It’s twenty days until I leave the BBC to join the University of Westminster as a Research Fellow, and do some consultancy. One research project is for BBC Future Media and Technology and The Arts and Humanities Research Council, therefore this will be a gentle transition.
I hope to help organisations create strategy and management systems for social media. The research projects are about how to facilitate interactive and social media, and how children use virtual worlds. I’m working with two fantastic Professors, David Gauntlett and Jeanette Steemers, so it’s going to be great. The other scheme is to write a book on the facilitation of participatory media - how fan groups are organised around brands like Big Brother, new continuity methods for cross-platform content, new types of presentation for media consoles, how to market interactive brands, and how to minimise risk. I’d like to write down all the things I learnt over the last 10 years on online communities and creating interactive content and pass it on, to either Undergrads or businesses.
I got the Internet bug when I did the first year of a course at Birbeck (Creating and Producing Multimedia) about 1995 or 6. There were 30 in the class and they all, bar four of us, wanted to learn how to produce CD Roms; we were seen as slightly mad and very reckless. Then the second ‘Mr Toad’ moment was with online communities (in 1997).
So, the next month is crammed with packing up some things and starting others, like this blog. I’ll have a month to get it going a bit before I begin ‘Phase 2′ or ‘career 4.0′ of whatever. While I get going (with this blog), it might be a bit bumpy on take-off.
