The Arts Council Wales looks set to take over funding control of the Wales Millennium Centre from the Welsh Assembly Government.
The government was heavily criticised in a report by the Wales Audit Office last October for ignoring concerns about the running of the arts organisation in the lead up to the WMC’s £13.5 million bail out.
Welsh Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones has now accepted the recommendations of a further report that called on ministers to consider transferring funding and monitoring responsibilities for the WMC to the arts council.
Mr Jones said he would consult with the ACW and the venue before coming to a final decision.
He said the final outcome will also depend on the outcome of an independent review of the governance of the WMC.
The Assembly government provides an annual grant worth 25% of the WMC’s turnover. It has allocated £3.7 million in revenue funding from 2008-2011.
The Wales Theatre Company is to close down in July, after the conclusion of its UK tour of its stage adaptation of Colleen McCullough’s novel The Thorn Birds.
The WTC was created six years ago to specialise in large-scale theatre projects in South Wales. During its operation it has produced 14 large-scale works both in English and Welsh.
Artistic director Michael Bogdanov announced that he came to the decision because of a lack funding from the Arts Council of Wales and the City of Swansea.
The WTC’s final performance will be The Thorn Birds at Wales Millennium Centre on 12th July 2009.
One of Wales’ fastest growing production companies, Telesgop, has secured contracts worth nearly £2 million and plans to become one of the UK’s leading providers of internet TV.
The announcement coincides with the launch of Telesgop’s new headquarters in Swansea earlier this month.
Telesgop has won a number of new contracts including a new series for Discovery Channel and is working in partnership with the University of Wales to launch an internet TV channel for the University.
Managing Director Elin Rhys said that the company’s aim is to become a market leader in providing internet TV for corporate clients.
Telesgop has already produced work for S4C, BBC, Discovery US and Animal Planet.
Cardiff city centre is undergoing a major transformation. The Cardiff shopping experience will never be the same again. St Davids 2 is coming…
The arrival of St David’s 2 is eagerly awaited by some, and not so much by others. Many people fear the effect it will have on local businesses and on the landscape of Cardiff. Change is everywhere. The world we live in today is constantly transforming. In such a fast paced society, how can we document today before it becomes the past? How can we document the past, before it is gone forever?
Amongst the cranes, building blocks and scaffolding of Cardiff, one local artist is documenting the city at this monumental time of change. Focusing on Cardiff’s historic arcades, Jennie Savage is creating an archive of a time and place, before the memories are gone.
The Project
I met with Jennie Savage one Wednesday afternoon in her studio in Canton. A bright attic space furnished with the usual artists trappings: white Apple Mac and shelves piled high with work. After a cup of tea she started to tell me about the Arcades Project.
Jennie is an artist with a unique style. She explores public spaces and constructed landscapes, but looks at them through human stories; the lives and narratives connected to the sites. She doesn’t map the physical geography of a town, but maps the other life of a space, the voices and stories of that place.
The inspiration for her current project is Walter Benjamin’s arcades project. Working in Paris in 1927, Benjamin believed the building of the Parisian arcades was linked to the birth of consumer culture and he wanted to record this dramatic change in society. He focused on the history of the everyday, looking at the small details of the arcades; the shape of a window or the pattern on a light. He collected writings and poetry of that time and used all these elements to document a time and place.
This is the idea behind Jennie’s project. Using history, old newspapers, archived dialogue, photos and people’s memories, Jennie will create a sense of the arcade space.
Jennie Savage explains her inspiration for the project
The project, she tells me, will take shape in many different forms: a film festival, a wireless headphones tour of the arcades and a series of 4 publications by Jennie to make visible her research, culminating in the 3D documentary; an interactive DVD archive mapping Cardiff’s Victorian arcades.
Gary Bartlett (project technical manager) talks about the 3D documentary
The Community
Jennie is not alone in her quest to document the arcades. She is joined by a historical researcher, Dr Andrew Cochrane; a technical manager, Garry Bartlett and a research team of 25 willing volunteers who are documenting through sketches, interviews and photographs. Working across all 6 arcades and the central market, the project will invite all the arcade communities to take part: market stall holders, shop owners and those of us who are shopping, having a coffee or just browsing shop windows.
Jennie wants to give visitors to the arcade an insight into the arcades as living, breathing spaces, while at the same time creating an archive, documenting them during this time of transition.
The Cardiff Arcades
The Victorian and Edwardian shopping arcades are one of the first stop off points for many visiting the city and have led to Cardiff's reputation as the ‘City of Arcades’. Built in the late 1800’s they were the vision of architect, Edwin Seward. After a trip to see the shopping arcades and covered walkways of Paris, Edwin decided they were the perfect solution for the development of Cardiff.
Today the arcades are preserved as historic monuments of the Victorian era, but they still are working spaces and are an important part of Cardiff’s commercial economy.
View Larger Map Click on each arcade for memories, images and information.
In a constantly changing world of consumerism and construction, Jennie and her team are preserving a moment in time, capturing a piece of Cardiff, before the memories are gone.
Find a Nazi near you! That is the game that has overtaken the internet ever since a British National Party membership list, including details of over 10,000 BNP members, was leaked to the internet by former associates.
However much we may disagree with the party member's views, is it right that private information such as this gets posted on the web for all to see? Many would argue that we should have access to this information as it’s in the public interest, but in reality, the BNP is a valid political party. Its members, like the rest of us, are entitled to privacy and freedom of speech.
