PlinthiPaul blog

If you want to meet me and chat about experiments, plinthing and stuff, just over a week before my appearance 8m above Trafalgar Square, tomorrow evening I’m holding a Pre-PlinthiPaul meetup in the comfortable, wi-fi-enabled, artistic environs of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London.

We’ll be there from about 7pm until shortly before 11pm, sitting somewhere near the Clore Ballroom. We’ll have some sort of PlinthiPaul sign to identify us.

There’s a bit more info over on this Facebook event, which you’re welcome to sign up to if you want to come.

Hope to see some readers tomorrow!

Event details copied from Facebook for those of you who don’t use it:

Date: Monday, 10 August 2009
Time: 19:00 – 23:00
Location: Royal Festival Hall (nr Clore Ballroom, Level 2), South Bank, London

Description

With just over a week to go until I’ll be conducting an hour’s worth of experiments on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, it seems an opportune time to have a get-together in London to chat about the experiments that have been submitted so far and hopefully come up with some new ones between us, or suggest improvements to the others, etc. – or just generally have an enjoyable evening in the comfy surroundings of the Royal Festival Hall.

We’ll hopefully get a Skype link up and running to one or two past plinthers, as well, to get their thoughts fed in to the process. If you can’t make it but want to pop up on Skype too, let me know and I’ll give you the details.

We’ll also hopefully be giving out little cards or leaflets directing passers-by to the web site at the base of the plinth a bit earlier on – maybe 6ish – so come and join us for that too if you can!

With the usual lashings of gratitude to Ben, I’m pleased to unveil a couple of new features on the site today:

• Comments/predictions: logged-in users will now see a text-entry box at the bottom of each experiment’s page. Into this box you can type your thoughts about the experiment, or indeed your predictions of its outcome. Don’t forget that if you correctly predict the outcome of an experiment, I’ll put you in a prize draw for some sort of plinth memorabilia afterwards! (Yes I do currently have absolutely no idea what the memorabilia will be, but it will definitely exist and not be completely awful!)

• RSS feed: if you want to keep track of experiments as they unfold, copy the RSS feed address – http://www.plinthipaul.co.uk/rss.php – and you’ll be able to keep up using your preferred feed reader – e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines, iGoogle, or you may have one built into your web browser (see what happens when you click the RSS link!).

Still to come: profile editing and possibly voting without logging in – although the ability to comment/predict should hopefully attract a few more readers to register and join the discussions!

In the mean time, a quick tip: if you’re a registered PlinthiPaul.co.uk user and you want to set up a user icon/avatar (such as my little logo next to my name here), just register at the ‘globally recognised avatar’ site, Gravatar, using the same e-mail address you used to sign up here. Upload your chosen avatar to Gravatar and that’s it – easy! (This also has the bonus that whatever icon you upload will also appear on any other Gravatar-compatible web sites that you sign up to with the same e-mail address.)

Stay tuned to this blog – which has its own RSS feed, of course – for more news!

My hopes for this site’s rapid ‘viral’ spread appear to have been somewhat optimistic. Almost a week from launch, we now have just a little over 20 registered users, and 18 experiment suggestions.

I did all the things I suggested in my post on Sunday to try to publicise the site, with, shall we say, mixed results.

Twitter was a mixed bag in itself, with the Guardian’s PlinthWatch eventually promoting me twice but the official tweeting pairing of Oneandother and OneandOtherweb ignoring my pleas for publicity. The real star tweeter was LDN, who kindly accepted my begging tweet when I saw him publicising another plinther and has been keeping his 13,000 followers informed of my progress, resulting in quite a few other people also spreading the word. I daren’t try to mention everyone here who’s tweeted a link to me or I may miss someone out and cause offence, but I did see every one at the time and really appreciated them all – thank you!

A few friends signed up at the site following my Facebook message, but most didn’t – never a greatly reassuring sign if your own friends aren’t even that interested, I suppose

I’ve no real way of knowing how many people surfed in from the One and Other web site or any other links I’d put on the web, so the success there is pretty hard to judge.

