Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

09.02.10
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Christian Thiemann, Follow the money: what we’ve learned from ‘Where’s George?’

Where’s George? is a project tracking one dollar notes in the US. Put a stamp on the note, and log it on the website. Creates link between the two places where the not was logged. Provides a lot of data about how money moves around the US, therefore data about how people move around the US.

Administrative system of US: Divisions contain States contain Counties. Spatially compact hierarchical structure historically evolved with geographic determinants.

Human mobility – are these divisions spatially compact, determined by geography? How much geography is encoded in the network of money movements?

Can make groups of counties, run algorithms to test the strength of borders between devisions/states/counties. Shows Mississippi River is a strong border, as is Colorado/Ohio border.

Compare to epidemiology, SIR model – susceptible, infectious, recovered, i.e. what happens when an infectious person meets a susceptible person, etc. No spatial element in this model. When modelled, see a wave of infection moving through the world.

But modern transportation, aviation, changes it. Incorporate that, creates new model of spread of disease worldwide, e.g. SARS. Modelling based on country doesn’t provide enough granularity. Using Where’s George? data, can see how people move around the US.

No dataset like WG. Local travel data and aviation data, but doesn’t show full picture.

Nw model for Swine Flu, combine WG data with for spread, and show where possible flu hotspots might be, e.g. LA, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, NY areas.

Can look at multiscale mobility and local mobility, they show very different spreads of disease.

09.02.10
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David Grier, Lessons from the Ancient History of Crowd Sourcing

I’m here at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit for the next two days. Expect quite a few notes (although probably not all session!).

Lessons in crowdsourcing.

Nothing new under the sun. Science shaped by forces that have existed a long time, and we understand them. Works on calculation and making mathematical models work. That has long history as being citizen science, going back 200 years. Take large task, divide into small exchangeable jobs, send out into the world with instructions on how to do them. Charles Babbage wrote extensively about this in the 1830s.

Babbage was thinking about this because of his computing machine, how can you split big tasks up? Activity is largely about starting something, drive is towards radical organisation that moves towards convention, where you have people who lead, follow, varying levels of skill.

Babbage’s discussion, prime example he worked off, Gaspard DeProny, French Revolution, labour was very cheap. DeProny got 100 people to do maths tables, required for surveying.

~100 years later, 1875, post American Civil War, lots of people out of work, women who were widows, organised group of computers, i.e. women, who put together the Harvard Star Catalogue. Then again in 1907 by US Naval Obs.

And again in 1938 during the Great Depression – 450 people working at tables with paper and pencils doing calculations for scientists or government. Maths Tables Project.

A few people have adding machines, they are the leaders.

A NYC computing office, Columbia Uni Stats Computing Lab, 1930, had 6 employees.

Most of the Maths tables computers hadn’t been to high school, organised by arithmetic opersations e.g. – or +.

Often drew from poor classes at that time: blacks, women, Irish, Jews.

Planners had a doctorate or masters, operated 1938 – 1948, remnants existed til 1964.

Most scientists/engineers didn’t have access to computers until mid-60s when they had timeshare. Some not until the 70s. They worked with a worksheet, that was planned, a bit like programming. Early programmers were called planners, coding was called planning. Instructions, so workers didn’t need to understand what they were doing.

Built 28 volumes of tables, e.g. powers of integers, exponential functions.

Discovered there were particular skills, and started to look for specific calculations that were good for generating revenue, e.g. OSRD calcs, microwave radar tables, explosion calcs; LORAN navigation tables (precursor of GPS); general science calcs, e.g. Hans Bethe paper on Sun. First test of linear programming.

Labour economics. As you build skills, people want to use their skills and want to be rewarded for that skills. They want to advance. WPA studied labour and skill as a way of building identity.

Building skill

  • Identity
  • Accomplishment
  • Avancement

Aspirational issues: Everyone wanted to be special.

Special Computing Group, had a room to themselves, had machines, almost all were women, and everyone wanted to move up to the special computing group. They started offering courses at lunch to develop those skills. Once they had completed that, were were opportunities outside. So lots of places they could apply those skills. Best measure of ability was the skill of the group.

They recognised that losing members of the group, breaking it up would damage the organisation. Started to have difficulty getting work, so soliciting work from scientists.

