Category Archives: Community

07.29.08
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NPR’s On the Media and ‘Comments on Comments’

As I’ve mentioned before, National Public Radio’s (US) On the Media is part of my weekly podcast diet. It was an interesting look at three different views on internet comments on articles and radio programmes. Host Bob Garfield interviewed This American Life’s Ira Glass, ‘professional writer and critic’ Lee Siegel and Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant. It spawned a round of very interesting blog posts and comments – Comments on comments on comments, as Jeff Jarvis put it. It soon spilled out onto Twitter from with an interesting discussion between Jay Rosen and Kevin Marks.

Kevin Marks comments on NPR's On the Media

Jeff says:

But I’ve argued that we’re looking at commenting the wrong way. We spend so much of our time playing wack-a-mole with the dirty little creatures who dig up the garden that we miss the fruits and flowers. It is far more productive to curate the good people and good comments — whether they occur under an article or, better yet, via links — than it is to obsessively try to clean up life, which can’t help but be messy.

The tsk-tskers treat the web as if it is a media property and they judge it by its worst: Look what that nasty web is doing to our civilization! But, of course, that’s as silly as judging publishing by the worst of what is published.

And I have to agree with Jeff that it’s a bit rich for Gawker to be arguing against comments on newspaper sites. On the Media linked to the post, and Gawker sounds like many in the newspaper industry who pine for a simpler time when newspapers enjoyed a near monopoly when it came to people’s time and attention. Channeling their inner newspaper nostalgist, Gawker says:

Newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments—like, say, report the stories that blogs so desperately need in their 24-7 quest for content! After all, blogs are often not equipped to regularly break the news, and we need content to chew on.

Of course, comments are OK on Gawker because they’re a blog, they argue. Might the mighty Gawker be a suffering a crisis in ComScore with all the competition?

Of the three points of view, I almost said Amen out loud as I travelled on the Tube when Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant said, that she was surprised that newspaper are still having this conversation.

It’s not the Wild West. I don’t believe in putting comments on every story. … I thought we had this (conversation) in 2002, and papers are getting in this conversation and acting surprised that there is this ugliness out there.

She then goes on and lays out a considered approach to comments and communities online. After the Virginia Tech shooting, they originally put up their standard message board. They took it down when it devolved into a loud discussion about gun rights and replaced it with a tribute site from Legacy.com (in the interest of disclosure, a good friend of mine works for Legacy), a site that powers the obituaries of several newspaper sites. The message boards are moderated by Legacy.com, and she said that the tribute site is still active.

Derek Powazek also wrote an excellent post criticising the On the Media segment. The main problem he saw with the piece was that Bob Garfield “lumps all commenters, and commenting systems, together. On the web, not all comments are created equal”. He says:

Yes, if you open your site to comments from people who do not have to register or create an account, you’ll get a lot of unfiltered craziness. That’s because you’re not doing your job as a host. Imagine a newspaper of infinite pages with no editors where anyone with a keyboard could contribute. Sounds fun to me, but not a recipe for consistent thoughtfulness. …

The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem.

I’m with Derek. The media never focus on positive communities online, but it’s not just the media’s coverage of online communities that needs to improve. Most online communities hosted by media companies could use some improvement, but as Derek points out, there are tools and a lot of experience out there. Unfortunately, most of it is either outside of media organisations or was lost when digital departments at news organisations were gutted after the dot.com crash.

Some of the solution to improving online communities and conversations on websites is using the best technology, but there are also content and culture issues to be aware of. Kevin Marks shares wisdom and lessons learned about online spaces. For people who are part of internet culture, some of this is well known, but it’s not common knowledge in media companies. (I’m fortunate to work with one of the best in the business, Meg Pickard, our head of communities at the Guardian.) Kevin highlights some great work done in terms of online communities and some common traits of those communities that don’t work:

The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.

News websites were never a ‘build it and they will come’ proposition, especially in today’s distributed world, and in the rush to build communities so that they will come, news oganisations are building the spaces but sometimes not preparing for when people come. Get enough people together online or offline, and not all of the experience will be positive or pleasant. The response shouldn’t be to shut down the community and bar the door.

News organisations need to look outside of their immediate area of experience and find communities that have worked and learn from them. This isn’t an area of blue-sky experimentation. There is a lot of experience and expertise out there. With a lot of this, news orgs will just have to look beyond other news orgs. There’s a big world out there on the internet, but it’s not always scary.

UPDATE: As Jay Rosen says via Twiter: “Jeff Jarvis tells Bob Garfield to join the conversation, and points out how many people online did the homework he didn’t.” Jeff highlights not only posts but excellent contributions from Doc Searls and Tish Grier in his comments. There is a lot of history to be learned from, and news organisations don’t need to re-invent the wheel or feel that they are starting from scratch.

In defence of news orgs, I not only believe but have said publicly, that when the media adds community features, they need to be ready to manage that community from day one because they already are dealing with large amounts of traffic. They often run into teething problems that most communities don’t reach until much later.

