Alongside the main Shift-Time Festival we're running a project to get Shrewsbury and the surrounding area blogging. We want people to use the festival to experiment with all sorts of "social media" services be they weblogs, photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube or Twitter. The end result, we hope, is to give Shrewsbury the tools to talk to itself about things that matter, whatever they may be.

This blog will act as a hub, collecting and linking to online activity that is either relevant to the festival or Shrewsbury in general, and posting things to to help and inspire you to blog about Shift-Time.

So get involved by setting up a blog or sharing your photos and videos online and let us know what you're up to so we can mention it on the blog.

How to get involved

by Pete Ashton

All you need to get involved with the project is somewhere on the Internet to put stuff. If you have a regular place where you’re doing this let us know and we’ll link to it here. If you’re just uploading the odd thing (like a photo or video) tag it “shifttime” and we should find it.

Blogging

If you fancy running a blog you can have one up and running in minutes using one of these free services:

Blogger is one of the oldest blogging services (hence the name) and is owned by Google. The interface is very simple and while the features are a bit limited you can publish on here as easily as sending an email.

Wordpress is the software that runs this blog and this is their their free, hosted version. This is more advanced than Blogger so can be a little bit complicated for the complete novice but it’s not as hard has it might first appear.

Tumblr is a very stripped down blogging service (in jargon-speak it’s a Tumblelog) which makes it easy to post photos, text, videos and links from around the web. You can use it for “normal” blogging but if you fancy a scrap-book approach this could work for you. Here’s my Tumblr where I collect random stuff I see online.

Typepad is a nice service but they do charge $5 a month. If you’re looking to develop something more professional looking but don’t want to worry about the techy stuff this might be for you.

I’ve put Twitter in here because it’s essentially blogging, just limited to 140 characters. If you’re Twittering about Shift Time include #shifttime in your tweets so we can find them here.

There are countless other blogging services out there so don’t feel you have to use the above if something else appeals, especially if you have a friend who’s already using something and can help you get acclimatised. If it lets you publish words in date-ordered chunks on the Internet it’s probably good enough.

Photos

The granddaddy of photo sharing websites (as opposed to services where you simply upload upload images) is Flickr. To use this you’ll need a Yahoo! account, if you don’t have on already. The free version lets you upload 100MB of photos a month (if your camera produces large files resize them on your computer before uploading) and access your most recent 200 photos. If you upgrade for $25 a year these limits are removed. The advantage to using Flickr is the community which is based around groups. One of the more active local groups is Shropshire Community which welcomes new members and regularly organises events. One of the administrators is Steve Green who will be blogging about the festival.

Other photo services include Facebook, Google’s Picasa (no community but integrates well with other services like Blogger) and Flickr competitor Zooomr.

Video

The 1000lb gorilla here is YouTube and there’s nothing wrong with it… except the community can be a little toxic. If you’re not worried about illiterate idiots leaving stupid comments on your videos (ie, you’re posting them on your blog and not engaging with YouTube as a social space) then it’s fantastic and 100% free.

Other video hosting services I like, and which don’t necessarily suffer from the idiot magnet, include Vimeo (very slick looking), Viddler (very functional) and don’t forget Facebook and MySpace let you upload videos as part of the service. Flickr also does video, limited to 90 seconds (they call them “moving photos”).

Other stuff

Those are probably the main three forms of online publishing but there’s a whole world of other services and tools out there. If you want to dig deeper check this list on Wikipedia for inspiration.