A workshop is taking place in Manchester on Thursday 19 January 2012, and key employers and representatives from the North West IT sector are invited to participate.

Here is a PDF of the workshop agenda.

Where and when

• Venue: New Economy, 6th Floor, Churchgate House, 56 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 6EU
• Date: Thursday 19 January 2012
• Time: 2pm to 4.45pm.

More information and booking

Find out more on the Sector Focused Workshops website, where you can also book for the Manchester event.

Salford Social Media surgery is a FREE event for those in the community and voluntary sector. You can speak to experts and get advice and tips on how social media can help your organisation.

Salford Social Media surgery is an initiative of Manchester Net Squared – a volunteer-led collective of people who aim to support those making social change with easy technology.

Sign up to attend and find out more

Visit the Social Media Surgery website to find out more and sign up to attend, and keep updated by following the #slcsms hashtag on Twitter.

This Wednesday we’ll be helping test a novel iPhone / iPod Touch app called MuseUs that invites you to look at the paintings in Manchester Art Gallery in a different way.

Your choices and decisions will not only add to the feedback about the artworks, but will help to refine the app.

The testing session will take place this Wednesday 21 December, in Gallery 6, Victorian Galleries, first floor of Manchester Art Gallery.

The test itself will take around 15 to 20 minutes, and you can drop in any time between 1pm and 4pm.

You do not need to own an iPhone or iPod Touch to take part in the test, as equipment will be provided.

We will ask you to complete a short survey about the app and your experience using it.

If you are interested in taking part in the testing sessions, please sign up using this form.

If you require more information, please contact Alan Holding at MDDA on 0161 255 8111 or 0161 241 8211, or email Alan.

A social media surgery is an informal event where “patients” get to spend one-to-one time with “surgeons”, looking at how social media can benefit their community organisation.

Need Help? Want to know how Twitter can help you campaign? How can Facebook help you connect? Or maybe you just need a basic starter? Please come along and join us…

Can Help? Can you spend an hour or two with a cup of tea and some local community projects, helping explain and show some of the ways social media could work for them? Please join the surgery… (Alan Holding from MDDA will be going along as one of the surgeons.)

Smiths Fan? You can also visit the Smiths’ Room, and have your picture taken to add to it!

Where and when

Date: Thursday 10 November 2011
Time: 4.30pm to 6.30pm
Venue: Salford Lads’ & Girls’ Club, St Ignatius Walk, Salford, M5 3RX (Google Map for the venue)

Find out more

Visit the Social Media Surgery website for more information and to book a slot.

Writing for the Web

Would you like to learn how to write for the web? How to promote your activities and services in the best way online? How to structure your content to get the most impact?

This practical course will look at:

• Writing & language for the web / How to an stucture article / blog post
• How to write for Facebook and Twitter
• Plain English, Accessibility and Audience
• Appropriate content & how to deal with negative feedback
• Pingbacks, Trackbacks and Backlinks – what are they?
• Sharing on social media / integrating with social media
• What is SEO and why it is useful
• Tips and tricks on having an active online presence

The course will be delivered by Liz Hardwick. Liz currently works primarily in community media, is a self-confessed geek and is an audio, visual & digital artist. Liz is part of Manchester Girl Geeks, Lancashire Artists Network and Plug-In Lancashire.

• Date and time: Friday, July 22, 2011 from 10.30am to 4.30pm
• Cost: £80 (£40 subsidised price – for those unemployed, freelance or in full-time education)
• Venue: Lets Go Global, 3 – 5 Malvern Row, Old Trafford, Manchester, M15 4FD
• More details and booking: http://writingforweb.eventbrite.com

Social Media for the Arts

This one day workshop gives a broad overview of how social media is being used by writers, artists, and other creatives to develop work, in the work itself and to promote their work. You will get an overview of the social media “toolkit”, practical sessions on using social media, and advice on how to use social media safely and effectively.

Suitable for anyone who is interested in using social media for collaboration, creativity and communication.

The course will be delivered by Adrian Slatcher. Adrian works at Manchester Digital Development Agency and is an experienced blogger, enthusiastic Twitterer (@adrianslatcher) and regularly chairs Manchester’s Social Media Surgeries.

