UK AOP: Ulrik Haagerup, leading new media change

This was the second time in a year that I’ve heard Ulrik speak, and it’s a real treat. I first heard him talk at an IFRA convergence workshop last summer. His ideas are compelling, but his new media leadership is some of the best in the world. He clearly communicates a plan of action for media organisations but he also has a management framework that helps organisations help staff through the change.

He started off by quoting a Chines proverb:

When the winds of change blow, some build shields against the wind but others build wind mills.

In 2002, Nordjyske was a newspaper in North Jutland in Denmark as it had been since something like 1767. It took about 10,000 Euros a day to put out the newspaper in 2002, and he said that the staff would strike at the slightest provocation. But they were facing a crisis, possibly the worst thing that can happen to a newspaper in Denmark: They were under threat of being sold to Norwegians.

Something had to change. He asked his staff what Darwin had said. Invariably, they said that strongest survive. Ulrik corrected them. What Darwin had actually said was that those with the ability to adapt to change in their environment would win, would survive. And he said that if more change is happening outside your window than inside, you’re in trouble. They had to adapt to survive, which is a fair comment on lots of business models these days.

We as journalists have lost our monopoly on information

They looked and saw that their audience was watching TV. They could run adverts telling their audience not to watch TV, or they could manage the change. Everyone watched CNN Headline News, but what they needed was a local version, so they launched 24 Nordjyske. Now, it’s watched by almost everyone in North Jutland, and they suddenly have an audience far greater than the newspaper. And that wasn’t the end. They launched a radio station, a premium SMS service. They have a website, and a weekly newspaper as well as the daily newspaper.

They now have a multimedia newsroom. They don’t have newspaper reporters or radio reporters. They have reporters. They create story for all media, but not all stories are created for all media. He broke it down this way as media and their strengths:

  • TV- feelings
  • Radio- here and now
  • Web- searchable and depth
  • Mobile- everywhere
  • Traffic paper- find time
  • Weekly- to everyone
  • Daily- stops time

His thinking about convergence is some of the best in the industry. He was the first person who I had ever heard that said that convergence is not a cost-cutting measure. It won’t save you money. He said that his staffing has changed little since transforming his organisation from a newspaper into a multimedia house. (They are so successful that people the world over come for tours and sessions. They pay 2000 euros per visit. They put that money in a box and just bought a new helicopter.)

His journalists are multi-skilled, but obviously, the learning curve is steep and not all of the results are award-winning. But he said: Don’t criticise the product. Applaud the process. He also talked about the difference between industrial management and innovative management, and one of the things that he said was that industrial thinking looks for short-term returns, while innovative thinking looked for long-term results. He said that the word for manager actually came from a French word for controlling horses, but that modern managers didn’t need to order their people around.

One thing that he said last summer that he didn’t in this talk is one off the lessons that I learned and really informs how I work and now I lead as an editor:

Most managers point and say to their staff: Go that way. That’s where the future is. But leaders say: I’m heading in towards our future. Follow me.

AOP: The evolving content model

Torin Douglas of the BBC moderated this panel. The panel:

  • Rod Henwood, head of new business Channel 4
  • Zach Leonard, digital media publisher, Times MediaTim Weller, chief executive, Incisive Media
  • Jim Scheinman, VP of business development and sales, Bebo
  • Rod Henwood, 600 channels on Sky’s basic pack. Our business model is under threat in a multi-channel world and with the disruptive force of broadband. He says what will save their bacon is brand (We worship our brand, he says), exclusive content, cross-promotional capability, corporate focus and adaptability. The biggest challenge is not so much what to do but what not to do. They have embraced video on demand. It is a possible threat, but they see it as an opportunity. They are looking for platform ubiquity.

    I’m glad that VOD is coming. Even with 30 channels of choice on Freeview, too often it’s 30 channels and nothing on, and I go back to DIY video on demand.

    Zach Leonard and the Times are gunning for the Guardian. The last six months he said that they are bringing in deals that before were only familiar in a print market. The story telling process of journalism has changed forever. He made a plea for developers to come see him. “I am sure that we can make you an attractive offer,” he said.

    Good to hear that. At least someone is hiring.

    Integrated newsrooms and common platforms are just the beginning. They are also looking at user-generated content and community. They recently posted the video of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 that was just discovered. Their traffic doubled and trebled. And their podcasting is ‘dominating iTunes’.