Gertrude Blanch, PhD, chief mathematician. Ran the computing group. Had to take everyone who came in the door, had to find ways to enforce discipline, e.g. people who didn’t think about carrying the ten, or who couldn’t concentration. Calculations were done 3 – 10 times each, didn’t just duplicate for sake of it.

“People doing hand calculations computing the same number the same way make the same mistakes” – Babbage

So did same calculation in different ways to ensure accuracy.

Crucial issue: How do citizen scientists relate to professionals? Professionals build walls around themselves.

National Academies of Science said they wanted to be of use to the gov’t, and help scientific work. WPA sponsored a lot of science. Internal comms of Nat Academies are ’embarassing at best’. Group realised it was in a position it didn’t want to be in, and internal memos had one set of reasoning that repeats:

“Scientists are successful people. The poor, are not successful, because they are poor. Therefore can conclude that hte poor are not scientific. Ergo, maths tables project is not scientific, ergo their work is not good.”

NAS wanted the budget for the maths tables and wanted to do it “right” and ‘well”. But they could never have replicated it with students as budget wouldn’t cover it.

Handbook of Mathematical Functions: Largest selling science book in history.

Gertrude Blanch, finished PhD in 1934, was Jewish, was never going to be employed by anyone, but doing the maths tables project lead her to be employed by the Air Force, worked on supersonic air flow, jet nozzles.

The thing that we are doing is building skill amongst the general populous can never be overlooked.

Maths group had droped form 450 people to 120 as labour costs were higher. But claimed 120 was as efficient. by 1946, group had fallen to 60 people with specific skill, but still as efficient. People have titles, skills, identifiable expertise.

Lessons:

  • We are creating skill, not just exploring the universe and doing science,
  • Get people who want to be identified with project, part of their identity.
  • Builds org with hierarchy, divisions of labour based on skill
  • Encourage aspiration

DeProny users Adam Smith as justification, first 2 ch of Wealth of Nation, division of labour, identifying people with skill. Forces that shape these orgs and relationships that will support science, there is also a political economy that shapes it. which builds skill but divides jobs, creates leaders and followers. Must deal with science self-defining as enclosed domain.

 

08.19.10
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Silly season’s here again

Earlier in the week, Channel 4’s Samira Ahmed sent these messages to Twitter:

SamiraAhmedC4: MATHS HELP! Do I need to say “comma” if I read out this formula tonight: p(h,r)=u(h,r)-pr=g(h, Zr)+f1[h, m(o,r)]+f2[h, m(o,r)]+E-pr.
Aug 16, 2010 03:56 PM GMT

SamiraAhmedC4: It’s the formula to explain how Blackpool (like Bath before it) is becoming classier.
Aug 16, 2010 03:57 PM GMT

If you’ve spent any time at all watching the debunking of bad science coverage, you’ll be wincing, because that formula has all the signs of being total tosh. August is silly season, the time of year where PR companies know they can trot out any old rubbish and it’ll make headline news because nothing else is going on. It’s a tried and tested method.

Ben Goldacre spends quite a bit of time debunking not just silly season stories but also flaws in the media coverage of health and medicine stories that could have serious public health repercussions. It was entirely unsurprising that he should see Samira’s tweets and dismiss them out of hand, given the PR industry’s history of producing bunkum formulae to promote their own brands.

Ben said:

BenGoldacre: .@SamiraAhmedC4 no, you just have to say “by reading this out, i have lost all respect for myself as a journalist”

Ben is followed by a lot of people who hold similar viewpoints to his and a pile-on ensued, with quite a few people being unpleasant to Samira.

Update 13:06: Gordon Rae has found the original press release from Nottingham University Business School.

The story seems to have originated from the the PA, who’d done a very shoddy job in covering it:

Resort’s winning formula hailed
Academics have claimed new Premiership heroes Blackpool as living proof of a formula predicting the resurgence of the fading Lancashire resort.

The equation is based on how different social classes interact to make or break a holiday resort.

Nottingham University Business School used the rise, fall and renaissance of Bath since its 18th-century heyday as the original basis for the theory. But now they claim Blackpool’s return to top-flight football shows the formula applies.

“Academics have claimed” is a classic fudge which often really means “We got sent a press release and can’t be bothered to actually find out any more about the story so we’re just going to make it fuzzy round the edges and hope no one notices”. It’s no wonder that people thought it was nonsense. It had all the signs.

