Most of the events we stream are from theatres, conference venues and the like. Nowt wrong with that, but this project is rather different, and possibly the only time we’ll be streaming live from a boat. Definitely the only time we’ll be streaming live from a boat on top of the SouthBank Centre.

A Room for London is one of the first projects to kick off celebrating the cultural side of 2012. It’s been commissioned by Artangel with Living Architecture, and the winning design is by David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner.

For the whole of 2012, A Room for London is a hotel, where those lucky enough to have nabbed a reservation can spend the night surrounded by the beautiful lights of London and a unique view of the Thames; ensconced in a calm, nautical environment inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There are some great photos on the Guardian architecture site and a little video on the Telegraph site to give you an idea what’s inside.

But A Room for London is only a hotel 3 weeks of the month, the other week is given over to Artangel, who have programmed readings, podcasts and live performances (Sounds from a Room) which will be streamed from aroomforlondon.co.uk and also on Guardian Music. Live gigs will also be broadcast in HD on big screens within the SouthBank Centre.

We are so excited about working on this project we can’t tell you. Kinura’s top webcasting team have been involved from the beginning, in helping to spec’ connectivity, hardware, HD capture and live streaming delivery. We’re now in the midst of final preparations for the first Sounds from a Room performance by Andrew Bird, the amazing Chicago-based multi-instumentalist. I’ve seen him perform live twice in the past and he is truly amazing. The live gig will be on Saturday 28th January at 14:00 GMT. All the performances will be archived on vimeo too.

Some folks to follow for updates:

@artangel
@livingarch
@southbankcentre

The Great British Art Debate conference is happening on Saturday 3 December 2011, and you will be able to watch it all online, live from Tate Britain. Tune in to follow the discussion and add your voice to the Q&A at the end of the conference.

Tweet @gbartdebate and using #gbad11

And if you want to watch some videos about people’s opinions on British art to get you thinking there’s a selection online, recorded across the UK. Here’s one (below) with Mr Simon Munnery, who I once saw doing a comedy gig in a pub in South East London. He’s a funny man, so he is.

The Great British Art Debate is a partnership between Tate Britain, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service and Museums Sheffield, supported by The National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, and by the MLA’s Renaissance programme.

We’ve gone all glitzy and glamorous and partnered up with Britain’s Number One Theatre Website Whatsonstage.com to sponsor the 2012 WhatsonStage.com Awards. The awards are completely voted for by the public with more than 46,000 theatregoers voting each year.

The 12th annual Whatsonstage.com Awards season kicks off with an exclusive Launch Party at Café De Paris on Friday 2 December and culminates with a star-studded Awards Ceremony and Concert at the West End’s 1100-seat Prince of Wales Theatre on Sunday 19 February. The Awards gala concert will be streamed live so people can tune in from all over the world.

Watch this space for more news and follow @whatsonstage on twitter and via the hashtag #wosawards.

We spent quite a lot of time this summer working with our friends at Baskerville Design on a project to make a newspaper via the super fantastic Newspaperclub.

We decided it would be fun and perhaps a little different to the usual route companies go down of producing glossy brochures. And yes, we could have put stuff on a USB stick or streamed a presentation about ourselves too, but you know, we do lots of that digital sort of thing – and at the end of the day, people do still like tangible reading matter. I do anyway. I’m just not into Kindles or iPads for reading books. For me, whilst I appreciate the amazing possibilities of technology, there is something about the musty smell of paper, the inky typos and the authenticity of the original object. I am often found with my nose in a book. Plus it’s nice to mix the analogue and digital when you work in digital media and spend a lot of time looking at a computer. But anyway, back to the point.

Newspaperclub has been going for a few years now and their service is really simple. They have loads of inspiring case studies on their blog. All you do is upload a PDF of your design (and they have helpful templates if you need ‘em). We uploaded the master copy, paid our cash, and a box of papers turned up 2 days later. Brilliant. We are very happy with the result.

We’ve been giving our newspapers out at events and showing them to our Mums and that, but if you want one, just let us know and we’ll post it to you with a funky kinura badge too if you’re nice :) Or you can download a PDF version below.

We even made a kinura-branded newspaper stand by buying an old one from a cute little post office in Suffolk (via eBay) and laboriously removing all the Telegraph logos and replacing them with our own vinyl letters! What a palaver!

In the spirit of a paper ‘less’ world, you can also download a PDF version. It’s all good!
Download the PDF of Kinura’s Newspaper here.

@newspaperclub

The video and podcast we made are now online giving a brief insight into the decision making and technical processes involved in creating this wondeful app, which is a fine example of how a poem that is nearly one hundred years old can be brought to life by an intelligent creative and technical team pushing the boundaries of working with new platforms.

Anatomy of The Waste Land iPad app – Faber & Touch Press by Arts Council England

Faber Digital worked with TouchPress and IADT to develop the app – and in the video and podcast you will find out just how much thought was put into every aspect of the interface and content.

The videos for the app were produced by the team who also produced the BBC Arena film on T S Eliot.

There was some discussion during the event of how the shooting style chosen for the app content perfectly fitted the format, being quite simple but also really high quality. The app features a great performance of the entire piece by one of my favourite actors Fiona Shaw and loads more expert video perspectives on the poem, filmed in partnership with BBC Arena, including contributions from Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson.

You can also watch a video demo of the app on YouTube:

140 characters is the brainchild of some lovely folks at The School of Communications Art 2.0.

The idea is to get a load of user generated content and tweets and make a live improv show along the lines of Who’s Line Is it Anyway? Neil Mullarkey (who is quite famous you know) is hosting the show – and he and his improv team will be working off suggestions provided by Twitter.