    Tim Weller, founder and CEO of Incisive. One of 40% that didn’t know what a blog is. He was the target of bloggers in the States for their search engine strategy. He founded the company 12 years ago. They turn a quarter of billion in revenue. They connect people who want to buy products with people who want to sell. They are platform agnostic. Key challenge is that the call for ROI (return on investment) is getting stronger. Buyers want real-time market intelligence.

    Work with search engines or block them out from paid content? I think it’s a fabulous marketing tool. Develop more community-based content with user-generated content. MySpace and Bebo, peer-to-peer markets are great at breaking down barriers to people communicating with each other.

    Jim Scheinman, of Bebo, was a no show. Bummer. I wanted to hear from him.

    Rod of C4 said the word: Convergence. I’ve heard about convergence for years, and for C4, it’s all about VOD right now.

    Torrin said that at C4 and the BBC, they have public money coming in, but how does the Times finance these changes. Zach says that they have a range of titles from the Times, the Sun to the Times Literary Supplement. On the Sun, they can play more with community.

    There was an interesting discussion happening about how to innovate. Rod said that there was the integrationist and the internal incubator model. They are two extremes, but he said that a balance must be struck between speeding up innovation but also getting this to the core of the business model.

    After listening to this, the absence of the voice of Bebo was noticeable. People are talking very peripherally about community, but you can tell it’s not core to their business models right now.

BlogTalk Reloaded: danah boyd

[This is liable to being the only talk I take notes on – just too braindead to do more.]

The word ‘beta’ used to mean something. Before Friendster, it used to mean that something was in testing, but now it probably means ‘not yet profitable’.

Software dev used to be a hideous process with specs being written, and checked, and coding and lawyers. But developers don’t like this sort of process.

MySpace developers decided to hack something together using Cold Fusion. No spec, no qa, no usability, no legal, no marketing. They just deployed it. From idea to deployment was two months. Can say ‘maybe they got lucky’, but that’s not the full story. But when they shipped, they asked the users for feedback, and built out requested features. But still no designed system, it’s just piecemeal hacks.

The beta is still pretty standard way of doing something. But MySpace still doesn’t have QA, instead they launch 2 or 3 new features a day, and hack on the live servers. An extreme idea but it’s a new way of working that’s pretty consistent to the social software world.

– hack it up, get it out there
– learn from your users, evolve the system with them
– make your presence known, invite feedback
– monetisation? Add a few ads here and there

Pros and Cons to this.

Cons – produces terribly horrible code that fails frequently. Held together by voodoo. But if you think about how usability been done, has a mentality, lab-driven context. They show people software, ask them to interact with it, and the result is that they fix a few pixels, change working, change page flow. Great for human-computer interaction but not human-human interaction.

But when you have crowds it is different to when you have individuals. Anything that can be fucked with gets fucked with. No good way of testing it per se, but no way to say ‘how to make certain that this can be used. But this is key to what makes social software valuable – it ends up reflecting the crowds.

Because social software spreads friends to friends, this is great from a marketing perspective. Shapes way people use it, the way they think about it. Early days of flicker, Caterina and Stewart said hello to every new users and talked to them about the site and why they did it. That shaped the Flickr culture, and the community because then friends of Caterina and Stewart did the same.

Lots of social software is tech-centred technology.

But an example that went awry. Orkut. Known now as a Brazilian site. WAs originally deployed as an invite-only to tech people, engineers, people associated to Google. But people joined because they knew those people, but weren’t necessarily interested. Too many YSANs.

But then some Brazilians joined, and the list of countries had a list of flags… like a sports event where you want to rise in the rankings. The Brazilians thought this was fascinating because they could beat the Americans. Messages went out and the Brazilians joined en masse, went from 5% to 90% of the people. At this point, the developers weren’t living in the system anymore.

Orkut has now spread to India, and that was deliberate. No problems launching but has taken on a new form recently. The space duplicates the caste system in some detail, and again Orkut does not know what’s going on or how to deal with it.

Culture’s provide meaningful context that tells us how to act. Spaces set norms, e.g. getting on a bus. As kids we don’t abide by norms, until our parents teach us. We learn from people around us and the space itself. Know that a bus is different to an opera house.

So how do you make meaning of context on a social site? Early Usenet groups all looked the same – so how do you make context? Can’t tell the difference between the others except by interaction.

