We've been thinking about the role of collaboration in the act of creation, and how it's enabled and altered by technology for a long time now.

We are currently working through a set of specific models of collaborative creativity and are in the process of making these diagrams to help make our thinking clear. Some of these are not quite self-explanatory yet, as we haven't added all the necessary text but we wanted to get them on the site and see if anyone might suggest things we might improve or models we haven't thought of.

I will do new and improved versions of these over next few weeks and re-post them. Click the images to see a proper size version.

Justin

DP is an old friend; I've been following his career since he was, er, 16, and have watched him grow into one the UK's most prolific and successful  TV composers - and certainly its most consistently adventurous. Anyway, I wouldn't mention such things here normally; that's what Don't Get Me Started is for. But I thought it worth drawing attention to this audio interview with Daniel, conducted by Paul Morley for his "Showing Off" show on the Guardian's website. I bring it up not especially for the content - although it's an insightful interview and there's plainly a rapport there - but more for its format and, well, that it exists at all:

- It's 37.34 long - give or take the audio stings; how would that fit into scheduled, linear output?
- Yet it's exactly the length it is and the platform requires no editing.
- It's conversational, really conversation, and perhaps therefore not as slick as you'd expect from the usual broadcasting subjects... and as a result, of course, infinitely more authentic.
- It's an interview with a TV composer; where else in the mainstream media are you going to come across a 40 minute interview with such a category of artisan?!
- And it's one which references Krautrock and Jerry Goldsmith and Stockhausen and The Orb and Debussy... with not the slightest attempt to talk down to the listener or dumb down in the name of some spurious "mission to explain".

So in short this is a great example of what the new media bring us: smartness, insight, subjects outside the glare of the mainstream media (and I'm including our own allegedly high-brow public service broadcasters in there, should you be tempted to think otherwise), and a format - that is, a length - which fits the content. Not the other way round.
Simon

Here's a tantalising short film put together by South African educationalist Steve Vosloo, reporting from the recent mLearning summit in the Zambian capital Lusaka and discussing the potential import of mobile in African education.

In our work with arts organisations, alongside the questions about social social media, content distribution and new forms of marketing, we're sometime asked about the impact of digital media tech on the actual practice of art - on making stuff.

Well, in the spirit of answering that, here's footage of a quite remarkable architectural video installation by the Bolognese video art collective Apparati Effimeri. Talk about best practice.

Couple of smart video presentations we've come across recently.

We're huge admirers of Clay Shirky of course. Here he is at TED@State (that's a sort of mini-TED hosted by the US State Department... that's how influential TED has become), riffing on the role of digital and social media in politics, in the spread of democracy in the dissemination of a message. There's too much in here for us to really single out any observation, but if we were forced to it'd probably be that (and this is a familiar Shirky-ism) that it's not novel services which are interesting, but rather ubiquitous, or at least mainstream ones.

This is about making stuff on the move.

Really, what in the gaps between doing other things? No not really, this is about making stuff on the move the big thing you are doing, destinations are now out of fashion.

So what are these big things you are going to do on the move - well one might be to paint a picture, maybe a landscape, with your finger, building up and blending the colours - but on your iPhone, you're not Ruskin, you're a first world digi-painter using 'brushes' a lovely app that is going to slow your rush down.

Brushes captures your every mark and then you can watch the film of you painting and of course upload it right away. The New Yorker loves it and have commissioned Jorge Colombo to provide one New York scene a week.

What else might you do - what if your finger painting just ain't digital? Well, why not help out on the universal campaign to digitise our entire existence, point by point. This is where the iPhone app called audioBoo becomes your tool. Wherever you are, there will be a sound that needs capturing, a photo that needs taking (to lend your sound some pixels) and a location that will need fixing with your GPS. And now you can grab all three, bundle them together from wherever you are, and place them on the audioBoo website, a universal library of beautifully severed moments.

Two great ways to make your in-between moments more permanent, more searchable, more aggregatable.

Justin