AgWired’s Chuck Zimmerman shares a story that illustrates the power of the blog. Syngenta (a big biotech company) had Chuck come in and blog a “media day” event a couple of weeks ago:
“This event started around 8am and was finished around 3pm. I posted 20 times including over 20 pictures and 5 audio interviews and they were all on AgWired before the end of the day (same day). Many of the posts were done during the actual presentations.
At the end of the event I burned all the pictures and audio to a CD and left it with them. They can post them onto their own website and it’s my understanding that is exactly what they plan to do. Their investment in this is minimal and yet they have immediate multimedia content that’s online before the other media attending even get home to their offices.”
No studio. No camera crew. No editors. One guy with some consumer grade gear and a truck-load of hustle. Is this journalism? I have no idea. And the people at Syngenta don’t care (as long as what Chuck posted is accurate).
If I were in charge of media at Syngenta, I’d ask everyone that covered the event to send me a link to their coverage (or a copy of the magazine article or a video clip of the TV piece, whatever). Then I’d make up a little matrix showing the coverage; when it got “out there”; and what kind of Google ranking it produced.
It hardly seems worth mentioning except for the sad fact that I had this idea nine years ago when I did my senior exhibition.
The Gestalt databases in use today, in fact, are a direct descendent of the Memetic Collage project, which I built in order to help an audience participate in the shaping of images, sound, and text related to a specific event or topic.
The idea was to allow a huge amount of information to be loaded into a database, and then organized after the fact by the activity of the audience. This was a direct response to the concept of “authoring”, which at the time was the popular term for putting together multimedia content.
With my BFA exhibition, I was putting forward the idea that “authoring” was a misnomer since most cases where people were using computers to tell a story, the so-called “author” was generally more of a technician, while the audience themselves were the interested party, and more qualified to be an author, than the person who happened to know HTML or Macromedia Director, or HyperCard.
The Memetic Collage instead gathered simple yes/no decisions from everybody in the audience about what was the most interesting related item on any given page. Using these aggregated decisions, the collage built an index of what scraps of information were related to what. This was then put back into the site as a new set of related items. This meant that a facilitator could blindly fill up a database with an endless stream of content, and let it organize itself through audience interaction into a cogent & evolving account of whatever was loaded into it.
The dream was to take this idea in its incubated art-show state and develop it into a business which would operate by saturating an event with image and sound gathering equipment, text contributors, and artifact collectors, loading it into a Gestalt database, and distilling it down into a high-resolution, multi-dimension document filtered by members of a qualified audience. The end result would be a web site that evolved as it continued to be visited, along with a CD/DVD of all the raw material saved in a preliminary state of organization.
This is the reason why my software and company is called Gestalt in the first place, this was what it was supposed to do. However, the realities of the marketplace have dictated over the years that I should pervert my dream into something more common, that people could wrap their minds around and feel comfortable using. Not to say that I have not made a decent go of it and built some very solid software– but its not what I really set out to do.
So, it’s ironic now that the rest of the world has caught up with this notion of ubiquitous imaging and quick, web-based orgaization of media and text in order to deliver a high-density account of an event.
Were some client– say, a news organization– to want to sponsor a project to produce an evolution of this concept so that it would have all the tools for storytelling it needed to break free of its old-media mold… I would be more than eager to make what contributions I could. I have, after all, been thinking about it for almost a decade.