So look at Friendster:
– Gay men
– Bloggers
– Burning Man attendees

Depending on which group people joined Friendster in, they took on that role. So if you were invited by a Burning Man attendee you thought it was a Burning Man site, so you they did their profile as per their own context, and didn’t realise or assume there would be any other contexts but the ones they knew.

Didn’t take long before your boss got online and you realised this was not a place to be half-naked.

Academics often talk about context and what’s appropriate. But it’s very difficult to cross contexts. People change, for example, the way that they speak depending on who they are talking too, but you can’t speak to multiple groups simultaneously without having to make a choice.

When researchers created ARPANET they were interested in sharing information. Interest driven starting point. Even MUDs and MOOs were activity driven.

But inversion with social software, because they started people-first, because you don’t want to know everyone on the web. You may be blogging to reach an audience, but you don’t have billions of readers, you start off with your friends, and if you’re really popular you’ll get beyond that. But your friends build the context. The people you know, connections of relations you have in the system.

Radically different process, but we don’t know how to deal with it. Problem is scale. These contexts collapse. How can you deal with multiple contexts because you’ve scaled.

Monetisation is forcing a lot of sites to scale too fast.

Facebook, for example. Colleges… then… schools… then businesses… now everyone. Tension with marketing – marketing means scale, and scale means multiple contexts.

Delicious, conversations about how awful it was that non-techies were posting.

How far can things scale? Can it work?

Blogs are the only area where its scaled successfully. Because there is no ‘blogosphere’ because it’s not one thing. People are unaware of each other – foodies and knitting bloggers don’t mingle.

Three questions;

Designers: There are costs to chaotic processes behind the design now, and what are the processes that can support users without burning out designers
Researchers: what implications does all this have for society, design, every day life, globalisation
Business folks: Monetisation and growth are seen as desirable, but they destabilise most social software and kill communities. is it possibly to monetise without doing that?

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SHiFT: Dannie Jost – Patents and software

Legislation was invented in the 18th century, and it’s not able to cope with the 21st century. Worked for the patent office so has a background.

Software should not be patented at all, it should be exempted at all times.

No one in the audience has a patent.
Lots of people have coded.
No one has ever applied for a patent.

Code is language, like literature, mathematic, and belongs to the domain of culture. Code is not a machine, it’s abstract, an intellectual endeavour. Usually code get packaged and is called software. It’s not physical yet it’s made physical.

Intellectual property:

copyright
– literature
– scientific
– art
– music

design 5 x 5
Patents 20 + 5
trademarks 10 yrs x X
trade secret – only good way to protect code

Why do you need to know about software patents?

Facts
1. Software is patentable in the US
2. Software is not patentable in ‘EP-land’, i.e. ‘European Patent’-land, Swiss are part of the European Patent Convention, also includes Moldavia. (Community patent does not exist yet, but it is a project.)

What is a patent?
“a title issued by a governmental entity that entitles the owner to a geographically and time limited monopoly.”

It’s a deal you do with the government. They let you have a monopoly for a limited time for a specific geographical area and your part of the deal is to disclose your invention, you publish the details.

Different types of knowledge: public domain and proprietary knowledge.

Wipo tells you what you can patent. Picks words very, very carefully – very legal domain. Have to be as exact as possible, terminology is important.

What are patentable inventions?
– new
– industrial application
– involve and inventive step, which must not be obvious to the people who know the field concerned.

Exclusions to the European Patent Convention
i.e. stuff you can’t patent
– discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods
– aesthetic creations
– schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers

This is just for European patents.

Patent paths. How do you get a patent?
– apply
– examination
– grant
– admin

Can file for a patent locally, or in WIPO in Geneva.

Three different groups that regulated. World patents done by PCT, in Geneva, can pick which countries you want to patent in, e.g. China, Portugal, US.

So there are software patents in Europe although they are not allowed, because through the PCT route you can get American specifications turned into European patents. This is why even if you are fully open source, fully free software, and if you are a developer or programmer and are serious about writing an application or starting a business which your intellectual capital is code, you better be aware of what is out there in terms of software patents. This is not about just filing a patent, but being aware of what is out there.

Very expensive. Not friendly to individuals, freelancers or even SMEs. Cost of the EP patent that is one of the driving forces pushing the Community Patent.

Software patents, therefore
– exist
– are enforceable
– part of the public domain

How do you find this stuff?
– open source
– publications
– expired patent applications

Sates of the art
– all publications in any language available up to the filing date.