It turns out that the story is actually based on a published paper:

The rise, fall and renaissance of the resort: a simple economic model
Author: Swann, G.M. Peter
Source: Tourism Economics, Volume 16, Number 1, March 2010, pp. 45-62(18)
Publisher: IP Publishing Ltd

When he found out, Ben apologised both on Twitter and on his own Posterous.

BenGoldacre: .@samiraahmedc4 humblest apologies, all the outward signs of bullshit were there, and was impossible to tell from PA report. sorry!

Many of his followers who had been rude to Samira also apologised to her.

Now, normally, this little spat wouldn’t be worth blogging about. A disagreement between people on Twitter that resolves amicably is barely worth a second thought. It happens all the time.

But the idea that, after the friendly apology, it was all water under the bridge is a little undermined by Samira’s article in today’s Independent about it, which in my opinion not only sports a lot of unnecessary ad hom attacks, but also fails to draw the most important conclusions from this storm in a teacup.

The title, Samira Ahmed: Targeted by the ruthless Twittermob, sets a poor tone from the off. I’ve had a look through the Tweets and “ruthless Twittermob” it was not. Snarky, rude, inconsiderate and thoughtless group, yes. But ruthless mob?

Samira begins by explaining that she is new to Twitter and had got some advice from “old Twitter hands”:

1. Twitter works best as a two way networking tool – asking as much as telling. And 2. Scientists, and the writer Ben Goldacre in particular, can get a bit aggressive on it.

The first piece of advice is good. The second is both a sweeping generalisation in regards to scientists and an ad hom towards Ben.

I flagged this second sentence up on Twitter, and Samira told me that it had been added by the sub and that she was unhappy about it, so we’ll have to take the entire piece as an amalgam of Samira’s own writing and the Indy’s sub’s writing, as we have no way of telling them apart.

Update: Whist writing this, this sentence has been updated to: “2. The science writer Ben Goldacre can get a bit aggressive on it.”

But getting the first, now even sharper, ad hom against Ben in before the end of the first paragraph makes me wonder what the point of this piece is. If all is forgiven and everyone has apologised, why go to a national newspaper to drag everything over the coals again? Was this piece written to examine the phenomenon of herd-like behaviour online and the psychology that might explain it? Or to have a stab at Ben and by association, his newspaper, The Guardian?

The second para takes another swipe at Ben, about how he got “his science facts wrong and launch[ed] a personal attack on my journalistic integrity.” Ben commented before checking the facts, and then apologised when he realised the formula was real. He shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions like that, but I do feel Samira’s overstating her case a bit. Here are his tweets in order, so you can make up your own mind:

.@SamiraAhmedC4 no, you just have to say “by reading this out, i have lost all respect for myself as a journalist”     6:07 PM Aug 16th

any nerd bloggers who want to pre-mock C4 News, looks like theyre covering this bullshit http://bit.ly/cmBfBx http://bit.ly/98aJKC    6:12 PM Aug 16th

.@SamiraAhmedC4 i’ve written a lot on this kind of lame non-journalism, some of it in this category here: http://bit.ly/dBGWLX     Mon 16 Aug 17:17:53 2010

.@SamiraAhmedC4 youre the one in a position to judge, all i can see is an “equation” with no terms defined. put press release online for us?     Mon 16 Aug 17:40:22 2010

.@alexbellos @samiraahmedC4 haha no, wait, for the first time in media history, this is actually a real formula! http://bit.ly/9xolOM     Mon 16 Aug 17:46:54 2010

Reading on in the Indy article we find a yet another ad hom:

We all enjoy self-styled sheriffs like Goldacre roaming the web setting their posses on quack doctors. But journalists like me, who work for major news broadcasters, operate under a code of conduct broadly similar to our television content.

I’m not sure where to start on that one, other than if Ben’s comment was an attack on Samira’s journalistic integrity, that doesn’t make it ok for her to attack his.

The lessons Samira draws are that reputation is important, Twitter isn’t about broadcasting, and that it’s a good tool for finding new voices. That’s all fair. But she misses some other key lessons from her particular experience:

1. Understand the culture of the community you are entering
This is the first thing that I tell all my clients who want to use social media. It’s 20% tools, 80% people and if you don’t understand how people relate to each other in the context of the community you are trying to be a part of, you will make a mistake. Samira’s mistake was in not understanding that posting a formula and asking how to pronounce without providing either context or source could be misinterpreted.