• Date and time: Thursday, July 28, 2011 from 10:30 AM – 4:30 PM
• Cost: £80 (£40 subsidised price – for those unemployed, freelance or in full-time education)
• Venue: Lets Go Global, 3 – 5 Malvern Row, Old Trafford, Manchester, M15 4FD
• More details and booking: http://socialmediaforthearts.eventbrite.com

The Manchester Peregrines Project give members of the public the opportunity to view a wild pair of breeding peregrine falcons, which nest on one of the buildings in city centre Manchester, using telescopes and with the guidance and knowledge of RSPB experts.

The Manchester falcons nest

Through a referral from Jeremy Buxton, the Big Screen Manager at the BBC, the RSPB wanted to know if we could help them put live video of the nesting falcons on the internet for more people to see.

We thought this was a great idea. Provided we could connect the camera to the internet, getting the live video put online would be fairly simple via a service such as Ustream.

However, we hit a snag when we found out that the internet connection at the building where the nest site was located was a domestic ADSL connection with less than 400kbit upload speed. That speed would not be enough to support live video from the nest, so our next thought was seeing if we could connect the building to our experimental public WiFi network.

The WiFi network – known to us as Manchester Public WiFi – is a pilot project MDDA is running which uses low cost equipment to distribute and share the high speed internet connection that comes into MDDA’s offices to provide free WiFi access at many locations across Manchester, including Albert Square, Manchester Art Gallery, Firmstart and the MadLab. (I’ll be posting more about the Manchester Public Wifi network soon.)

The first step was visiting the nest site again to see if it would be possible to connect it to our WiFi network – part of which involved sticking a phone out on a ledge and taking a cheeky snap of the nest whilst one of the falcons had its back turned.

One of the Manchester falcons on the nest

We found out that we could “see” the WiFi network from site. We had power for the camera and our equipment, and the camera-mount used in previous years looked fine, so we were OK to go for the live video. Also, we could improve the upload speed from the 400kbit of the ADSL connection to 50Mbit on our WiFi network – over 100 times faster.

The next step was helping the RSPB choose a good video camera for the job. We ended up with a camera that could send its video over a computer network (just like a webcam can), could record in high definition, do fancy tricks like motion detection (more about that in a minute) and work without a hitch in the glorious Manchester sunshine.

Once the camera was in place and connected to our network, we started work on getting the video off it and onto the internet. We needed to do a few things with the video coming from the camera:

• Stream live video over the internet for anyone to watch
• Upload short video clips

But given that this was something a bit special – wild peregrine falcons nesting in city centre Manchester live on the internet! – what else could we do?

Hang on. Falcons? Internet? How about getting the falcons on Twitter? And how about any time something interesting happens in front of the camera we record a short video clip, put the clips from the falcons’ nest on Flickr and let the falcons tweet about it? Sounds like a plan!

So we set up some user accounts on Flickr, Twitter and Ustream (as Perry Grin!) and got to work on the camera.

Streaming live video

Streaming live video to a lot of people takes more internet bandwidth than we have available on our public WiFi network, so we used a third-party web service – in this case a free account on UStream – to help distribute the live video of the nesting falcons over the web.

We used an application called Wirecast on an old Mac Mini in our office to grab the live video from the camera (a bit like how you can take the live video from a webcam when you plug it into a PC).

The Wirecast application showing the live video feed from the falcons nest.

Wirecast then sent the video on to the falcons account on Ustream. It was then Ustream’s job (as they’ve got the internet “oomph”) to stream the live video to anyone who wanted to watch it.

Ustream lets us add a chat box to the falcon’s live video page. This has been great for the RSPB as it’s enabled them to engage in conversations with people interested in things like when the peregrines chicks will fledge, when Incy Wincy the Spider (who crawls across the camera at night) has gone and inspire drawings of the chicks.

Twitter user @birdsiveseen's drawing of falcon chick

Using Ustream enabled us to get statistics as well, so we know that (at the time of writing) there’s been over 30,000 unique viewers to the live video stream since early April 2011, amounting to almost 15,500 hours of video watched in total.