So if you wrote your algorithm on a napkin and left it in a restaurant, that’s in the public domain. So patent then not valid as ‘novelty’ is destroyed. (Novelty can only be destroyed, it can’t be proven.)

Lots of patent databases.
Several prior art wikis.
Can also use search or metasearch like Clusty.

SHiFT: Stowe Boyd – We make our tools and they shape us

What sort of web doe we want? What sort of world? And how do our tools shape that?

The web is becoming a third place, replacing the third places we had before.

Oldenberg:
1. home
2. work
3. a place that is neither home nor work, but something else: a library, bar, cafe, park, wherever. Not necessarily with your family or work colleagues.

Movement away from the third place due to the rise of TV. People spend less time in social involvement in the third place. Americans average 4 hours of TV per day… Italians and British also average 4 hours too, so no smugness form the Europeans. Macedonians go for 286 minutes a day.

Television is a disease, because it leads people to sitting passively on a couch having info pushed at them, and are not engaging with people.

But the light at the end of the tunnel is internet. 56% of broadband users watch less tv. People aren’t going back to the pub or cafe or park, but moving on to the net. Using increasingly social tools. Consistent patterns of people’s social interaction within the real world and the virtual world. does not mean that all sociall systems online are equal, or equally good.

So we know this transition is happening. So how do the tools stack up.

Email sucks. Has had a big impact on culture, but it’s terrible. Extremely easy to spam, to treat people homogeneously. People are using less email – proportionately we are using other social tools more. Email changed communications channels in business, and the need for middle-managers went away .

Younger people use email less than older people. People from 13 -19 see email as a corporate evil, a propaganda machine. We’ll see significantly less email in the future.

Instant messaging. The buddy list is the centre of the universe. Average AIM user has the client open for 5 hours a day. Strong advocate of the social cues of IM, status messages etc.

Blogging. All these things came along at once. Biggest impact of blogging is in the US with the dissolution of the traditional media in the US. NYT laid off 400 people this year. Profound impact on journalism, but this isn’t what this talk is about. But blogs are changing what’s happening in the US and it will trickle through to everywhere else too.

Also has impact at individual person level, people communicating with their friends, to make new friends, to participate in the third space online.

Tags. A way for people to create shared meaning.

Explicit social networks, such as Last.fm. Discovered have the musical taste of a 27 year old British woman – she has the most similar taste to me on Last.fm.

Geolocation. Plazes. Where people, and geolocated photos. Bridge from virtual, web world to the real world. Leads to Glocalisation, global products and technology used by a small local network.

Techmeme. Tracks tech memes, and people play the game of jumping on the hottest stories to try to build traffic. Dangerous feedback cycle? Have a piling-on phenomenon, so have a clustering effect. So instead of having 500 stories of interest, it gets narrowed down to 50. Thinks that’s a bad thing because we’re talking about less things, starting to echo each other, talking within the group not to the rest of the world. Bad kind of social model.

If we look at these sorts of social technologies as a group there are certain characteristics that emerge.

Shape of web culture to come, and the potential impact on world culture to come:

– participatory, not passive; people are involved, not just accepting what they’re given or shown.
– open, not closed: anyone can get involved
– inclusive, not exclusive: that’s another reason not to like Techmeme, because it’s an elite group or authors
– edge, not centre: power is moving from the central elite to the edge, to the long tail of millions of people; centralised media organisations are losing control; once you put power in the hands of the people at the edge, it’s unlikely they’ll allow it to go back to the centre.

Our tools have an impact on us, but we can impact them by choosing which tools we use. If you see a tool going in the wrong direction, either complain and say you don’t think it’s going in the right direction, or simply don’t use it.

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County fairs, country music and loving your audience

I grew up in the rural Midwest in the US, about 90 miles west of Chicago, and my father loved – still loves – county fairs. Back in the mid 1980s, I was lucky enough to see Johnny Cash with his wife June Carter at a country fair. I still remember the shiver that went down my spine when he took the stage and said: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”

I’m not a huge country music fan, but I love good music. Johnny Cash was a living legend, but he still thanked the audience for coming to the concert, for buying his records. He was humble, but it was a humility and a gratitude for his audience that was common to country singers. When I saw Walk the Line this year, I realised for Johnny Cash it might have been because of all of the letters of support he got, especially when he was struggling with his demons and addictions.

