Last year, over 3500 people pledged to support Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over 1200 people added their link to our map mash-up and we got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!
But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech on Wednesday 24 March. We have 197 signatories so far, we just need another 2875, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge and let all your friends know about it.
It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.
Last Friday I wrote a blog post on my own blog about The Impenetrable Layer of Suck and did what I usually do with blog posts these days: I Tweeted it. I saw a few people reTweet it, so thought I’d check my stats. This is what I saw:
I’ve heard many a time from friends at Guardian Technology, who all regularly Tweet links to new articles and blog posts, that Twitter is a greater driver of traffic than Google News. I’ve found it to be true here as well. On days that I Tweet a link, traffic is much, much higher than days I don’t.
I rarely see links from other websites listed in my referral stats, apart from my own site where there’s a feed in the sidebar and weekly roundups. The decline of the trackback is an interesting, and sad, thing. They got so polluted by spammers that they became unworkable for most people and now I rarely see functioning trackbacks. Blogrolls have also fallen into disfavour, probably because they were such a pain to keep up to date and the technology to look after your blogroll didn’t develop much functionality beyond very basic add/delete/sort links.
This is a shame. In the early days of blogging, I felt like I really was a part of this huge network of bloggers, all passionate about the opportunities this new technology gave us, all excited about the democratisation of publishing. Now blogs feel much more isolated from each other, less connected, less like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. More like lone voices howling in the storm.
Twitter brings traffic, as sometimes does Facebook, but it doesn’t make me feel that this blog is connected into a wider network. Whilst information flows through my network, just as it did before, that flow is mostly invisible. Twitter doesn’t show me whose Tweet is sending me the traffic, it’s all just a nameless wall of http://twitter.com. The network has slipped behind a veil.
It’s great that Twitter brings readers, but I miss that sense of connection that my referrals stats used to bring me.
So, how important is Twitter to you, compared to other sources of traffic? Do you get most of your referrals from Twitter? Is Twitter now where you find most of your news?
In Eggs-actly what ARE the chances of a double-yolker? Hanlon points out that young hens tend to produce more double yolks than older hens, and that flocks tend to be of the same age, so six double-yolkers is not an unusual occurrence for a young flock. Further more, double-yolkers are heavier than single yolked eggs, so when the eggs are sorted by weight they will tend to wind up in the same box. So really, a box of six double-yolkers isn’t that much of a surprise.
The second was from WNYC’s RadioLab, a great radio show and podcast from NPR in the States which has now become a must-listen for the gym. I love RadioLab – they cover science stories in an engaging, entertaining and though provoking way. Their programme from Sept 9 last year was called Stochasticity, “a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness”. The first two sections should be compulsory listening for every journalist:
A Very Lucky Wind Laura Buxton, an English girl just shy of ten years old, didn’t realize the strange course her life would take after her red balloon was swept away into the sky. It drifted south over England, bearing a small label that said, “Please send back to Laura Buxton.” What happened next is something you just couldn’t make up – well, you could, but you’d be accused of being absolutely, completely, appallingly unrealistic.
On a journey to find out how we should think about Laura’s story, and luck and chance more generally, Jad and Robert join Deborah Nolan to perform a simple coin-toss experiment. And Jay Koehler, an expert in the role of probability and statistics in law and business, demystifies some of Jad and Robert’s miraculous misconceptions.
And then the first half especially of:
Seeking Patterns Fine. Randomness may govern the world around us, but does it guide US?? Jonah Lehrer joins us to examine one of the most skilled basketball teams ever, the ’82 – ’83 ’76ers, and wonders whether or not the mythical “hot hand” actually exists.
Then we meet Ann Klinestiver of West Virginia, an English teacher who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991. When she began to take a drug to treat her disease, her life changed completely after one fateful day at the casino. Jonah discusses the neurotransmitter dopamine and the work of Wolfram Schultz, whose experiments with monkeys in the 1970s shed light on Ann’s strange addiction and the deep desire for patterns inside us all.
Statistics is something that you constantly see journalists getting wrong. The Bad Science forums are rife with examples of statistics abuse. It’s not surprising, because it’s actually very easy to get statistics wrong: Probability in particular can be very counter-intuitive and assumptions that seem to be common sense are frequently just our brains playing silly buggers with us. Personally, I think that all journalists should have to study statistics, even the freelances, because it’s so easy to get it wrong and so useful when you get it right. But, in the meantime, I’d settle for more people listening to shows like RadioLab and reading blogs like Good Math, Bad Math, Bad Science, or Junk Charts.
For any of you interested in intranets, I’m going to be talking at the IntraTeam conference in Copenhagen at the beginning of March. I’m onstage at 3.10pm on Wednesday 3rd, talking about email and how we can use social media to shift the burden of certain types of communication away from email and onto more suitable platforms.
If you’re going to be there, please do come and say hello if you see me!
Using Eysenck’s classic personality test, Tosun and Lajunen found that students who scored high on extraversion (agreeing with statements like ‘I am very talkative’) tended to use the Internet to extend their real-life relationships, whereas students who scored high on psychoticism (answering ‘yes’ to statements like ‘does your mood often go up and down?’ and ‘do you like movie scenes involving violence and torture?’) tended to use the Internet as a substitute for face-to-face relationships. Students who scored high on psychoticism were also likely to say that they found it easier to reveal their true selves online than face-to-face. The personality subscale of neuroticism (indicated by ‘yes’ answers to items like ‘Do things often seem hopeless to you?) was not associated with styles of Internet use.
‘Our data suggest that global personality traits may explain social Internet use to some extent,’ the researchers concluded. ‘In future studies, a more detailed index of social motives can be used to better understand the relation between personality and Internet use.’
