Barry to tell us about the Tuna steaks he had marinading in Soy Sauce, Honey and Garlic (our mouths watered !) The walk finished by the grave of Captain Cooks father in the Marske cemetery. The finished images will end up in the Octorama tour which you can read about here. Tomorrow it’s Skinningrove.

The free social network NING that drives the Digital Village Social Network is intending to go PREMIUM only. The announcement from the new CEO (whilst cutting the Ning workforce by 40%) seems quite stark, “pay for premium services or migrate off the network”. Of course no-one said Ning is going away and all you have to do is pay (not sure how much yet) to keep your network. However, I hear warning bells and so I’m experimenting with alternatives as are many people.

Meanwhile folks who are on Facebook may want to join the Facebook Page – Digital Communities which will also form part of a new social media strategy to replace NING.

[edit to add] As an alternative to Ning I’ve now set up a “BuddyPress” and exported the members across. It can be found here www.tvcm.co.uk/community

There has been a change to Loftus Digital Village. The Image archive has grown very large and is not simply a Loftus Image archive. SO – it is now known as the East Cleveland Image Archive and it’s still at http://www.ecol.org.uk/loftus – John Hannah’s team at Loftus Library will continue to beaver away at the archive. There is now a new site for is Loftus Digital Village is http://www.ecol.org.uk/loftusdv – Pages pertinent to Loftus are there and Loftus specific images. The site is in its infancy.

I’ve started to implement another other strategy and you can see the idea here http://www.skinningrove.tv/image-archive/ NB the images are not actually on the Skinningrove site – merely displayed there

Others have been added

STAITHES http://www.staithes.org.uk/image-archive/

BROTTON added http://www.brotton.org.uk/image-archive/

CARLIN HOW – http://www.carlinhow.org.uk/old-carlin-how-photos/image-archive/

LOFTUS http://ecol.org.uk/loftusdv/image-archive/

MARGROVE PARK http://www.margrovepark.com/images/archive-images/

SKELTON http://ecol.org.uk/skelton/

SALTBURN http://saltburn.org.uk/image-archive/

This is a fabulous resource for East Cleveland

For European Get On Line Day March 4th we’re organising a Day of Cultural Blogcasting from Destinations, Saltburn UK. We’ll plan to use the “live blogging” approach employed for the recent Saltburn Community Animation event so that media is released throughout the day to a schedule. The site is here: www.destinations.uk.com/gold

At this short notice it’s unsure how much content will come from Europe but we at least expect items from Latvia and Finland, possibly Greece. We’ll be firing up 5-10 min videos, some audio stuff and perhaps image galleries: all hoping to reflect who and where we are. If anyone has anything they would like to have considered for inclusion contact me direct on s.d.thompson@tees.ac.uk

The community animation event in Saltburn on Thursday was a tremendous successes with a full house for the matinee (in which we hooked up with children and police in Latvia) and around 80 people for the evening event. We even made it onto Latvian National TV !

You can relive the event on the blog at www.saltburn.org.uk or if you really want to re-run the event in the order it happened click here ( it builds slow but quickly gets media rich) – just read each page, scrolling down and then click “older entries” at the bottom. As well as the hook-up with Latvia, the event was followed by people in Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey, Sweden, Finland and the UK.

The event saw the world premier of “The Force is With You”.