Uploading short video clips and tweeting about them

As well as the live video, we thought it would be interesting to grab short clips of interesting things going on at the nest site and automatically upload them to the photo sharing website Flickr and then let the falcons tweet about them on Twitter.

The video camera we chose has a feature called motion detection. This allows the camera to automatically trigger the recording of a video clip if something moves in front of the lens.

We set the camera up so that a 25-second long video clip would be recorded if something happened around the edges of the falcons nest.

Motion detection trigger zones on the camera

As the camera has a “pre-roll” feature (which means it remembers the last few seconds of video in its memory) it starts the recording a few seconds before the action actually begins, so we don’t miss something interesting like one of the parents landing with some new food for the chicks.

The camera saves the short video clips to its own SD card, just like on a regular digital camera, but also uploads them over the public WiFi network to a server at MDDA’s offices.

Automatically putting those video clips on Flickr and putting messages about them on Twitter involved getting lots of different web things working together and a simple computer program – as explained in the science bit below.

The science bit

When the motion sensor is triggered on the video camera, it records a 25-second long video clip, saves it to its own SD card for back up, and then uploads that clip via FTP to a server at MDDA’s offices.

Each clip is an MP4 video file between 2.5Mb and 4Mb in size, has a resolution of 1280 by 720 pixels, a framerate of around 12 frames per second and a filename something like nest-motion20110602_103743.mp4.

A simple computer program is scheduled to run every hour on the MDDA server. The program checks if a new clip have arrived since the last time it was run and if one has arrived, it gets uploaded to the falcons’ account on Flickr via the Flickr API.

Using the Flickr API lets the computer program do things like set the title, description and tags to describe the video clip, get the web address of the clip’s page on Flickr and be notified when the video has been processed by Flickr and is ready to watch.

After the clip has been processed by Flickr, we have the address of the clip’s web page (its URL) on Flickr. However, as we’re going to be using Twitter to tell people about the new clip, and as Twitter limits messages to 140 characters, we have to use a URL shortening service to turn a long web page address (such as http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcrperegrines/5789934452) into a short one that is good for Twitter (such as http://s.coop/1oio).

There many URL shortening services, and we decided to use s.coop, which has been created by the Co-operative Press based right here in Manchester. Like Flickr, s.coop has an API which lets computer programs interact directly with the service. So our program used the s.coop API to turn the long web page address of the video clip into a shorter one ready for use on Twitter.

Now that our program has got the short web page address from s.coop, it’s almost ready to tweet about the clip on the falcons’ Twitter account.

We didn’t really want the falcons to send tweets like “Video clip #23746273846 has been uploaded to Flickr”, so we asked the RSPB to provide some phrases that the program could use when sending the tweet. The program picks one of the phrases at random when sending the tweet, which means we could send tweets like, “Ah, another home movie from the life of a Manchester peregrine. http://s.coop/1oio“.

A tweet from the falcons.

Like Flickr and s.coop, Twitter has an API, which we used to send the tweet about the new video clip that’s just been uploaded to Flickr.

So, to recap, here’s what happens:

• Something happens in front of the camera and triggers the motion sensor
• The camera records a short video clip and uploads it to a server at MDDA
• The MDDA server runs a computer program that uploads the clip the Flickr, makes a short URL of the web page on Flickr and then sends a tweet about it to the falcon’s Twitter account.

All this science bit takes about three minutes, and most of that is waiting for Flickr to process the video ready for viewing.

Falcon figures and popular peregrines

Using Ustream, Twitter and Flickr to share images and live video of the Manchester falcons has helped the RSPB reach more people.

Though the project’s use of social networking sites like Flickr and Twitter has been quite low profile, since this year’s project went live in April 2011 (and at the time of writing) the falcons have over 280 followers on Twitter, over 27,000 views on Flickr and over 30,000 unique viewers on Ustream.

Find out more

You can find out more about the RSPB’s work by visiting A Date With Nature and following the RSPB on Twitter.

You can follow the Manchester peregrine falcons on Twitter, Flickr and Ustream.

Thanks to Joanna Keene, Emily Sanders, Richard Bashford, Carolyn Jarvis, Brian Reid and everyone else at the RSPB. The MDDA stuff was done by Paul Spensley, Paul Limbrick and Alan Holding.

