Of course, July is filled with much mixed emotion in Northern Ireland. I’ve come to be thankful the turbulant past and pleased to be guaranteed a of the few days off conveniently just before my birthday. In previous years this this time would have been spent in Portstewart with the family, gathered around the television watching the flames of burnt cars and general carnage of a time which has mostly been left behind.

I won’t go into it, but Northern Ireland can certainly be a “colourful” place at times.

For the first time, I will be out of Northern Ireland for this “holiday season”. I’m off to Dublin to celebrate my birthday with some good friends.
Enjoy your weekend.

Lets get the discussion going. If you are interested leave a comment below; I really think this can be great.

How to upload images to Pixie:

1. Click on ‘Upload’ at the top of the page when logged into your profile:

2. Select ‘Find Images’, then choose the images from your computer that you wish to upload:

3. Add a name to the album, or select a previous album to add images to. Also add tags to the images so they can be found by searches, as well as grouping event images together:

4. Now Finally, click ‘Upload’:

5. Success!

6. Now view the image(s), rename them and add descriptions and specify better tags if necessary.

• Blog
• Self-hosted Gallery
• Photo sharing site such as Pixie, Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Picassa etc.
• Social network sites like Facebook/Bebo/Myspace

But which of these are truly optimised as a community for receiving constructive comments and has a decent community behind it. I’ve used Flickr for a few years and had a pro account for a 2 or 3. But now I’m reconsidering renewing it. I probably will in the end as it is pretty much the standard in online photo sharing, though taking some time to decide.

Flickr has many advantages, as well as disadvantages. Recently, however, I have been using the Ireland-based Pixie a lot more. My recent dislike of Flickr came about as I released that the way I use it has changed over the last number of months. I no longer worry about getting a high number of views, or images being espectially highly rated, but more being a part of a community. Pixie can offer a greater sense of community, as well as being local.

With around 15,000 registered users, Pixie serves over 80,000,000 images through blogs, forums, widgets and those on the site. With 1 Million+ images, with about 10 different sizes for each makes for a lot of photographs!

Founder and CEO Marcus Mac Innes says that “Compared to Flickr or Facebook [the numbers] may look fairly insignificant… I believe, however, that we have a stronger community which has grown steadily with like minded people.” I too believe this to be true, many events and photo walks have been organised, with users of Pixie joining together and uploading the resulting photographs to the site, and viewing, commenting and rating each others’ shots.

The unfortunate thing about the Global and vast nature of the likes of Flickr is that it has become too big to any longer be a true community. At least not on a local basis. Yes there are local groups, with discussion forums, something that I feel Pixie should incorporate, though in terms of community feel, Flickr feels too disjointed. It is also abused, and “gamed’ for greater views, comments and favourites, often by adding images to groups which require commenting on a certain number of images per image added.

“While Pixie started off as a photo sharing site which differentiated itself from Flickr by making the process of photo sharing easier for non technical people, we have since moved to focus more on what we call “crowdsourcing”.”

Pixie has been working with a variety of events throughout Ireland and promoting the idea of attendees uploading photographs to the site. This brings the site as much to the offline world as well as online.

“I’m constantly amazed by the variation you get from different people’s perspective on a scene both in terms of the actual capture (framing, lighting, angle) together with the different styles of post production.”

Although there are still plenty of improvements and to be made, Pixie has a good community, with many users and, and good features for rating and discovering images which have been regarded highly by other users. Pixie also chooses one image per day and publishes this on Twitter for all to see.

Try it out. Join the community.
My photos are at pix.ie/philokane.

But what was the BT Experiment??

In short, John Fitzsimons has spent the last 26 days in one room/cell in the Great Northern Mall in Belfast with only Internet, TV and a phone line. The aim was to create an impact, to try “trying to influence world events.” Did he succeed?

John is a 22 year old Film Studies studient from Newry, Northern Ireland, quite versed in the online world, with a YouTube channel [can't remember/find the url] where he specialises in voice overs and impressions, since beginning the project devised by local advertising company AV Browne he has had no contact with the outside world other than through the technology which is at his disposal and besides looking forward to seeing (well he could ’see’ so I guess more ‘touching’) his girlfriend he is also looking forward to “fresh air, and the smell of cut grass, and the ability to walk futher than 25 feet in a straight line!”

Those are definitely fair requests. After a series of mental arithmetic tests and a few interviews to be sure he was up for the task, John entered and began his quest. Though how well did he use the technology and time to achieve an impact?

A number of social networks were utilized: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Bebo, a Blog, as well as the BT Experiment website as a hub for all of these networks.

I asked John what he had hoped to gain from the experience:

“I wanted to achieve electronic connection with people in the thousands, and organize events in the real world, purely from my interaction with the public over the internet.

What he did achieve however:

“I arranged a conga line, a male leg wax session (were i and four other men took part) and a band to play outside the box. Also I have achieved over 7000 YouTube views and 2000 YouTube channel visits, over 460 twitter followers and over 1000 facebook group members. I also have had an interview with Peter dickson (the e4 voice over guy).

I have been on Ireland’s biggest radio station … rte 2fm, on the gerry ryan show. I have been on cool fm on several occasions, and on i102-104 which covers 10 counties of the west coast, and on u105 here in belfast. I have had articles in many news papers all over Ireland, and also have had reports that my story has hit newspapers in Boston, New york and Sydney.”

