Meetup #2 - Weds 13th January

[Sam Easterby-Smith]

Sorry for very late notice on this but I'm wanting to get some traction (and Hwayoung said we could have the madlab - if you book them they will come!)

Signup page is here!

Rough agenda:

Identity: Name, Domain, Logo, Hashtag etc
- Between "The Manchester Aggregator" as full name and manc.ag for short
- Adrian drunkenly said he'd pay for the manc.ag domain ;-)
- Hwayoung said she'd do further design work
- overall structure and strategy - editorial rules etc

Online (web/mobile) edition:
- combination of between being a dumb feed and the 'curated' thing we're talking about
- getting something out there QUICKLY (ref Dave and using Reader / pipes / etc)
- hosting and such (I was just going to cover this myself for the time being)

Print edition:
- production (editorial, layout & design, automation, schedule, etc)
- printing
- distribution

Funding and sustainability etc etc

More thoughts welcome!!

[Kate Feld]

Okay, I am sick as a dog at the moment but hopefully by Wednesday I will be much improved, and will be there.

[Sam Easterby-Smith]

Well you've got another week to recover now :) get well soon!

[Dave Mee]

Nailing a name would be good.

Tags here say mancagg
Domain is manc.ag
Discussion is labelled Mangg
(My memory seems to say) ManAgg

[Sam Easterby-Smith]

Hi folks,

Herewith are some minutes! [With a few comments that I can't resist pasting in brackets]

Present: Sam, Dave M (but had to leave), Clare, Louise, Kate, Adrian, Nigel, Eliza
Lurking: Hwayoung
Didn't make it: Josh, Rebecca, Carolyn, Dave N


READER - AND TECHNOLOGY STUFF (done first because Dave had to go)

Dave started the meeting by saying that he had set up a bunch of things on google - including a mailinglist/group as a (more private) alternative to the ning... [however as nobody has signed up and it's rather forking the conversation and it's nice in my mind to keep everything in the open I've pasted these minutes up here on the ning!]

Dave talked about Google Reader as an initial method of managing the blog list and aggregating the content in more-or-less the way we had been discussing:

1) We can use it to collate the definitive list of good active manchester blogs
2) The "Bundle" feature allows us to export the (unfiltered, realtime) aggregation of everything that comes in
3) We can selectively "share" items - thus making an edited version of the feed
4) The sharing can include writing custom lead-ins or summaries if we want

What we don't get from that is extensive user-driven feedback in the way the Blogpaper does, but I think we all agreed that we don't fancy that model. [I think it may help to have a bit of this kind of thing later on though - possibly very low key stuff like capturing read-counts and "likes" and so forth, if only to make the job of selection easier for editors - but this is cool for the time being]


NAMES AND IDENTITY

We talked about names. Kate came up with the suggestion of "The Monitor" - people were pretty positive about this - it encodes a lot of what the project is about without being quite so geeky as "the aggregator". We discussed whether or not to include the word Manchester in the name and concluded that we would not (but that we would use the word manchester in a strapline [eg "Mashing up manchester's online media since 2010"])

Clare suggested that we adopt the monitor lizard as our official mascot and incorporate one into the logo. [I think that will look great]

Some concern was voiced about connotations of christian science. [which does continue to bug me somewhat now I've slept on it... In fact I'm really quite bothered by it mostly because I imagine that people would see "The Monitor" on a news-stand and think it was the CSM and not touch it with a barge pole... I really feel I could do with some re-assurace on this.... I'm going to start a separate discussion about it.]

Sam looked at domain names: "themonitor.org.uk" is available - not the best but passable - most other variations are gone and belong to CSM

[Other possible ones I found this morning: themonitor.me themonitor.at themon.me themon.org themon.at mmon.me mmon.at]


CONTENT SOURCES

We talked about the sources of the content - saying quite quickly that we want to primarily stick with grassroots bloggers rather than re-use anything from "old" news sources (like the beeb or men) - that kind of thing would both be a copyright nightmare and not in the spirit of it being a community-sourced effort!

Adrian suggested however that we might want to include feeds from selected and relevant organisations blogs - eg the cornerhouse or mdda. There is certainly an argument for this in terms of exposure and so forth [I think it's perhaps important to make a clear distinction between material written in an official capacity and content that has been written personally - this could be visual in terms of the design and colour perhaps - a gentle health warning for readers?]