Do you have ideas on how to improve public transport and travel information in Manchester?

Are you a developer or designer who wants to build great applications using public transport data?

Do you work in local government and want to know more about Open Data at a practical level?

Do you just want to get your hands on lots of Lovely Data?

Lovely Data is a series of Open Data hack days sponsored by Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA) – part of Manchester City Council – and run in partnership with Open Data Manchester, DataGM, FutureEverything and the Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab). Read more about Lovely Data.

The theme of the very first Lovely Data, taking place on Saturday 9 April 2011, is Transport.

We’d like you to share your ideas, play with public transport data sets, build cool applications that show off your skills, and give feedback on how public data can be improved.

You’ll learn more about the Data GM – the open data catalogue for Greater Manchester – and give feedback on how it can be improved.

You don’t need to be a super geek to get something out of the day (though super geeks are always welcome!). If you’ve got a great idea you can team up with someone who’s got some coding skills.

Where and when

The Lovely Data Transport Hack Day will take place on Saturday 9 April 2011, from 10.30am to 5pm at the MadLab in city centre Manchester.

The MadLab is at 36-40 Edge Street, Manchester, M4 1HN. Here’s a map on OpenStreetMap and a map on Google.

Teas, coffees and lunch will be provided.

Please note that the MadLab will also be hosting a writer’s group meeting in the afternoon, so please be prepared to move around a bit to accommodate them.

What you’ll need to bring

Ideas on improving public transport data! They’re always good.

A computer you can create, design and / or code stuff on.

Not a programmer? Bring a computer or mobile anyway and you can help with research on the day or testing the websites and things that people make from your ideas.

Some projectors will be available, but please bring your own VGA adapter if you want connect.

Register to attend

If you want to attend, please go to the Transport Hack Day page on Eventbrite and sign up.

Any questions?

Leave a comment on the Lovely Data blog and Alan Holding at MDDA (that’s me!) will do his best to help.

Lovely Data is funded by the Smart-IP project. The Smart-IP project will develop open innovation pilots in Manchester, Ghent, Cologne, Bologna and Oulu around the themes of Smart Environments, Smart Engagement and Smart Mobility. In Manchester we will be developing new services and products around the first two of these themes, and will be engaging with the local developer community and with citizens to ensure they can benefit the widest community.  The project is led by Manchester City Council and part-funded by the European Union’s Competitiveness and Innovation Programme.

This Omniversity of Manchester course will get you started on the road to realising your own Internet-connected projects.

An Arduino is a low-cost electronics prototyping platform that has become the de facto choice for physical computing projects.

With the addition of an Ethernet shield – which enables data to be sent and received over a network – Arduinos make an excellent platform on which to explore the Internet of Things.

Arduino electronics board - Photo courtesy of the MadLab

Booking information

The one-day course costs £132 per attendee and takes place on Friday 25 February 2011 at the MadLab.

You can find out more and book a place on the Omniversity website.

The sector includes companies involved in advertising; architecture; arts & antiques; crafts; design; designer fashion; digital and ICT; music; publishing; radio and television; software; computer games and electronic publishing; video; film and photography; and visual and performing arts.

The North West Fund for Digital & Creative provides finance from £50,000 to £2m to businesses seeking finance to support a broad range of needs from start-up and early stage development through to expansion plans for trading businesses.

In return, the Fund Manager will require an equity share in the business. Capital structures can include a combination of equity and loan support as best suits the needs of the company.

More information

• North West Fund for Digital & Creative website
• The North West Fund on Twitter

Steven blogged about some of those techniques on the Manchester Net Tuesday blog, and he has also given us the heads-up on a new international pro bono programme for non-profits called The Analysis Exchange.

The Analysis Exchange has been set up to help community organisations obtain advice from local SEO experts. The programme is also an opportunity for budding SEO consultants to get experience, building their confidence and boosting local talent.

You can find out more on the Analysis Exchange website and there’s an introduction to the programme on YouTube.

You can also find Manchester Net Tuesdays on Twitter, and the group meets regularly at the MadLab.