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07.24.08
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Local can work, complete with facts and figures

In the recent round of virtual mud-slinging in the ‘curmudgeons’ versus digital journalists, one of the arguments by way of assertion is that hyper-local doesn’t work. It is, of course, a reductionist argument, lumping together a wide range of strategies. A lot of the assertions are short on facts, but Vickey Williams at the Readership Institute highlights two dailies that are succeeding in creating local community. From the Bakersfield Californian:

My thought is that it’s because this paper lives up to its role as an essential connector and network builder. Some stats from Molen this week: 1,192 individual Bakersfield.com blogs launched since the newspaper’s site began hosting weblogs two years ago this month; 314 updated within the last three months. Add in the newspaper company’s nine other sites (including MasBakersfield, NorthwestVoice, NewToBakersfield; and their newest, RaisingBakersfield.com) and the number goes to 2,780 blogs launched, of which 655 have been updated in the last three months.

That community content represents about 18 percent of Bakersfield.com’s traffic and 25 percent of total traffic throughout the local network of sites, Molen said. “It is easily the fastest growing source of traffic for us.”

Another interesting metric is the number of people who have created public profiles in the company’s online social network, and in doing so, essentially endorse its brands. For Bakersfield.com, the number is 16,792; across all 10, it’s 31,868.

I would be curious to see their frequency numbers. What is the average frequency of their visitors? Is it better than the average visit of two pageviews per visitor per month?

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07.17.08
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Journalism That Matters: A Passion for Place video

Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project dropped me a note about this.

What motivates people to launch a local online news community — a “placeblog” and what are their challenges, their successes, the opportunities, vision and passion which accompany this work?

With all of the talk about community, it’s worthwhile to hear from practitioners. It’s on the Internet Archive if you’d like to download it. The video is licenced under Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States by the “The Media Giraffe Project’s
Journalism That Matters initiative”. More of the work from the Giraffe Project can be found at Journalism that Matters.

07.05.08
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Going Solo Leeds announced

I shall be reprising my talk on how to draw a healthy line between work and play at Steph Booth‘s Going Solo conference in Leeds on 12 September. Registration is now open, but don’t delay – the first 25 tickets will be going at the early bird rate of £150, and some have already gone. Once they run out, the normal price is £220.

If you’re a freelance, or are thinking of starting out on your own, then Going Solo will be invaluable – it has a great atmosphere and some stonking speakers! So go straight to registration, do not pass go, and pick up an early bird ticket whilst they are still around.

05.19.08
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Going Solo: Round-up

Friday was a brilliant day – as one of Steph’s advisors, I’ve seen just how much hard work she put into organising Going Solo, and I have to say that it was all well worth it! I had a fun day, met some really cool and interesting people and, even though I’ve been a freelance for ten years, I still learnt a lot of useful stuff. I think Martin Roell was a highlight for me, and I very much enjoyed the panel I moderated on how to set rates and negotiate with clients – always a tricky subject.

The presentations up on Daily Motion, photos up on Flickr, plus notes by Urs and Jaap. And if you like the look of all that, and are feeling a bit disappointed that you didn’t make it to Lausanne, then you’ll be happy to hear that Going Solo is going on tour! The next Going Solo is going to be in Leeds, early in September this year – the exact date and venue are yet to be announced so subscribe to the Going Solo News mailing list and you’ll be the first to know.

04.17.08
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Twitter interviews on ReadWriteWeb

I already added the post Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media on ReadWriteWeb to del.icio.us because it talks about participation inequalities and relative time spent by people on various social media sites and services. The post has kicked off an interesting discussion in the comments as well as at the office. But as a journalist, one thing caught my eye. Sarah Perez ‘interviewed’ people on Twitter about how they spend their time using social media. Now, obviously, this isn’t a broader sample of people who simply don’t participate, but it does give a snapshot of social media usage and a range of participation.

I’ve used it personally if I have a tech question I’m stymied by or want to get a range of views on a movie or a restaurant. Suw jokingly refers to it as a query for the ‘lazyweb’.

However, there is definitely something useful here journalistically. Sarah’s use of Twitter also shows how using the service not only as a way to promote your content but also to create community could be used to add to your journalism. No, it’s not a random sample. But since when are ‘man on the street’ interviews?

Twitterquest

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04.15.08
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Real-time innovation in news organisations

Ryan Sholin has started a great conversation about how to create cultural change at newspapers.

The important part of the job isn’t speaking to the first 20 people on the conference call for an hour, it’s maintaining contact with the one person on the call who has the potential to Get It: Moving from the Paper business to the News business isn’t as simple as picking up a different skillset; it’s about changing the mindset of journalists.

It reminded me of a question I’m often asked about cultural change: How do you turn journalists into bloggers? The simple answer is that I don’t. I find journalists who happen to be bloggers or who show an interest in blogging, give them all the technical and editorial support that I can, and then I try to share that knowledge and success around the organisation.

How do I spot a good blogger? I ask whether the journalist is already aware of other bloggers writing in their beat. I try to determine whether they are willing to engage with other bloggers and people who comment on their posts. In short, are they ready to join the conversation?

Sharing the success stories helps spread the culture. As David Anderson of Fairfax Digital in Australia told me recently, you need success stories to tell your managers, and I would say that you also need success stories to win over journalists, who are professional sceptics. You have to spread culture up and down the organisation.