The “experiment” is a nice idea, and certainly some decent promotion for BT but I’m not entirely convinced that it achieved half of what was possible. John genuinely seems like a really nice guy, and it could just be me, but I wouldn’t have watched 19+ James Bond movies in the time given, but rather tried to find ways to bring far more people together than he did. A bit of radio, newspaper and online coverage is not causing an impact, besides the fact that those interviews where not carried out for any thing that John did since being in the room, rather just because he was in the room.

7000 views on YouTube is decent, though only an average of 179 views over 39 videos. As he said himself, “Facebook has the biggest potential at reaching real people” this I agree with, and 1000 real people to have joined his group is quite good. Though John loves the camera, for him it’s YouTube all the way, so I guess we can expect to see more of that pretty face.

Not to be too hard on “The Experiment” and John - I can only imagine it would be pretty tough being in the same room for a month boredom did appear to be a problem, but overcome, and then there was the problem of eating, thankfully there are many ways of getting food delivered, plenty don’t even require the use of a phone, but rather a nifty website, namely niftynosh.com where much of John’s food was ordered from and brought to the back of the store where he could collect it. However, I just can’t help by feel he could have potentially made a difference in some way.

Then again, he only set out to make an impact - and here we have it, I’ve been intrigued, and so have plenty of others, enough to blog about it, take some photographs of him, have a chat with him through the door of the Room and would actually like to invite him for a pint sometime when he is released.

Finding communities on the web, places where one person can make an impact and cause a stir can be difficult; John did do it. Next time the world.

John escapes his cell tomorrow at 9am and will be around the Great Northern Mall until around 1pm.

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The weather was fantastic, the crowds were huge and the performers put on great shows. The festival/competition, now in its fourth year, was by all accounts extremely well organised - including getting the full benefit of the web through the blog, Bebo, Twitter, Facebook and a Pix.ie group for uploading photographs.

The majority of the performers were very funny (even if it did seem like some went to the same comedy school), many were very talented, some freakishly flexible, while others, in not necessarily having great talent, were brilliant entertainers.

Magic Brian, had plenty of laughs through his show as he was strapped in a straitjacket then tied in chains. With a final countdown from 1min 30sec after getting loose from the chains he escaped from the jacket with his assistants at the side.

One of which was Boston Phil who, unknown to Magic Brian, was chosen for the 2nd time in a row, this time however, his sitting position got the better of him and no sooner was he up than he was right back down again, on the poor kids below. They lived, but he did manage to get a joke in about the Red Sox being the better team over Brian’s home-town team of the Yankees.

Asher Treleavan juggled machetes on top of five circular containers - seems simple enough yet it was the little ginger kid he picked to help him who stole the show. Before getting to such a height, Asher did a little juggling from the ground, throwing them between his legs stating: “This is dangerous because I might cut my balls off.” Then came the boy’s response, repeated for those who didn’t hear it, “Not if you’re a girl ‘cos they have a nookie.”

For most performers, their show is all about the build up to a finale - plenty of filler, comedy and audience interaction made the likes of Mike Wood, who caught a cabbage thrown from a catapult on a spiked helmet. Odd, but a talent none-the-less.

The word “contortion” was flying about all weekend with Bendy Em, who fit herself tightly into a tiny perspex box balanced on a 7ft scaffolding rig and Alakazam who squeezed his body through a squash racket, tennis racket and toilet seat. Elasticity to the max.

One ‘act’ I was thoroughly impressed with is Titan the robot. Hilariously funny soundbites with great timing. Has to be seen to be believed; some video clips on the creators’ website.

My favourite performer of the weekend was most certainly That Man, from Norfolk, U.K. He combined many forms of juggling and great skill, completely engaging large audiences throughout the weekend, all without saying a word.

Not forgetting, of course, the Bubbles!

The winners were:

3rd Place: Bendy Em
2nd Place: Alakazam
1st Place: USA Breakdancers

Lots of videos from the competiiton on the official blog.
Writeup and photos on the Pix.ie Blog.
The photographs which have been included in the SPWC group on Pix.ie.

Michael Jackson, despite all the reports in recent years, was a fucking legend on stage and I have always loved so much of his music. My mother has the LP of BAD and another Jackson 5 album (it had the brilliant song ‘Ben’ on it but I can’t seem to find the album cover I remembered) and I listened to both well before my teens, I remember sitting in the front room listening to BAD and reading the lyrics from the inlay. An incredible album, with great songs like ‘Speed Demon’, ‘Bad’, and ‘Smooth Criminal’.

Then there’s ‘Man in the Mirror’ where I managed to perfect every ‘Ugh’ and ‘Ahh’.

As one of the first artists I loved (others here and here) I, like so many others, am very sad to hear this news.

For a long time his movie Moonwalker was a huge favourite of mine, I even watched it recently and still love that incredible live scene of the brilliant ‘Dirty Diana’, the bunny rabbit in ‘Speed Demon’ - and that robot at the end is hard to beat!

Unfortuantely Invincible was a bit crap, but very little compares to HIStory and the inlay book with the story and photos.

It’s a sad day.
Don’t mock the death of a great performer and artist.
RIP.

I didn’t buy the umbrella. Because sometimes I like getting wet. I love the rain. The challenge, I find, is taking photographs of the rain, let alone in the rain.

A few more photos from today on Pix.ie.

It was still raining when we got out. So quickly returned to the pub.