The Rhodes University New Media Lab's ‘State of the Arts' Web site provided users with interactive coverage of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.

Vincent Maher, head of the New Media Lab, who spearheaded the project, was backed by a 21-strong team of students and lecturers.

The Web site was updated in real-time with images sent from the journalism students from the events via mobile phones, while the Web site could also be accessed by mobile phones on the simpler http://fest.ru.ac.za/mobile version.

The Web site represented the festival for those who were not here, and for those people who made it to the festival, it allowed them to reframe their experience after the actual event, says Maher.

The festival coverage, which included text, audio, multimedia and images, was made available to media organisations under a creative commons licence, he adds.

The Web site also offered interactive features such as ‘Find-a-Festino' and ‘GeoGraffiti'.

‘Find-a-Festino' let people who had been photographed access the site to add captions to the uploaded photos. The results could then be sent as postcards via e-mail.

The ‘GeoGraffiti' facility combined cartography and blogging, allowing users to add their own experiences on a scalable map of Grahamstown for others to see what they have to say.

An underlying project being run in collaboration with the centre for advanced media from Prague, the Czech Republic, is the implementation of a single interface in the digital newsroom.

“We are piloting a new content management system which tightly integrates print and photography on a common database,” says Maher.

“And if successful we may look to distribute it to other small newsrooms on an open source platform.”