Sunday 16 May 2010

FutureEverything

Attending Manchester's FutureEverything Festival is becoming a habit. This years's event is just coming to an end and again I was along for the ride.

Sadly, I only got to the Conference and not any of the Art or Music events... I'm particularly gutted to have missed Plaid at Victoria Baths. So, for my highlight I must choose from the list of diverse speakers who came to Manchester (as well as cities around the world hooked up by the GloNet experiment).

For me, session which captured the essence of FutureEverything and its heady mix of art, culture and technology was delivered by Shawn Micallef from Toronto. His session told about the Murmers project which has been running for several years in several city suburbs across North America.

Signs posted at key locations around the city invite passers-by to dial a number and share their stories and memories of that specific place. Visitors to that spot can then dial in to the service to listen to all recorded anecdotes associated with that location.

The project was established several years ago and predicted a future of geo-location enabled social media which be are familiarising ourselves with today. It reminded me a little of AudioBoo which captures audio snippets from smartphone owners around the world, making them immediately available to global listeners and forever tagging each sound file with the location where it was recorded.

I'd love to see a collaboration between the two projects.
Reflection of the Printworks, Manchester BlogBooster-The most productive way for mobile blogging. BlogBooster is a multi-service blog editor for iPhone, Android, WebOs and your desktop

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