Finally, my three e-mails – one to the One & Other plinthers’ contact e-mail address, and one to each of my two local newspapers, the News Shopper and Bexley Times – have all gone completely ignored for the whole week. It sounds from fellow members of the plinthers-only Facebook group I found a couple of days ago that most local papers are keen to cover their area’s plinthers, so I’m not sure what mine have against me, or art, or whatever.

I found the complete silence from One & Other even more disappointing in a way though – coupled with the two O&O accounts on Twitter also failing to say anything to me, it’s a bit of a disheartening way to be treated, and very much at odds with the overwhelmingly positive feedback I’ve heard about their treatment of plinthers when you’re actually on site preparing for your hour.

(Semi-promisingly, I did get a sudden, out-of-the-blue tweet from oneandother earlier: “Have you had any submissions yet?” Haven’t heard anything else since I replied, but the fact that they asked that rather than clicking through to my web site and seeing the 18 experiments for themselves is a bit odd anyway!)

Some of the more enthusiastic supporters are former plinthers themselves. The inimitable minibeastgirl (who plinthed in the early hours of 20 July) has submitted an experiment, as well as engaging with me on Twitter perhaps more than any other O&O follower. Meanwhile catnip (who played what should perhaps be called plinthctionary earlier this week) has rather excitingly promised to promote my endeavours on her radio show this morning (Saturday), so do tune in to RhubarbRadio.com between 8 and 10am – if you’re awake!

So there is support out there, just not in the volumes best suited to getting the ideas and votes really flowing fast. However, a project like this has ultimately got to be about quality more than quantity, and on that front the site is doing well – there’ve been some superb suggestions and I’m really looking forward to seeing how some of them go on the big day, assuming the voting comes out in their favour.

User ebase’s suggestion of measuring the air quality on the plinth gave me pause for thought: how on earth would I go about that? As luck would have it, though, I used to run the local council web site years ago, and remembered adding a section about air pollution to it, under the instruction of an enthusiastic and knowledgeable colleague in the air monitoring department. I dropped him a line a couple of days ago and it now sounds like, if this experiment goes ahead, I’ll be borrowing and learning how to operate a handheld PM₁₀-measuring device by the end of next week! It’s great how helpful people are when you explain what’s happening and I really appreciate his offer.

Most other suggested experiments only rely on my having more basic equipment, like measuring jugs and pieces of paper, but don’t let that restrict your creativity if you want to suggest something outlandish. As long as I can obtain (cheaply/freely) and carry up what I need, I’m up for more or less anything!

One final point: it’s been suggested to me by a few people that requiring people to register in order to vote, while fairly secure against vote-rigging – which is perhaps not the most pressing of my worries – is likely to result in far fewer votes actually coming in and so a bit less clarity about which experiments will be the most popular to carry out. I’m therefore getting my web guru on the case with this and all being well you’ll be able to vote without logging in some time soon.

Thanks for all the support, tweets, experiments, and so forth. I’ll keep you posted with developments – including details of the evening event we’re planning for Monday (10 August) on the South Bank in London – come and join us to bounce around plinth chatter and experiment ideas if you can make it! More soon…

The next challenge, now the web site is at least up and running, is to spread the word as far and as wide as possible to solicit ideas. Another great thing about the internet is how it can potentially enable ordinary people sitting in their front rooms to spread information around with a broadness and immediacy we could only have dreamt of a decade or two ago.

The difficulty is in working out how to tread the fine line between successfully spreading the word and getting people interested, and merely annoying everyone and putting them off the whole thing by basically being a spammer.

I don’t claim any great expertise in online marketing, but I am a heavy user of the internet and its various communications channels, so I do know what’s more likely to appeal to me and what’s more likely to turn me off, which I suppose is a better start than nothing.

So, with all that in mind, what have I been doing to publicise PlinthiPaul.co.uk? Here’s a selection:

• Twitter. The #oneandother hashtag is used frequently throughout the day by people interested in discussing the happenings on the plinth, including myself, so I’ve used my PlinthiPaul Twitter account to promote the site. I don’t intend to mention it more than about once a day (and only when I have something vaguely interesting to say about it like the number of experiments submitted so far or similar), though, or it could annoy more people than it attracts. Twitter also has the advantage of it being easy to spread messages by ‘retweeting’ others’ messages, as I may be demonstrating on the plinth if this experiment goes ahead! PlinthiPaul has had a few retweets already.