I got that feeling of connection with my audience when I was a cub reporter in western Kansas. It was not just a connection with my sources but also with my audience. That feeling of connection is one of the reasons that I find blogging as a journalist more fulfilling than traditional publishing or broadcasting. I find it odd now to write a story that doesn’t have a space for comments. Yeah, I can see the stats. I know people are clicking on the story, but I find having a conversation with my audience more fulfilling.

I talk to a lot of people in the media who view their audience as an annoyance. In the past, the only time they ever heard from members of their audience was to complain. Here in the UK, they jokingly refer to agitated callers or writers with the blanket phrase, ‘Angry in Milton Keynes’.

When I started this post, I was going to point out some of the many incidents when the media turns on their audience. It’s a pointless exercise really. It gets pretty ugly pretty quickly, like when Richard Cohen of the Washington Post this spring called e-mail correspondents a ‘Digital Lynch Mob‘. (For more background, Kos called it the ‘Substance of a Blogswarm‘. Tailrank has a nice roundup of this particular spat.)

I’m not going to pick on Mr Cohen or any publication. Even I have found myself in a middle of a blogswarm or two, such as when the brothers at Iraq the Model banned the BBC from their blog last year. A poor colleague, Sarah, who actually had little to do with the misunderstanding, got some pretty abusive e-mail. She asked me to help out. I hopped into the comments and explained what we were doing. Two comments later, the tide turned, and a commenter named Thomas was even talking about linking back to us.

As I’ve said before, if we in the traditional media blog, we have to play by the rules of blogging, not our own rules. You don’t issue a press release. You get out ahead of the blog storm. You get into the comments. You give your side of the story.

But you don’t always have to be on the defensive. Real blogging – getting out there and actually engaging in a conversation with your audience – has real benefits, both in terms of the business bottom line and just in terms of personal satisfaction.

What do I get back from it? A lot. As I blogged a few weeks ago, I’m changing jobs. Friday was my last day in the office at the BBC, and my colleagues blogged about it. I had plenty of well wishers. Abdelilah Boukili in Morocco has become a loyal member of our audience. He’s been quick to let us know when something is wrong with the blog, usually technical glitches. But it’s helped us fine tune our blog setup. He has also set up his own blog to chronicle his comments on BBC websites. But his comments on the World Have Your Say blog and here on Strange Attractor show how blogging opens new ways to relate to your audience. He said in a comment to me:

It was your interaction with the contributors to the BBC blog that encouraged me to be one of the frequent contributors. I am not a journalist like you equipped with means to get information. All I can do is give my comments which can be good or bad.

In case, you leave BBC blog I will be “following” you in the Guardian blog.

And there are several bloggers who have become frequent visitors to my blogs, Steve in Utah, Ipanema, Anbika in Nepal and Roberto in Miami, who have wished me well.

It takes time to build a community with a blog. Media companies are rushing to blog, rushing to use social networking tools. But as Suw and I always say, the technical tools are just the start. First off, learn to love your audience. We need to learn from the country music crowd. They remember who pay the bills.

Exploding the limits of linear media

As I wrote in my last post, one of the things that we realise on the BBC World Service radio programme that I work on is that we’re joining a global conversation that is already going on in a million ways, virtual and real.

Of course, one of the ways we try to take part in that conversation is through weblogs. For instance, recently, we discussed Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the US. We asked whether the world had something to fear in China.

We invited Dan Harris of the China law blog on the programme. After it finished, he had this to say about the programme:

Just finished my show on the BBC and found it both interesting and frustrating.

Dan went on to explain his views in a way that he thought that he couldn’t on the programme. He’s not the first blogger that we’ve had on the programme who felt frustrated by the format. As a matter of fact, Fons Tuinstra, an internet entrepreneur and China consultant, who has been on the programme said this in a comment on Dan’s blog:

At least you have a weblog where you can make your point. I have been a few times in the program and I found it an interesting chaos. It tries to focus on easy to consume tidbits without trying to really make a point.

From this and other comments, I sense that the bloggers we have on the programme sometimes feel constrained. Many in the Mainstream Media fail to realise that some of our audience now live and communicate in a world where they control the terms the debate, not us in the MSM, so I think that bloggers find it a bit jarring when they are suddenly pulled back into the old world of broadcast media where they have to cede some of their new found freedom.

Secondly, blogging is nonlinear, like many things on the internet. On radio, we have an hour for the discussion. It’s linear. The world of broadcast is also one of scarcity. Scarcity of spectrum. Scarcity of time. That is not to say that the age of broadcast is over – the BBC radio signal reaches places far beyond the reach of the internet.