I wonder how long it will take for companies that use psychometric testing to add an additional “internet user type” section…
I was listening to WNYC’s RadioLab on the weekend, particularly the recent episode, The New Normal?. The first section was a story about a tribe of Kenyan baboons studied by Robert Sapolsky. The group got tragically infected by tuberculosis and most of the alpha males died.
Now, baboons are notoriously aggressive and when new males join a tribe, much trouble ensues. But after the death of the alpha males, a new culture took hold, one of gentleness and acceptance. When new males joined the group they were accepted much more quickly than normal. Grooming increased, especially between males. The group had changed.
Initially, it seemed that this was just a temporary effect, but now, 20 years later, the group still behaves differently to any other baboon tribe even though most of the original members are long since dead. The culture of tolerance has endured and has been passed on not just through the teaching of baby baboons, but also through the conversion of incoming adolescent males whom, it was assumed, would have brought their violent culture in with them.
I couldn’t help but think of the different communities that I’ve been a part of over the years and the importance of first contact. What happens when you join a community influences your own behaviour there, like it or not. If someone is rude, aggressive or dismissive of you, then you are more likely to be rude, aggressive or dismissive back. When someone welcomes you to the community with warmth and openness, you return the favour to the next newbie to arrive.
Perhaps one step towards healthy online communities is to shoot all the alpha males (or females, for that matter) that barge in, beating their chest and picking fights with the youngsters. Metaphorically, of course.
Clive Thompson writes on his blog (and in Wired) about how social networks such as Twitter become dysfunctional when the network gets too big and, as a result, too lopsided:
When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down.
This is a point I’ve been making for a long time, not really from personal experience but from observing various friends who have very high follower counts. Clive goes on:
Technically speaking, online social-networking tools ought to be great at fostering these sorts of clusters. Blogs and Twitter and Facebook are, as Internet guru John Battelle puts it, “conversational media.” But when the conversation gets big enough, it shuts down. Not only do audiences feel estranged, the participants also start self-censoring. People who suddenly find themselves with really huge audiences often start writing more cautiously, like politicians.
When it comes to microfame, the worst place to be is in the middle of the pack. If someone’s got 1.5 million followers on Twitter, they’re one of the rare and straightforwardly famous folks online. Like a digital Oprah, they enjoy a massive audience that might even generate revenue. There’s no pretense of intimacy with their audience, so there’s no conversation to spoil. Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals. It’s the middle ground — when someone amasses, say, tens of thousands of followers — where the social contract of social media becomes murky.
‘Microfame’ is a term I first heard used by Danny O’Brien at OpenTech 2005 in his keynote, Living Life in Public (available from the UKUUG site, embed coming soon!).
This was in an era before Twitter, before Facebook opened up to the world, when most people became ‘internet famous’ through their blog. But becoming ‘microfamous’ puts people at the centre of an uncomfortable social dynamic. As Danny said:
There are people out there who know something about you, but you have relatively little knowledge about them.
This becomes problematic because the microfamous rarely have the resources that the truly famous do to protect their privacy. But more importantly, it creates a disconnect, an unbalanced power relationship that we don’t really have the societal experience to understand. Knowledge is, after all, power.
This relationship asymmetry has been amplified by Twitter especially. Twitter is a very good example of how poorly we understand these dynamics and how the tools that we create and use are not designed to take the microfame effect into account.
It’s appears that there are a number of stages in the growing asymmetry of one’s Twitter network. The first is when the majority of @ messages you receive come from people you don’t know. That happened a while ago for me, probably at around the 2000 follower mark. Then @ messages from people you know get swamped by @ messages from people you don’t. Finally, the @ messages to every last thing you say flood in, killing your ability to have a conversation with anyone and making it impossible to build connections.
I’ve not experienced those last two stages, but I’ve seen it happen to friends and it’s not pretty. It puts them in a difficult position where the people @ing them feel put out that they don’t get a personal reply, but the amount of time it would take to read and respond to every @ makes it extremely difficult.
This is the eternal problem of social networks. In order to be financially successful, social networks need to grow large. But in order to be socially successful, they need to stay small. Seemic was a good example of this. In the early days, it felt like a small, intimate community where one could upload a video and have a real conversation around it. As it grew, the conversational seeds, those first video uploads that broached a new subject, became so numerous that it was hard to find one’s own, let alone the responses to it. In fact, it became so time-consuming to participate I had to give up.
With Twitter, the problem is just as much about the tools as the network itself. Twitter clients tend to be designed for people with small networks and don’t deal well with asymmetry. Most tools, for example, have two ways to show @ messages: you can see @s from your friends in your timeline or see all @ messages lumped together, regardless of who they came from.
I’ve yet to see a tool (although clearly I’ve not used all Twitter clients) that gave you a third choice, to see all @s from people that you follow in a separate view. That would at least allow the Twitterer to focus on maintaining relationships with the people they have chosen to follow, whilst facilitating a dip into the faster-flowing stream of @s from the rest of Twitter whenever they wanted.
It might be tempting to dismiss this problem as one that only the cool kids suffer from, but that would be to miss the wider point. In some situations, creating small trusted networks with variably-permeable boundaries is key to creating a sustainable broader network. This is particularly of collaboration spaces, where you want to invite only key people to work with you, although that group may change from project to project.
(Now, you may think that Facebook achieves this, but it doesn’t. It gives one the sense of being in a small sub-community without actually delivering on that promise – the boundaries are far too porous, and their porosity is not entirely under your control.)
We need to do a lot more thinking about this problem. It’s relevant in a whole host of context – hot-desking enterprise, for example – and most social networks focus on creating broad opportunities for interaction without considering how to let people create natural boundaries where they feel comfortable.