• Facebook. As soon as I found out I was on the plinth I created a Facebook event and invited most of my Facebook friends. Unfortunately that pre-dated the ‘PlinthiPaul’ name and can’t be changed, but it’s a useful way to keep people I know in the loop about what’s going on and encourage them to participate. I sent all the invitees a message yesterday directing them to the web site and some have registered and sent in some ideas already, so that’s good news. I also posted a link to this site to my profile to spread the word wider still. Such links are easily shared with other friends so that could yet spread further too.

• Web. Aside from the fact that this site exists, there are a few other places I’m able to promote the site online. I have another blog which I’ll probably link to this site from, and I’ve also updated my profile on the One & Other web site to link here, and added a link to the ‘My story’ part of the profile. I’ve no idea how many people idly browse forthcoming plinthers’ profiles, but I might as well try to grab their interest too!

• E-mail. We plinthers are given a contact e-mail address for the One & Other organisers, for use for queries etc. When they called me a few weeks ago they were interested in what I would be doing while I was up there – perhaps, I thought, sniffing around for interesting media-friendly stories they could follow up further, or cover on the weekly Sky Arts 1/HD TV show. Back then I didn’t know what I was doing so they left disappointed, but now the site’s up and running and I’m clear what’s happening, I thought I should drop them an e-mail, so I did so earlier today. Whether you’ll now see me on Sky Arts is another matter, though…

• Old media. Local newspapers are always on the lookout for a quirky tale of a local resident, right? So my next e-mail will be to a local freesheet or two…

With that lot in hand, and one or two other ideas up my sleeve, is there anything else left I could do? Please comment below if you think of anything! One possibility, though – suggested by PlinthiPaul.co.uk’s development guru Ben – is for a PlinthiPaul meet-up in London in the next week or so, at which we can talk through ideas and, using a laptop and wi-fi, get people registering, submitting and voting on experiments there and then. I’m thinking perhaps the Royal Festival Hall, as somewhere suitably arty with comfy seats, a bar and free wi-fi – and it’s within walking distance of the plinth, which is always a bonus. What do you reckon? Would you come along?

Now, back to those e-mails. They won’t write themselves.

How exciting: today we launched the ‘beta’ version of PlinthiPaul.co.uk.

On 1 July I was very excited to receive an e-mail telling me I had been lucky enough to be picked in that month’s draw to stand on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square at noon on 18 August, as part of Antony Gormley’s One & Other project.

Once my excitement subsided, though, I was left wondering how I would fill the hour. An hour is a long time, so it was clear that nothing too simple would do, but I couldn’t think of anything more involved that would be worthwhile.

Until, that is, a recent train of thought about plinth size led me down the path of wondering whether the plinth was big enough to swing a cat, and whether such a thing could be verified through an experiment to do just that – aha! I should do a series of different experiments to last the hour!

I’m a strong believer in the internet as a force for ground-up change and the power of like-minded people coming together online to achieve results that would be far harder individually. As such, it seemed sensible to look to the wisdom of ’net-based crowds for suggestions, and have them vote for which ones I should seek to do on the plinth.

Fortunately, an equally strong believer in the power of people through the internet is Ben Werdmuller, who just happens to be a Web 2.0 genius with a great track record of online developments and a real grasp of how to make the best of social technologies. While I’m no technophobe myself – indeed, I met my wife online nearly a decade ago when that wasn’t the everyday tale it now seems – I could never have pulled all this together, especially not in such a short space of time, so I must give many thanks to Ben for taking my initial idea and basic site design and enhancing/developing it into the interactive marvel of PlinthiPaul.co.uk.

We’ve only launched in beta today because there are plenty more features still to come. This blog, which I’ll switch on as soon as I’ve written this, will be the next thing ticked off the list, but I know Ben has lots more up his sleeve too, including the ability to predict the outcomes of the experiments people have suggested, and probably further social tools like the chance to leave comments under them, and RSS feeds of the site’s content, too.

So please do keep checking back to the site over the next couple of weeks in the run-up to my plinth stint, and please don’t hesitate to register on the site so you can submit experiments and/or click ‘Like’ next to the experiments you like in order to help me decide which ones are the most popular.

Thanks for your help and participation!