What happens when you wed the nonlinear, interactive, many-to-many networked power of the internet and mobile phone networks with the global reach of radio? I don’t know yet. We have a lot of work to do to bridge the worlds of the internet, the mobile phone and the radio – especially the internet. But the glimpses of what could be keep me going, keep me pushing those boundaries between media.

I believe that the limits, the constraints, the shortcomings of what bloggers feel when they come on the radio could be exploded if we break down some of these barriers between media. I’ve been trying to do that, to create a new media for 10 years now. I thought we would be further along than we are, but the dot.com bubble and crash came along: The bubble gave us a lot of hyperactive, hyper-funded ‘me-too-ism’; then came the Crash, which destroyed many people’s faith in the Internet. I used to think it was all bad, but from the ashes of the crash came a return to the Net’s grassroots: Social software and social media.

But now I’m straying into the territory of the next post: Social Media Me-too-ism. Suw and I will have a lot to say about that this week. Watch this space.

UPDATE: Dan left a comment and said he wasn’t frustrated by the being cut off by a higher authority. As an attorney, he said: “Please remember I am an attorney, so I am very much used to being cut off by a higher force: the Judge.”

That reminded me that was another more nuanced point I was going to make but forgot. For this, I’ll blame Suw. She was watching Doctor Who on here iBook while I was trying to write this.

The more nuanced point I was going to make was about nuance. There are limits to what we can pack into an hour, and I think Mike’s comment below about too many voices is spot on. It’s a fine balance. We want to include as many voices, as many points of view as possible, but too many voices becomes a cacophony of unexplored threads of thought. This is the limitation of linear media and where the internet can fill in the gaps.

Both in audio, video and text, we can explore more ideas in much richer depth than we ever could in one hour of radio. And as I’m seeing, the conversation that begins on air spins out in a million directions over weeks. We’re still receiving comments on discussions that we had in early April. Hopefully, as we plug into the online communities better, this conversation will deepen. And I’m enjoying the challenge of building bridges between the world of the internet and the world of radio.

And I’m also enjoying this conversation about this process. As a matter of fact, without this conversation, it would be a much more difficult and lonely job.

The challenge of fostering community

I’ve been away for a while, doing some real heavy lifting launching a blog at work. The programme I work on at the BBC, World Have Your Say, launched its blog now just about a month ago.

It’s been a real challenge. The technical stuff is easy, and we’re blessed with great geeks (and I say that as one of them) at the BBC.

The struggle has been two-fold. I’m going to be diplomatic here when I say the first challenge is developing a sense of ownership of this blog, this new media thing, amongst a radio team. Suw would call it adoption.

How is it core to what we do? How does it help us put out two hours of radio everyday? It’s part of my job to sell it to them.

The other challenge is selling it to our listeners. They listen to radio. What does the blog give to them? How does it enhance radio and the global conversation that we’re trying to foster?

If you would have asked me in the middle of last week, I would have said I wasn’t doing a very good job of selling it either to my team or to our listeners. I was learning the hard lesson that Dan Gillmor learned at Bayosphere: Community building is hard.

As Dan said:

Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)

How do I help foster a sense of community using this blog wed to a radio programme with millions of listeners around the world?

Well, it doesn’t happen overnight, and a month is really a short amount of time. And the BBC blogs are being launched rather quietly and are pretty well hidden in the vast digital thicket that is BBC.co.uk. At one time, we had 1800 subsites under that domain.

And we’ve only got so much online billboard space to promote all of the things that are behind our front door.

But the last few weeks have only reinforced my fundamental view that Big Media blogs have to remember they are taking their place in a pretty well established community: The Blogosphere. We’re not top dogs here. We’re in many senses johnny-come-latelys. And my view is that we must participate as equals not arrogant superiors.

I am a blogger just the like millions of other blog writers out there, and I play by the rules of the blogosphere, not the rules of Big Media. My team is joining a global community, and we have to do it with a little bit of humility.

Obey community rules, and the gift economy of linking and quoting will pay you back for good behaviour. It’s starting to work. We’re getting comments pretty regularly now live while we’re on air. Last week, we even had a contributor from Australia send in a phone number while we were on air, wanting to take part in the programme. That’s exciting, and it helps me sell the blog to my team.