The lesson from this should have been that if you ask for help with something scientific, provide a link to your source material first. That source material should be the academic paper if you have one or the press release if you don’t. If you’re writing a story based on a press release, be really, really careful what you say.

2. Twitter escalates the bad and the good, irrespective
Twitter does great things, spreading the word about important issues or worthy causes. But Twitter is made up of humans, and humans sometimes get things wrong. In those cases, bad words will spread just as far, just as fast. This is unfortunate, but it is pretty predictable.

The lesson here would be that when something goes bad, try to understand what happened and why, and then nip it in the bud as fast as possible. Samira failed to provide context and without context the formula looked like nonsense. Rather than asking Ben to DM or email, it might have been more effective for Samira to hunt down the original paper (which she should have had to hand anyway) and post the link to that on Twitter. Although Samira mentioned “Nott U biz school” on Twitter, it seems she didn’t link to the paper itself.

3. Everyone makes mistakes
On Twitter especially. Everyone, from @StephenFry on down, at some point Tweets something that they later regret. From public messages that should have been DMs to snarky comments that one later regrets, pretty much everyone says something daft on Twitter eventually.

This lesson’s easy. With great power comes great responsibility. Ben should understand that with 57,004 followers, he has great power. I understand his temptation to snark first and ask questions later, but some pre-snark research may well have changed his mind about what to Tweet and saved everyone some hassle.

Neither Ben nor Samira have covered themselves in glory here. And normally, I wouldn’t even bother covering this spat, if that had been all it was. But I get a little cross about these sorts of ‘Twittermob’ stories, because they remind me of the old school “The internet is full of axe-wielding murderers” stories that used to get published so often a decade ago (and still do by the red tops). That’s just wrong. They show a distinct lack of understanding of Twitter and social media in general and extrapolate too far from personal experience, emphasising the bad and generally ignoring that it’s well outweighed by the good. That has the potential to dissuade people from taking part in what can actually be a vibrant, supporting, intelligent, friendly place. And we’re all the poorer for that.

Update 22:40: Samira has emailed me to ask if I would post a full set of her own Tweets, which I am happy to do. I had to take the timestamps out from what Samira sent me as unfortunately they had gotten all mangled, but they are in reverse chronological order, and there are more after the jump.

@katebevan to quote my favourite fictional science officer the whole experience has been….. fascinating.

@BlakeCreedon Thankyou so much.

@Schroedinger99 Thankyou for the apology.

And all this before the story’s even aired. Latecomers start here: http://bit.ly/9EZtyU

Continue reading →

08.17.10
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Interesting North & Eyjafjallajökull

I’m going up to Sheffield in November to speak at Interesting North, a day-long conference where people talk about their passions (rather than their work). I, for one, will be going way off piste:

Suw is a writer, collaboration strategist and lapsed geologist.

Earlier this year she followed, in considerable detail, the exploits of Eyjafjallajökull, The Little Volcano Who Could (Close Airports Around Europe On A Whim). Part of a community of vulcanologists and lay enthusiasts, she watched for earthquake swarms, monitored live webcams, and attempted to interpret interesting yellow blobs on the volcano’s infrared cam.

For your delight and delectation, Suw will be attempting to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull live on stage, as well as pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the eruption.

I’m up for doing some consulting in Sheffield, so if you’re based there and would like some social media help just let me know. Otherwise, I hope to see you there!

07.28.10
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Will Apple’s obstinacy become self-defeating?

Apple’s attitude towards app approval for iTunes has been strange, to say the least. Stories abound of ?seemingly innocent applications being rejected for obscure reasons or, indeed, no real reason at all.

The latest example of their arbitrariness is the rejection of Time’s subscription-based magazine app for Sports Illustrated, “where consumers would download the magazines via Apple’s iTunes, but would pay Time Inc. directly”. As All Things Digital says, this could turn out to be a big problem for publishers, who not only want the predictability of subscribers, but also want the data.

Just a few days ago, the US Copyright Office ruled that jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad “?will no longer violate federal copyright law”. It may still void your Apple warranty, but it’s not going to land you in any more trouble than that.

In April, Apple released iPhone OS4 and with it came the news that developers would not be allowed to programme apps in anything other than C, C++, or Objective-C.