Follow @140characterstv

It should be rather interesting. Not sure if anyone has tried such a thing before? I was watching Frozen Planet and the twitter stream was so popular that it was whizzing down the tweetdeck – you couldn’t keep up! So that scenario is perhaps not best for mass scale social telly participation. Mind you if you just used twitter.com and not tweetdeck you manually refresh so might be easier to follow. Any how I digress – back to the main event.

They say:

“On 7th November we’re filming our pilot show as part of Internet Week Europe. There’ll be a human audience, a pixelated one on the web, a team of improv geniuses and your input to feed their funny glands.

Neil Mullarkey is one of our 450+ mentors. Our students know him as their ‘improv mentor’.Others know him for bringing improvised comedy to television in ‘Who’s Line Is It Anyway?’, or for appearing alongside his former comedy partner, Mike Myers, in two Austin Powers movies, or for performing alongside the likes of Paul Merton as a Comedy Store Player. Neil and his improv team will be working off suggestions provided by Twitter.

The event is going to be filmed and streamed live online at http://www.140characters.tv/, so anyone in the world can influence the direction of the show.

BUT ONLY 140 PEOPLE CAN WATCH THE SHOW BEING FILMED

Tickets are limited. Book now to avoid disappointment.

CAN’T MAKE IT TO LONDON? WATCH THE SHOW LIVE ONLINE

AT 7PM ON MONDAY 7TH NOVEMBER

www.140Characters.tv

Tickets to watch the show being filmed are available here – http://140chars.eventbrite.com Follow @SCA2Dean for the URL to watch the show streamed online live.”

We are working with Nice Agency, Edelman and Get Additive to make this happen. Wish us luck!

Today (14th Oct 2011) we’re starstruck and streaming live at 18:30 UK time, from bfi Southbank London as part of London Film Festival.

Using the YouTube Live streaming platform, via the bfi YouTube channel, we’ll be filming and streaming a live Q & A with the chaps behind 50/50: Seth Rogen (producer/actor) and Will Reiser (writer). It’s a unique on stage interview.

YouTube users can post questions by leaving comments or uploading video, and there’ll be voting to see who’s questions get asked. Totally interactive! If you want to join in you can vote on questions or submit your own until 17:00 on Friday 14 October. Just visit the BFI YouTube channel.

More news from the bfi here.

So I’m on a panel at Online Video Strategies 2011 on 19th October, which is part of the Streaming Media Europe conference, an annual gathering of online video folks which I’ve been going to since way back when (too long)?!

The session I’m speaking at is called “Building a Successful Online Video Strategy” which is a big subject to pack into 45 mins, but hopefully we’ll be able to get some useful information across to whoever comes along.

Steffan Aquarone, “Independent Web Video Strategist”, is chairing the panel. He is an experienced and esteemed web video guru and also has very nice hair. You can see his linked in profile here, follow him on twitter – @Steffanaquarone – and he does training for marketers via Econsultancy web video training.

My fellow panelists are Simon Crofts, Creative Director, ST16, Jon Quirk, New Car Editor, AutoTrader and Thomas Owadenko, CEO, Videoagency. I haven’t met any of them yet, but I’m sure they’re very nice and I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say about all this strategy business.

To my mind, the word ‘strategy’ is much overused these days, when really it’s quite simply about knowing what you want to achieve, what actions you might take to get there, and how to tell if you are meeting objectives, making progress and generally doing well and heading in the right direction.

One’s strategy will of course depend on what one wants to achieve, so there isn’t a universal code. One small strategy may be part of a larger set of organisational objectives. That said, there are some useful things to think about and tricks you can use if your strategy is about getting content out there, getting sales leads, creating an online community or whatever.

Some key things to think about that may affect the success of your communications or campaign are:

• Quality of content – as we all should know by now, you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear
• Frequency – keep it fresh, get people to subscribe, have regular slots
• Authenticity – don’t be shy, don’t be a bland purveyor of platitudes, let your personality out
• Dialogue – talk, listen, comment, chat, listen more, respond
• Talent – if you haven’t got any, hire some in!
• Being realistic – vision versus budget
• Which platform – do you need to be on more than just one? Is it about seeding to multiple platforms or managing one well so that you can drive people to it?
• Connected Tv and iDevices – unless you have the budget understand that you probably can’t optimise for these things – as yet – so understand where and how your audience will view your content

More on all this soon when I report back from Online Video Strategies 2011
Follow @streamingeurope for updates. #SMEU11

We’re excited to be working with the Arts Council and BBC Academy, who have joined forces on a project called Digital Capacity for the Arts, which offers training and guidance for arts organisations around creating and distributing content and reaching audiences via mobile, IPTV and online platforms.

There are a series of practical seminars and workshops until August 2012 and a growing base of online resources, including webcasts, short films, presentations and podcasts.

You can watch all the seminar sessions from the Seminar on Audio and Audiovisual Content online here:
http://digitalcapacity.artscouncil.org.uk/videos-seminar-2/ plus a ‘Seminar in 200 seconds’ highlights video that the Kinura crew edited in lightning time.

The next event is in London in October, and it’s all about Creative Use of Archives

The twitter hashtag is #digicaparts if you want to keep up to date.

If you love us, or just like us, please vote for us and you will be rewarded in some kind of cosmic way I’m sure. Or maybe we’ll buy you a pint. Is that bribery? No surely not. Just spreading the love.

Vote now before it’s too late!

btw we are in the ‘Streaming Services Provider’ category. Because that’s what we do. :)