Sutton Grapevine was not about access to technology but about using physical activities and online technologies to reveal the texture of life in the village. Where we’ve used technologies they’ve been those that people already use or could easily adopt:
suttongrapevine.org; is a free WordPress Blog. We use podbean a free podcasting service where we upload audio files to our account on podbean, and the most recent podcasts automatically appear on the this blog. Gabcast; is a low cost service that lets people record a story over the phone. The recordings were automatically uploaded to Gabcast and later linked to this blog. The strength of Gabcast is that no internet connection is required and the cost was low. But it is difficult to tell stories into a telephone so it seems to work best as part of organised activities. AudioBoo allows iPhone users to make short digital recordings with photographs which can be posted online. It was used by the team to make short recordings around the village from time to time. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables people to post and read short notices that appeare immediately on the website as well as being were delivered to subscribers. Its immediacy makes it work well in ad hoc situations. As a result of twitter we gathered additional stories about the area.
Recordings were made on a variery of equipment spanning price ranges including £10 voice recorders; a Sony Minidisk Recorder and mic; an iPod, an iPhone and a Marantz digital audio recorder. Audio was later edited in Garageband. The Marantz is a professional recorder but looks a bit like an old fashioned tape recorder so people barley notice it which we found to be invaluable as people are often a put off by a microphone being pointed at them. The iPod Classic and iPhone are both easy to use but the battery life is short with the iPod and sound levels are not as high as with the Marantz. The minidisk and mic is good quality easy to use and economical choice though it is not digital. We also used some small digital audio recorders by Olympus which were very handy.
