Greenbelt2005

After far too long a day of travelling I’m back in the US. The Festival was great, though as tiring as ever (jetlag compensated for the more relaxed on-site schedule). I’ve spent the day catching up on feeds and email, and tinkering with the collage code. For the most part it’s been working well and new content has been picked up pretty quickly, particularly since I added in a technorati watchlist for links to www.greenbelt.org.uk. The one exception was from flickr, where often there’d be more new photos between checks than were included in the feed, meaning that we only had ~100 of the 500 posted. As a quick fix I added the individual ‘greenbelt2005’ feeds for several of the more active flickr users, but now I’ve rewritten the code to use the flickr API to check for all new photos within the last 45 minutes (we check every half an hour, so 45 minutes should make sure nothing falls through the cracks) and pulls them in that way. ...

Greenbelt is Europe’s leading Christian Arts Festival, and an event I’ve been involved in for over a decade now. This year, we’re trying something new (to this event) by encouraging everyone who attends the festival to tag materials relating to the festival with the tag ‘greenbelt2005’, focussing primarily on flickr, del.icio.us, and of course technorati. We’ll soon be offering a simple interface to explore the contributed content through the festival’s website, but my hope is that we will be able to open up the data we collect to introduce more people to the concept of a ‘remixable’ web. It’s all very last minute, and details are still being worked out, but I’m excited by the potential to open up the concepts to a new audience. Any suggestions of ways to work that out or examples of other projects that have opened up content to a broadly non-techie audience would be much appreciated. ...