Following a meeting with Auro and Clément at the beginning of April, I managed to sort some dates to come down and cover activities at Village Underground. Before I came down it was important to have some social media networks more sorted.

Village Underground now has a Twitter Account, a YouTube channel, and a Flickr site. I’ve also been overhauling their Facebook and Myspace presence. At the simplest level this has meant using all the logos and backgrounds so branding is carried across all elements. It also means effectively pulling content from elsewhere and thinking about re-distribution.

Raw Material
You may have noticed from my last post on Posterous that I had more plans for extra platforms. However, after I met with Raw Material I decided that this isn’t the best solution.

Raw Material will be responsible for adding content across these sites after I’ve finished and they weren’t interested in unnecessarily complicating the brand. Because I was pulling all the current channels over a hectic weekend prior to my VU residency, I did perhaps hastily name some of these sites. For example Village Underground’s Twitter identity may get changed due to ‘VillUnderLondon’ not showing up in search results. The small following built purely through re-enlivening Facebook and following Twitter mentions was also balked at and doubtless audience figures will rapidly increase in the professional hands of Raw Material. I hope it will be better than this Insight screen grab of previous Facebook Group activity.

They also particularly questioned the need to have a real presence on audio sharing platforms such as Audioboo or even Sound Cloud. Auro wanted to put mixes of club nights online but Firgas from Raw Material mentioned PRS “would be all over it.” Firgas also doubted there would be much interest in detailed musical playlists or podcasts as VU’s music doesn’t have a particular sound. Instead of creating Spotify or Last FM playlists, I added a playlist of forthcoming acts to Myspace.

We also chatted about using video clips of live performance. We decided the best decision here was to take down if asked. Any full length interviews and performances that take place in one of the Village Underground driver cabs will need a separate release form. I will post separately about this material or you’ll probably see content pop up on all the channels mentioned.

Once I’d re-located the sites and venues using my own memory of the walk (with a little help from Birmingham Music Map) and Chris Phipps himself, I firstly geolocated everything in Audioboo then inserted the information on my own map.

View Home Of Metal Birmingham Tour in a larger map

My original plan was to embed audio onto the pinpoints, but currently Google Maps doesn’t allow you to use any kind of audio player. The nearest I could achieve was to embed a YouTube slide-show into my map – click on the Town Hall pinpoint at the top of the map as an example. As I mentioned in my last post, my main objections to YouTube are its clumsiness and untidiness, it would be better if you could resize the slideshow and view it like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A site called Woices uses Google Maps API to embed a walk. So far the site pretty much does what I can do below, with a touch of Social Media added.

More interesting is the Infospot which allows you to customise the site and access to analytics. In addition to the normal download option it can be triggered by Geolocation for iPhone users. I’ve been playing around with a trial version which isn’t viewable to the public.

To make this customised site viewable it would cost 59 Euros a month! This would be great if I had funding for this project and there was some kind of revenue model. A more cost effective way of producing this would be to set up a map in Flash, research Geolocation and maybe build a phone application myself.

If this was to be a more permanent serious tour project, I would also need to pay Chris Phipps for the use of his material. And even ask him (and others) to talk about other venues and their experiences of Birmingham’s musical past. I would also need to consider how the newly relaunched Home Of Metal site is developing. Home Of Metal is after all a place where non-professional Heavy Metal fans can share their own experiences, memories and stories.

Finally, I need to consider how far this has moved from being a journalism project. News sites often geolocate stories and many online news projects can act as archives to preserve the past. But is recording the past, and creating and maintaining tours the responsibility of the journalist, a civic society or a historian?

STOP THE PRESS… @hadleypaul just alerted me to this beauty by @buddhamagnet

View Boobase Home Of Metal marks in a larger map

Te great thing about this is that it finds the boos by tags, so if I were to add more venues to Audioboo and tag them ‘Home Of Metal’ they would also pop up here!

Finally, I’ve created a full podcast with musical interludes to give you time to walk between pinpoints.

For added visual treats and ‘chapterisation’ why not download the enhanced podcast?
(right click, ‘save target as)