Let’s put three and three together, shall we? Apple is rejecting apps without much logic or clarity to their decisions. The publishing industry have been drooling over the iPad as a possible industry saver (which is likely bullshit, but let’s just run with it for a second) and have poured a fair amount of effort and money into their iPad strategy. Developers are getting frustrated that they can’t develop whatever they want for the iPad, using whichever language they want.

How long is it going to be before we see an app store for jailbroken devices which will bypass iTunes altogether? The publishers have an interest in such a move. So do developers. And as an end user, would you like to be able to decide what you install on your phone and what you don’t?

Personally, I’d like to have a better browser than Safari, which hardly plugs in to any other services (Twitter, Instapaper, Delicious, etc.) at all, but I can’t because Apple doesn’t allow apps that reproduce functionality provided by their own software. I’d also like to have any magazine subscriptions I take out be a relationship between me and the publisher, without Apple holding on to my data like an information-obsessed middleman. (As a bonus, I’d also like a more sensible music management application: iTunes is the worst music organiser and player I’ve ever had the misfortune to be forced to use.)

Me, I give it a year before we see a jailbroken app store and a whole new ecosystem growing up.

06.15.10
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Betrayed again: NME Radio goes the way of Xfm

In 2007, Xfm ditched its daytime DJs, then axed all the remaining DJs in a shift to a fully automated playlist solution. I had been a loyal Xfm listener since day one in the mid-90s. I had listened on FM, via satellite TV when I left London and was out of signal range, online when I was abroad and then on DAB when Kevin bought me one for Christmas.

When Xfm fired all its DJs I felt betrayed, hurt and disappointed. A station I has supported for years had got rid of the very people who made it special. At the time I said:

The loss of real human DJs – people who care, people who are passionate, funny, interesting, exciting, cute, intelligent, informed, connected – will diminish listeners’ feelings of loyalty to the station. People react most favourably to other people. We like it when a human answers the phone instead of a machine. We prefer to be treated as individuals, not en masse. We want to have conversations with people we like and care about, people that we feel some sort of fellowship with. We don’t connect with people who pop up with an intrusive message for their own little social circle, we simply aren’t wired to care all that much about strangers.

In 2008, NME Radio began. By then I knew Iain Baker, who had been one of my favourite DJs on Xfm, personally and was excited to hear that NME Radio had hired him. Iain is a great DJ with a taste in music that matches mine and a warm, friendly manner that makes him a joy to listen to.

I finally had a replacement for the enfeebled Xfm. NME Radio was fun, full of great music played by great DJs. My radio listening needs were being fully met, even moreso when NME Radio moved on to Twitter so that I could interact with the DJs in a medium that I found convenient. (Although I must say that their use of social media in general was lacking and they could have done a lot more with it had they been bothered to find out how it can all work.)

But today I discovered, several days late due to having guests, that NME Radio have fired all their DJs and are pulling back to become an internet-only radio station. DX Media, who had licensed the NME brand, have decided not to renew that licence, thus leaving NME Radio as a shell of its former self. Says Brand Republic:

The live NME Radio station, launched under licence from IPC Media by Xfm founder Sammy Jacob’s DX Media, is to close after DX Media decided to terminate the arrangement.

NME Radio will stop broadcasting on national DAB and on digital television on Sky, Virgin Media and Freesat, but an automated service will continue online at nme.com/radio while IPC reviews the next stage of development.

Perhaps they weren’t doing well, one might think. Well, it’s true that there weren’t as many ads as you might have expected, but according to Brand Republic, audience size was increasing:

According to the latest Rajar audience-measurement figures for the first quarter of this year, NME Radio had an average of 226,000 listeners a week, up 16.5% year on year and 27.7% quarter on quarter.

Today (14 June), media agencies expressed disappointment about the decision, citing the gold award the station won in the best use of branded content category for its Skins Radio work for Channel 4, as evidence of the station’s progressive approach.

So it would seem that DX Media simply didn’t have the patience to wait for NME Radio to read critical mass, despite the fact that the signs were good. If anything, it looked lie NME Radio was well on the up. The Guardian says:

NME Radio went nationwide on digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio at the end of last year and also broadcast via Sky Digital, Virgin Media, and Freesat.