The BNP immediately asked for the list to be removed, which I suppose is fair enough, but the damage has already been done. Once a piece of information has been posted into cyberspace, it is virtually impossible to remove.
This incident made me think about the issues surrounding justice and the internet, an idea that was also brought up by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk. He made the statement that "contempt of court laws will not survive the internet".
This problem has already been raised this week with the Baby P case. The names of Baby P's mother and her boyfriend could not be revealed for legal reasons, yet if you tap ‘Baby P’ into the Google search box, you will immediately be able to find the names and addresses of all those involved in the case.
It’s a reminder of the crazy speed at which information can now travel on the web and raises real questions about the legal process.
Is it now impossible to keep a defendant’s name confidential?
Is it possible for a jury not to be exposed to a defendant’s past before the trial, when all the information is only a few clicks away?
Contempt of court is in place to ensure the neutrality of the jury, and in doing so, ensures the integrity of court proceedings. But in today’s web riddled society can a defendant ever receive a truly fair trial?
The internet is revealing cracks in our legal system. The old laws do not work in this new environment. It’s time we come up with a new concept of justice for today’s web world.
Google, the King of the internet. So popular we have even converted the noun into a verb- let’s google it! Without it I doubt I would use the internet half as much. I challenge you to try and find someone who hasn’t googled their own name to see what comes up! I did recently (for research purposes obviously) and the results included a voiceover artist, an award winning cook book writer, and an actress who’s credits include the slightly dubious title of ‘the Empress Strikes back’. I must point out that although I have a voice, I can cook and I can attempt to act, none of the above Rebecca Woods are me. As I scrolled through the results, number seven jumped out at me, it was me! my Facebook page!
This got me thinking, what do I have to do to get my Facebook page to be the top result when someone searches for Rebecca Wood? This is exactly the same question newspaper websites ask themselves when posting an article. What do we have to do to ensure our story gets to the top and as a result gets the most views? The answer: Search Engine optimisation (or SEO if you want to be media ‘trendy’)
Google tracks 1 trillion websites, so just how does it work out which ones to put first in its search results?
It is all based on a sites reputation. Google looks for signs of quality clues, such as, who has the best links or the most visitors. When you enter a topic into the search bar, Google will scan all its websites and pick up on articles, videos and any other material if keywords have been tagged along with this information.
This can cause a real problem for the pun meister at the Sun. Its witty, outrageous and often blatantly offensive headlines work brilliantly for the front page of the daily paper, but they do not work well with search engines. Many headlines consist of few words, and none of them are keywords, making search engine optimisation efforts more difficult. Let’s go back in time to when Caledonian Thistle staged the huge upset over Celtic in the Scottish cup. The Sun printed the famous headline ‘Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious’. Now, this is a flash of inspiration for the print version, but for online- what googler is going to think to put that into the search box when they want to find out about the match? In today’s world you would have to include the keywords in the title, such as, ‘Caledonian Thistle beat Celtic in Scottish Cup’. Okay, I know it lacks creativity but if you want the traffic, you have to make sacrifices!
With all of this fresh on my mind I have created this blog for optimal traffic optimisation. It is full of links, keywords and has a simple to the point title. All I have to do now is sit back and wait for the traffic to come hurtling through like the M4 on a bank holiday weekend. Well, I can dream can’t I?!
This is a blog about blogging- sounds a bit inbred doesn’t it!
Only the other week I was being told that the blog is a dying breed and that the internet is awash with unused blogs - the ‘jetsam and flotsam’ of the cyber world. It seems that millions of people got caught up in blogmania and dabbled with blogs, only to abandon them after a few months.
Having only just recently got to grips with my own blog, this disturbed me somewhat, and I was relieved when this week Adam Tinworth, head of blogging for Reed Business Information, stressed the importance of blogging for widening the internet conversation.
And that made me think; even if the number of bloggers is slowing down, there will always be new bloggers, just like there is always new writers.
What’s also being over looked is that other forms of social media are also growing rapidly. For many, social networks like Facebook and microblogging tools are taking the place of personal blogs. Once again we are faced with the question ‘What is the definition of a blog?’
When I started out, I imagined a blog to be a kind of online diary, a personal pulpit to express my thoughts and opinions. Oh, how naïve I was. Tinworth explained that blogs that are purely opinion tend to FAIL. Great, my blog and I were not off to a flying start.
So, I hear you asking, what is the secret to a successful blog?
The blog must cover two key things:
1. Conversation – discussing topics of mutual interest 2. Be interesting – links, photos, discussions, opinions
If you want a good blog you have to first of all find a niche, be enthusiastic, have a range of content and post regularly. (The last I must admit, is a major hurdle of mine). According to Technorati (the blog tracking people) the best bloggers post 4 or 5 times per day!
Once the blog material is up to scratch, you must link it to the wider web conversation. Tinworth explained the three ‘spaces of the internet’:
1. Private space – Content is hidden. E.g. social networks, members only forums 2. Public space – Open to all but hosts have control. E.g. forums, comment sites 3. Distributed space – Traffic moves freely. E.g. wikis, microblogging
If your blog is to be successful, you have to try and link it to all three of these spaces.
The Arts Council Wales looks set to take over funding control of the Wales Millennium Centre from the Welsh Assembly Government.
