We recently attended the news:rewired conference organised by Journalism.co.uk and held at City University in London. Above is a short interactive with an analysis of the key speakers from the event and some of their behaviour on Twitter.

At the heart of the Apple Computer iPad is one rather important thing – the way human beings interact with technology. On the whole, Drawnalism thinks that anything which brings a closer connection between our senses and what we can do with them through technology is worth investigating. (Yes, we watched Minority Report too.) We thought the following video was worth watching as well, mainly as an example of how touch control is going to offer us a rather better interface to technology. Especially, if you make things with your hands.

10/GUI from C. Miller at Vimeo.

If you are interested in a.nother article on the Apple machine, we think @psmith’s round up piece for Journalism.co.uk is as good as we have seen.

Updated: Monday Feb 1st. Drawnalist opinions of the launched object are largely positive. We like larger displays for supply of information and design, but like all new creative devices the iPad is going to need time to develop and show its strengths. We also look forward to a version with a sharp, pointy stick facility for those of us who like them. Yes, we are looking at you Wacom.

NewsRewired – the event for those interested in making the news – had some breaking stuff all of its own last week.

During his panel session in front of more than 100 delegates, Greg Hadfield, one of the UK’s more conspicuously successful journalists and business people announced a change of job.

He explained his move from the Daily Telegraph to digital firm Cogapp as the result of a refusal to wait any longer for institutional journalism to catch up with the opportunities of digital.

Drawnalism taken at the conference. Drawnalism’s final post on the event will be posted later this week.

Updated 19th Jan 2010: Greg Hadfield has written for the Media Guardian repeating his words from the #newsrw event.

#newsrw Journalism and news:rewired Image from Drawnalism

Click the picture for a small gallery of drawing from the news:rewired event which was held at City University, London on 14th Jan 2010. You can follow the online buzz about the event here and find some less urgent and more reflective journalism about it at the site of the event’s organisers, Journalism.co.uk.

If anyone who attended the day would like to nominate tweets or comments from speakers and participants at #newsrw please put them in the comments below and we’ll make a new version of the image above.

Some of our on-the-spot drawing and reportage from the autumn of 2009

Today the influential Techcrunch site published a powerful piece of opinion claiming that hand-made content was dead.

This contention is based on the revolution in dispersal of ’free’ information – and new industrial-scale commercial attempts to make money through a volume provision of data. (Techcrunch cites a firm called Demand Media who are particularly depressing in this respect because they seek a market in video tutorials based simply on large numbers of eyes and trending or hot topics.)

We think there is a great deal of merit to Michael Arrington’s observations about the issues of information overload and of unique content creation being buried beneath manufacturing processes.

Basic economics teaches us oversupply of anything devalues the original and this is true for all forms of content. But, if creatives who use skill with their hands to work, whether it’s making original video, art or words are prepared to experiment, innovate and continue to follow their instincts, we see no compelling reason why they shouldn’t survive and thrive, even in an age of massive and impersonal data flows.

My advice to content creators is more subtle. Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die.

Knowingly or not, the implicit reference in this quote from Arrington put us in mind of one of the most famous pieces of graphic design from the history of the United States. Here it is.

It was hand-made by Benjamin Franklin, or one of his associates, in 1754 and Wikipedia has a brief description of its meaning at the time. If you’d rather take it on trust, the image stressed the need for common purpose between the (then) eight colonies against control from Britain, the colonial power. If you look carefully you’ll see the initials of the states etched close to the segments of the snake.

If you’ll excuse us stretching the metaphor, every all-powerful power crumbles in the end. Empires die, gods get replaced and technological innovations become obsolete. What endures (global warming and Hollywood disaster movies aside) is the human urge to create. So, find a way to endure until the situation is right for another small and successful economic revolution*.

Resourcefulness has maintained human-sized ingenuity in the face of similar economic threats for as long as there has been a recognisable process of manufacture and trade between peoples. It’s not yet time to despair and where there is a will, there is a way.

* We’ll be coming back to this theme in future posts.

Drawnalism makes drawing and visual communication to report your events and business messages. Below you will find examples of our work at conferences and public events. You can find a description of our business skills. Our recent clients include major media groups and blue-chip corporates. Please feel free to contact us to discuss your project needs.

Today, the UK government will publish an amendment to its Digital Economy Bill which may allow a great change in the way the law of copyright operates in the UK.

The government amendment to the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act (pdf) gives Ministers the ability to update the 1988 act without bringing new legislation to parliament. The move, introduced by Lord Mandelson is intended to help prevent illegal downloading of audio, video and imagery from unregulated digital sites and servers.

This is a complex legal area, concerning trade secrets, commercial assets, large and formerly highly profitable businesses and now, the nature of the easily shared information on the internet.

You can read the two sides of the current debate about the government’s plans from Stephen Timms (Minister for Digital Britain) and from Rupert Goodwins at ZDNet.

Copyright is only one element of a broader legal idea called Intellectual Property (IP) which also includes commercial Patents, Designs and Trademarks and we thought it was a good time to have a short reminder of what image copyright is about.

The full legal description of copyright can be found at the UK Intellectual Property Office. There’s a potted history of where the right came from too.

For visual creatives like Drawnalism, copyright is an automatic right which means it does not need to be applied for – the right is implicit in any original work we make. And it also applies to all these other creative businesses.

When we perform at business events we license the rights to the work we make there to our clients. This allows them to reuse the work afterwards for their own promotional activities without affecting our copyright.

Useful link: PDF downloads of copyright guides from the Intellectual Property Office

If anyone knows better, or has an experience they would like to share, please do jump into the comments below and tell us about it.

Yesterday, Alex Hughes and Matt Buck of Drawnalism attended Amplified 09’s £1.40 ‘curated unconference’, hosted by Reuters at their London base in Canary Wharf. The event was a mixture of talks and panels loosely set around the themes of the future of news and politics, and the impact which social media services like Twitter are having upon it.

Although we were there chiefly to participate and listen, we also took the opportunity to draw sketches of the proceedings and try and convey a little of the feel of the event. You can see our sketches as they appeared on the day here.

The £1.40 of the title refers not only to the 140 character limit in a typical Twitter tweet, but also to the £1.40 suggested minimum donation and entry fee, with all proceeds going to the DEC Disasters Appeal for Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam.

There was a liveblog of the event from Amplified and Reuters, and further coverage on the Guardian’s Digital Content blog. You can also follow the continuing discussion on Twitter under the #1pound40 hashtag.

It was a good event with some interesting thinkers and doers taking part, so our thanks to the organisers and hosts for getting us there.

Updated: 9am on November 20th. Mark Jones of Reuters has some interesting reflections on running a social media unconference to read here.