Nigel voiced some concerns about the actual nature of the content that manchester bloggers write, saying that there is a lot of stuff in the arts and culture and food kinds of territories but not a lot of politics or "newsy" writing. I said that I thought the existence of the aggregator, particularly once it is available in print, would hopefully be a catalyst for getting people to write more in this vein.

We floated the idea of setting "challenges" or specific topics for people to write about later on. This could be quite a powerful tool in the medium term when there are big issues in play to drive people to generate relevant stuff. Again it's one to park for a little while.

We said that we would set up a specific shared editorial blog on wordpress or similar.

We agreed [i think] that we don't want to host comments from readers on the online version - instead direct comments back to the original source of the relevant post. [I also thought but didn't say till we got to the pub that in the end it would be neat to have some kind of navigation strip in-a-frame when this happens so that people can carry on navigating through the aggregator content. Like what you get when you do a google image search only less obtrusive.]


REVENUE, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING

We talked extensively about revenue and advertising - generally we don't want advertising if we can help it BUT the thing has to be sustainable.

We talked about selling the print edition and what a suitable cover price might be BUT again it would be even better to give it away for free and would simplify distribution massively. Adrian talked about his experiences of selling his poetry magazine - and how the only place that it actually sold from reliably was the Cornerhouse.

We discussed taking donations - Louise had a good example of a free (albeit niche) publication in london which did very well for itself on this model.

We talked about limited advertising through page or whole-issue sponsorship - potentially this could be a good way to operate, for example we could simply sell one advert, taking up the whole back page, and use that to bankroll the printing of each issue.

We mentioned inserts - flyers and such from clubs for example... Adrian suggested cover-mount CDs or DVDs as a possible sponsorship avenue and/or a way to add non textual content - eg film festival sampler...

We touched on subscriptions. We agreed that "advertorials" were nasty. We talked about figuring out a break-even point in terms of revenue.

Probably we will end up with a combination of the above approaches.

We looked briefly at print costs - newspaper club having been suggested both by Josh and Hwayoung (via twitter)... Louise (i think) said that it looked really rather expensive and that we'd almost certainly be able to get it done cheaper by a local printer. Clare suggested MARC (3 doors down edge st). [I nominate myself to go in and ask them for comparable quotes]


NEXT STEPS

1) Kate said that she would work on getting the Manchizzle blog list into the google reader - possibly delegating some of the leg-work to others depending on how easy it is. [Not completely sure but it should be possible to get the whole blog-roll out of Wordpress in OPML format - which Reader should in turn be able to understand - no guarantees though! Dave is this possible?]

2) Adrian agreed to compile other "organisational" blogs into the reader account

3) Others agreed to assist kate and contribute any further sources they could think of and fiddle with the reader.

4) Sam to register a domain name and set up a (private-for-now) rough-version of the site based on the two output feeds from Reader

5) Sam to get some quotes from MARC re printing costs

[alexhough]

Following on Twitter and encouraged by Mr Alan Burelston on GeekUp [1], I really wanted to come along, but the weather, a sore knee and lack of confidence in the trains and the post Christmas state of my haircut all conspired against my ambition to join you. I remained in front of my fire, enjoying a new configuration of cushions I am experimenting with.

Here are three thoughts.
1) Output by hiring space in existing print media, selling adverts round the content or acquiring a discrete sponsorship deal. Sell the content with adds to other bits of print media (the kind that is trying to sell flats and an urban lifestyle.)
2) Output as photocopied A4 stapled together. Distribute though Magma and FACT (both have fanzine sections located in cool positions: Magma close to the fashion and trends mags; Inview [2], Tank [3] , Fantastic Man [4] )), FACT with the new media art theory books relating to cooler-than-urbis-ever-was exhibitions. While in Liverpool visit the Englands Dreaming archive[5] in for inspiration, view copies of Sniffin’ Glue -- the original A4 sized punk fanzine.
3) Invite guest editors / curators to filter the aggregator. This increases variety introducing new readerships –- the friends of the editors. Attempt to get a balance of variety. To do this it might be interesting to look through the Stafford Beer archive, conveniently located in the same library as Jon Savage’s punk archive. Create an archieve of Blogs as you go, write a coffee table book for xmas 2010, sell archive it to someone.

[1] http://groups.google.co.uk/group/geekup/msg/397ba98ad0ccd417
[2] http://www.inviewmagazine.com/
[3] http://www.tankmagazine.com/
[4] http://www.fantasticman.com/
[5] http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/lea/77472.htm
[6] http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/lea/77471.htm