The station had an average weekly reach of 226,000 listeners in the first quarter of 2010, and just two months ago announced the signing of former Xfm DJ Alex Zane. It launched with a show presented by Ricky Gervais.

Once again, a great radio station has decided that the human voice is unnecessary or too expensive, and that us little sheeplings will continue to listen to an automated service that has all soul and personality of a brick. Well, I for one shan’t. If I want music without interruption, there’s Spotify, Last.fm, my iTunes folder, and a bazillion music blogs and podcasts that can keep me busy.

What I want is to be able to listen to Iain and his colleagues. Their voices gave shape to my day. Like the old town cryer calling “11 o’clock and all is well”, the sound of Iain’s voice was a reminder that I had better be getting on with my morning lest lunchtime creep up on me.

I feel betrayed by NME Radio. Hurt. Angry. I’ve been through the loss of my favourite radio station before when Xfm turned to shit, and this hurts even more because of it.

The strange thing is… just before Xfm lost the plot, it started broadcasting some really dodgy station idents that were repulsively puerile and insulting. They upset listener and DJ alike. I remember being quite shocked when I heard them or heard about them.

Only a few weeks ago, NME Radio started broadcasting dodgy station idents that I found repulsive and insulting. One featured a woman trying to ask her boyfriend to marry her, casting her as a needy, silly, unrealistic bimbo and him as an uncaring, selfish, emotionally unavailable twat more interested in his radio than the feelings of his girlfriend. That’s insulting to both men and women alike, frankly.

So now I’m lost. 6Music seems to be the place that refugees from Xfm and NME now go, but half their DJs bore me and the others drive me up the wall. I am again in the radio wilderness, searching for an indie alt rock home with charismatic and entertaining DJs to keep me company.

UPDATE 18 June 2010: I was pretty cross when I wrote this post. I think NME Radio’s fate reminded me so much of what happened at Xfm and opened up some old wounds. I’ve had an interesting conversation with someone closer to the action than myself, and reading this post back in the light of that additional information, it does sound a bit harsh.

Ultimately, DX Media and IPC were in a tough spot. Starting a new radio station just before the ad industry tanked and global recession set in was a piece of bad luck no one could have foreseen.

I have no reason to doubt the intentions and capabilities of the people at DX Media and IPC who worked on NME Radio. I do still think they could have done better at social media, but these have been testing times for all businesses that rely on advertising. I hope IPC figure a way to continue NME Radio, and perhaps even find the budget to hire back some of the great talent they were forced to let go. Indeed, I shall continue to listen, as they do still have the best playlist in town, and perhaps by remaining loyal through testing times I might help the station survive. One can but hope.

06.09.10
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Can anyone ‘do a Radiohead’?

Radiohead really shook things up a bit when they decided to let people pay whatever they wanted for their album, In Rainbows. Although others had used similar models before them, Radiohead were possibly the biggest band to try that tactic and they inspired many more people to experiment with innovative funding and payment models.

But one of the main criticisms of Radiohead’s experiment was that it could only work for bands or artists who already had a following as substantial as theirs. There can be no doubt that the bigger and more committed your fanbase, the more likely an experiment like that is to succeed. But still there remain doubts as to whether the crowdfunding model can work for lesser known creative projects.

One thing that is clear is that many people believe that it is possible, enough to create the infrastructure required to allow people to tap into their communities for support. Since Radiohead’s experiment, several crowdfunding websites have sprung up which make it easy to ask people to contribute financially to different types of project. ChipIn, Pledgie, IndiGoGo and Kickstarter all help people realise their fundraising goals, although no site can short circuit the hard promotional work that users need to do to get word out about their own project.

I have a personal interest in learning more about what’s required to make a crowdfunded project a success, not least because I currently have my own project running on Kickstarter. Argleton combines storytelling, bookbinding and a geolocation game and is currently 27% funded with 49 days to go.

I like to think that I have a pretty well developed network, having been blogging for the last eight years and being fairly prolific on Twitter almost since the beginning. But my network pales in comparison to someone like Robin Sloan, whose Kickstarter project inspired my own. Robin currently has 212,704 followers on Twitter, in comparison to my paltry 3,255. I would imagine that finding enough people to support a project if you have an even smaller network than mine would be very difficult indeed – supporters don’t grow on trees and they don’t magically find out about your project without your hard work and intervention.