We’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m glad to be back blogging. I always say that blogging keeps me closer to my audience than the broadcast model of Old Media. That’s where I want to be. I find having a conversation with my audience much more personally satisfying than talking at them.

My network, my tools. Your network, MySpace.

Last Thursday, I spoke to my friend Steve Klein’s multimedia journalism class at George Mason University on one of my last days in Washington. I’ve spoken to his classes before, and I usually have highlighted some of my own multimedia projects.

Speaking at Steve Klein's class

But this time, I wanted to show them some of the stuff that was happening at the grassroots level with third party web tools instead of Flash or big monolithic content management systems that are good at serving up lots of pages but not so flexible. I was really inspired by a post by Argentinean journalism professor Julian Gallo who showed how easy it was to tell multimedia stories using these new tools.

I kinda assume that anyone younger than me eats, sleeps and breathes this stuff, so I was a little surprised that very few of them had heard of sites like Flickr, Odeo, OurMedia, CastPost etc. By using these sites and services, it’s possible to build very compelling multimedia stories.

They hadn’t heard of these sites, but they all knew about MySpace and Facebook. I didn’t think that the class was somehow behind the curve; instead it reinforced a couple of ideas.

1) Don’t be fundamentalist about my tools.
2) The internet isn’t just about information. It is social.
3) My tools for my community. Your tools for your community.

Blogs and Flickr really do help knit my London social network together. When I got back, friends said I must have had a nice break based on my pics in Flickr.

I never got into MySpace because it disturbs my sense of online feng shui. But these kids talked about how their friends were trying to get them onto Facebook or MySpace. And one student wanted to do her project on how other students were passionate about MySpace.

They were doing the same thing I am doing, but their community uses a different site or service.

I shouldn’t gloss over point two. I have a really hard time getting people to understand that using the internet is social, not anti-social.

It’s anti-geek prejudice that just doesn’t square with reality, but that’s another post for another late night.

Don’t need a weatherman

Suw and I are in Washington DC mainly so that I can get my UK visa for the next year, and for me, it’s also a chance to see old friends. I was based in Washington for six and a half years from the Clinton impeachment through to George Bush’s second inauguration last year.

We landed last Thursday evening to warnings of impending doom. A snowstorm was on its way, more precisely a nor’easter. For those of you not steeped in American meteorological lore, a nor’easter is when a storm comes up the east coast of the US. In layman’s terms, the warmer, wetter air from down south slams into the cold air up the coast and voile, lots and lots of snow. DSCN0267.JPG

The last really big one happened in Washington on President’s Day weekend of 2003. It dumped a couple of feet of snow on Washington. My car was buried for a week behind a four-foot wall of snow left by the plows.

Weather weenies

Washington really can’t cope with snow, well, that’s putting it mildly. The town freaks out with even the mere rumour of a threat of inclement weather. I just don’t get it. It’s not like the city doesn’t have wintry weather.

And Washington really doesn’t know how good it’s got it. I grew up west of Chicago, and I have childhood memories of the Blizzard of ’79 when something like four or five feet of snow got dumped on us. My father, who is six feet even, had to go up on the roof in the middle of the storm to shovel off the chest-deep snow to keep it from collapsing.

Unfortunately, he dumped a good chunk of it right by the front door. I was about the only one small enough to squeeze into the front door until sometime in April.

Talking about the weather

Sorry for prattling on about weather. It probably has something to do with my storm chasing days as a cub reporter in western Kansas. Well, that in the fact that talking about the weather was one of the icebreakers I used when interviewing laconic Kansans who viewed me with deep suspicion. As they said, often: “You’re not from around here are ya?”

But weather is a real obsession for people. I almost enrolled my father in a 12-step programme for addiction to the Weather Channel. He had this habit of beginning every phone conversation by telling me the temperature of where I happened to be at that time, whether that was London or Washington. It was useful when planning what to wear for the day, but slightly freaky that my father knew my local forecast better than I did.

Here in Washington, local TV stations had their network of local weather watchers who sent in pictures of how deep the snow was in their back yards. I wonder why newspapers haven’t picked up on this or created spaces for their communities to talk about weather.

Sure, when I go into a weather site I want to know weather, quickly. But I wonder why news and weather sites don’t create more tools, more spaces to bank on this natural talking point.

Oh well, Suw and I survived the Blizzard of ’06. In Washington, it managed to coat the city in a beautiful blanket without really causing that much disruption. Plenty of Flickr pics to follow.