DesignIT roundtable discussion/debate: Is blogging art?

As I mentioned in my earlier post DesignIT: a mashup of charity, art and technology we held a debate at the Music Room Gallery to discuss whether Blogging is Art. We broadly agreed in the first couple of minutes that blogging is certainly a form of expression, many (I think all) agreed it's creative. 

The roundtable was comprised of the following people:

  • Alexandria Ball who chaired the debate (Microsoft IT Pro Audience Marketing Manager) 
  • Neville Hobson (leading blogger)
  • Charles Thomson (co-founder of the international Stuckist art movement)
  • Jane Kelly (artist/Stuckist)
  • Steve Clayton (blogger and CTO for the partner group @ MSFT UK).
  • oh and er some Steve Lamb guy!

Unfortunately Stephen Pritchard (blogger and author of a podcast for the Financial Times Digital Business) wasn't able to join us after all. 

As I explained in my post Have Roundtable will travel I took a Microsoft Roundtable device along, placed it in the middle of the table and recorded the audio and video.  

Neville Hobson discussed the debate and the roundtable device in The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #353 

If you'd like to simply listen to the audio then click here for a low bandwidth WMA recording of the debate - I extracted this from the roundtable output and compressed it to 30Khz which sounds fine to me given that it's purely conversation.

I haven't tried hosting the full audio and video from a roundtable session before so I look to you for feedback of how well this works - the full audio video experience comprises 180Mb for the entire debate whereas the audio I linked to earlier was 15Mb. To give it a whirl click here - you need to move 14 minutes and 15 seconds into the recording to hear the debate - the first part of the recording is simply us getting set up and waiting for everyone to arrive.

Here's an image showing how the video output looks on my screen - something that's not obvious is the slider towards the bottom of the screen that's coloured Green - you can drag the slider from left to right to move through the recording. The window on the left handside shows the video feed from whoever's speaking - in this case Alex. The window to the right (of Alex in this case) shows the panoramic view of the room. The large dark blue area would normally show presentation slides or whatever's being shared as this is a standard live meeting interface. You can drag each of the windows from their bottom left corners to resize them. Something I really like is that people can join the meeting remotely and share the output from their webcam too - when they speak you see their image in the top left window - you can read more in my post Microsoft Roundtable: a cool way to collaborate by video

I really like this kind of technology as IT CAN reduce the amount of travel that many of us would have to do otherwise.