And I think therein lies the key. As my friend Lorin said on IM yesterday,

The gift of shameless, classy, effective self-promotion is one of the best super powers going around. I wonder what one needs to be bitten by / exposed to / turned into to get that happening.

Like bands before them, authors are going to need to learn not just how to write but also how to effectively promote their own projects in order to reach enough people. Having a good idea never was enough – life always goes more smoothly for those with the right connections. Now it’s easier to make those connections, although it takes just as much time and commitment to achieve that as ever. Only time will tell if I have the connections necessary to make Argleton happen.

06.09.10
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Thomas Madsen-Mygdal: Reboot

I’m here at the Moving Images conference in Malmö, Sweden, to talk about email a bit later. My talk and Thomas‘ talk are the only ones in English, so here’s notes from his very good but very brief look at the conference he runs, Reboot.

Basic facts about Reboot – festival that’s run 11 times in the last 12 years. Very young when he started it. Enquiry into what the internet is and what it means to us, and also a personal journey. Currently taking a break because involved in a lot of stuff, but also getting very tired and not sure what would be worth spending 2 days of 600 people’s time.

Something that’s a movement or an event is hard to describe, so three small stories that illustrate journey of Reboot.

2001, post dot.com bubble. In 2000, there were 2400 people during the day, and 4000 people partying at night. Was a huge thing that was out of control. So in 2001 all this social stuff was happening and was sad about how we treated the potential of the net during 1998-2000, and wanted to say that there was more than what we saw during the bubble years. 2001, had 1500 people there. Had some huge speakers, but everyone just wanted to know how to get a job, how to make a living.

Changed the perspective, not just tech as a tool, but look at what people are doing, changing things due to understanding tools, new behaviours, etc. Transformational. Someone complained that it was all ‘one way’, big name speakers, said it all sucked, and this at a time Thomas was very proud of it!

2002 he totally shifted it all around, so it was one big open space, one speaker in the morning one at 8pm, the rest self-organised. Half the people loved it, specially woman. Everyone else wondered why they paid money for it.

The importance of the invitation. Every year the challenge is “Can I write an invitation that gives meaning to myself?” And this year he couldn’t, so taking a year off. Always find it interesting to ask, when do you invite people? So much stuff gets decided before you open up and invite people in. Started looking at academic conferences who have a call to participate. Only thing that’s set is the theme, then the rest is an invitation to come on a journey and figure out what the event is. It’s not that it’s self-organised, but that the purposeful invitation is undervalued.

Why are we doing this? When do we put the invitation out?

In 2007, for some reason, Reboot became international. Website changed from Danish to English, and then a lot of international folks showed up. At one point there were only 15% Danes.

Then in 2008, a big event organiser told him that the stage wasn’t big enough, wasn’t decorated well enough, should be more separation between rooms, and saying ‘It’s not a real conference’. Thought about it, and thought that everything was designed to be on a human scale. It’s about equality: no VIPs, no speakers’ room, everyone is equal, everyone is trying to make a good experience for everyone. Facilitation is doing just little enough that it moves along, but not so much that it turns into a big circus.

Marketing. Ten years ago, had a huge marketing budget, then it became more that they were just doing their thing and the people who want to be a part of it come along. Now they do very little marketing. When you do something that gets the right people in the room with the right attitude, it just happens. Doesn’t really understand what’s happening sometimes, but it works because people know it’s their peers int here. Speakers are much more experimental.

Designing for human scale, something we’re early in trying to understand.

Overall lesson would be, How do you get yourself into it? You’re spending your time on this creation, how do you give it everything you’ve got, but at the same time, that’s what makes it scary to do. Doing something isn’t about the factual stuff you need to do. We use the same venue for the last six years. It’s not about that. It’s more about this mountain of expectations that this is going to be a life-changing two days, and you’re sitting there six months before, wondering how are we going to get the right people? Is it going to be magic or something else? When you’re doing stuff about participation it’s all about What we want to do with them, but i think participation always starts with you, your behaviour, your attitude, what you want to accomplish with it. That’s where all this participation projects go wobbly, they see participation as a small part of traditional process.

Two years ago, we were thrown out of a nightclub for various weird reasons. So outside, on the other side of the street, a street party appears. Some guy had some speakers and they just adopted that party.

So the next year, they searched for this guy with the sound system and they did the street party again. Got shut down by the police twice in a row. But what this was was looking at what the ecosystem was doing, then providing the little bit of magic that let that happen again.

Participation is magic.

06.07.10
by

The commodification of the uncommodifiable

Earlier this year Lottie Lodge knitted a pair of socks and put them up for sale on Coriandr. As any craftsperson should, she worked out the costs of her materials and time and set that as her list price. They socks worked out to be £208.70.

The disparity between the cost of creation and the price that punters are willing to pay is a significant problem for crafters. I learnt this through my jewellery making, which I had hoped would be a self-sustaining hobby rather than a new career, although it was nigh on impossible to sell enough to even be that. I still have a stock of necklaces sitting about that I just haven’t been able to sell.

The same problem affects content creators too. I have a number of friends who are professional authors. All bar one get paid less for their books than the time it takes them to write them. Most authors I know don’t even get paid that.

I suffered the same problem when I was a music journalist. Whilst I was writing for the now defunct Melody Maker, freelancers had the first pay rise the paper had enacted for ten years. Cunningly, however, they counteracted the pay rise by reducing the word count, meaning that I went from earning just over £200 per article, on average, to around £180. The music press didn’t need to pay more. Behind every eager young journalist was a long, long queue of younger, more eager journalists willing to work for less.

Whenever you have a popular activity where the number of people who want to do it exceeds the number of professional opportunities you create this imbalance. This means that the price of the socks or books or articles gets driven down even though the cost of production is going up, at the least, in line with the cost of living.

In an industrialised environment, this is what unions are good at stopping. A good union forces those who act as intermediaries between producer and consumer to pay a fair amount to the producer, which ultimately means higher costs to the consumer. (A bad union, on the other than, just goes on strike at the first sign of change and wastes everyone’s time and money.)

The internet facilitates disintermediation but that is itself a double-edged sword. Whilst a direct relationship with your buyers can result in higher quality sales, it also removes the protection from abuse that numbers, e.g. belonging to a guild or union, can (sometimes) provide.

The combination of a disintermediation of the production cycle alongside the industrialisation and commodification of that same production cycle creates two production pipelines:

  • hand-crafted objects, often very high quality, that cost a lot to produce, but which few are willing to buy at that price
  • industrially produced objects, sometimes very low quality, that cost very little to produce but which many are happy to buy at that price

I think this is a significant cultural problem, but not because I think that industrial processes necessarily produce inferior goods. That’s clearly not true as industrial processes often allow us to create things that are impossible any other way, and that is of massive value to society. So this isn’t an anti-industrialism rant. But what we as a society risk by expecting hand-crafted objects to be sold at the same price as mass produced goods is the squeezing out of the crafter and the resultant loss of skills. Culturally, the loss of skills such as bobbin lace making or stained glass making is a cause for concern.

The same isn’t true of content. The industrialised processes of Demand Media do not achieve something that a more considered, better paid process can’t do. The Huffington Post’s model of relying on writers willing to work for free ‘for the exposure’ is more exploitative than the music press was when I was a hack, and it puts no bread on the workers’ tables.

We need to start messing with the business models of creation. The ones we have clearly aren’t working very well and the cynical exploitation of people’s passion is turning the internet into a tool of oppression instead of freedom. Publishers need to get away from this idea that the only way to be profitable is to drive down the cost of content production by driving down their wages bill by exploiting writers.

We need to examine the role of the ad sales departments and ask whether they are doing everything they really can to place appropriate ads on the appropriate pages. Twice recently I have heard of commercial departments throwing up their hands and abandoning blogs and social media content because they ‘don’t have relationships’ with the right vendors. Well, surely it’s your job to go and create those relationships?

Now, it’s a simple repost to say that there are no successful business models for online and that there’s no way to have an online content business that isn’t predicated on making the cost of that content as close to free as possible. That too easily ignores companies like Federated Media or the specialist blogs that aggregate passionate and focused readers whose clicks are worth more to advertisers than those of a generalist publication. Sure, it’s hard work, but it is possible.

But stil,l we need to start looking outside of the traditional models that are based on mass sales and mass audiences. Good content takes time to create – and I’m not just talking about investigative journalism either! Whether it’s a well considered blog post, a feature article or a novel, the key cost to writing is time, and if we don’t start to understand and value that, we risk turning our written culture into mass-produced schlock.