I’ve been fortunate. At the BBC, I had support at all levels for digital experimentation and, when I came to London, it was great to see evangelism from people like Richard Sambrook, the head of the Global News Division. At the Guardian, we’ve got digital evangelists all the way up to The Editor’s office. However, both the BBC and the Guardian still grapple with cultural change. And I couldn’t agree with Ryan more when he says you can’t mandate change from the top down.

Anyone who has worked with me will attest that sometimes I get frustrated at the pace of change in the industry. I really thought digital journalism would be further along by now than we are. The dot.com crash wiped out a lot of talent in the industry and set us back years. And I’ve crossed swords with a fair number of nay sayers. I’m not sure there is much we can do for the close-minded, and the need for change is urgent enough that arguing with the Andrew Keens in the industry just isn’t worth your or my time.

Industry scale change will only come with time. The industry is struggling because the depth of digital culture is still too thin and still so new. Don’t sweat that. Don’t even try changing your organisation wholesale. We might have the experience, but as Steve Yelvington says, we still don’t have the political capital. Many of you will run into middle management who ‘own’ the bureaucracy and have an investment in the status quo. They’ve spent several years supporting the Andrew Keens because it protected their position and power. Now, they have a new strategy: They are fighting over who owns change rather than focusing on actually creating change. While they’re fighting, us digital journalists need to get on with it:

  • Start small with an event or story-based project.
  • Bring the cost of the project down as close to zero as possible from a technical standpoint. Use open-source or free net-based services.
  • Try one new multimedia story-telling feature or engagement feature with each project.
  • Debrief. Learn. Repeat.

This is based in part on my interpretation of the Newspaper Next project. As Steve Yelvington says:

We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.

This is real-time innovation. Try journalistic projects with existing tools and learn journalistically and technically from that. That takes zero development and relatively little time. It’s about editorial creativity, not about development cycles or budgets. If you find something that works, then you know where to focus product development. What can you do with Twitter, blogging software, YouTube, Seesmic or FriendFeed to create a journalistic project and help build your audience?

04.10.08
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Confessing a dirty little secret

In January’s Fast Company was an article by Clive Thompson, Is The Tipping Point Toast? I read it with interest and made a mental note to at least add it to our Del.icio.us feed. But over the last two months it has just been gnawing away at the back of my head and I find myself compelled to think about it in a bit more detail.

In the article, Clive discusses the work of Yahoo!’s principal research scientist, Duncan Watts, who is challenging the idea that a small number of highly influential people are the ones who start new trends. The concept is central to books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and is repeated over and over again in all sorts of contexts. In fact, it is so embedded in the way that we view how ideas are transferred and propagated between people that it feels almost like heresy to question it.

But Duncan Watts has questioned it, and his research seems to show that new trends can start anywhere, and that not only do you not have to be influential to start a trend, being influential doesn’t guarantee that you are also a trendsetter.

In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

This is a conclusion that’s going to get up the nose of many a marketeer, but how does it affect social media consultants?

My work is focused mainly on how to persuade people in business to change their behaviour: how to replace bad working habits with good ones, and how to change unhealthy business cultures into positive, constructive ones. How do I help people wean themselves off their dependence on email, and learn how to collaborate and communicate in healthier, more effective ways?

The opportunities that social tools present to business are frequently missed because no one thought hard enough about how to introduce them to people. Most businesses fail to to understand why these tools are useful and why the old tools are so seductive. My job is to counter that, and is much more about psychology than technology (although the tech clearly does play a part).

Piloting social tools in business is relatively easy. You’re working with a small group who have probably been picked because someone within that group is already enthusiastic. I can sit down and work face-to-face with these people, finding out how they work and then explaining how the new tools will help them. We can figure out specific tasks to shift onto the new tools, I can advise on how that shift should happen and I can support them through the change.

But rolling social media out to the rest of a large company takes a different way of working. I can probably work directly with tens, or maybe even over a hundred people – if the project has the time and budget – but no one person can sit down with thousands or tens of thousands of people in one company to make sure that they understand how the new tools could improve their working life. It would be a Sisyphean task.

Instead, we have to treat tool adoption as a meme, and rely on people propagating it through the company, person to person. In this sense, we are doing what marketeers are doing: Trying to create a self-sustaining trend. We want the social tool to go viral.

As anyone with real world experience of viral marketing will tell you, that’s far easier said than done. The concept of an influential elite, a minority who have the majority of the power to influence, is a deeply attractive prospect. If it were true, it would mean that I could sit down with the 50 most influential people in any one company and bring them up to speed, and they would go on to do my work for me. I could change the culture of a business from closed to open, from distrustful to trusting, from competitive to collaborative, in merely a few weeks.

That is a seductive idea. And I must confess to you all now, I have been seduced by it. I have talked with clients about the concept of networks and nodes and bridges, and I have propagated the tipping point meme. I’ve never read Gladwell’s book. I haven’t had to – I’ve absorbed the concepts over time without really questioning them, without examining them in the cold light of day.

But deep down, I never really believed the idea of an elite group of influencers, and that disbelief has grown over the last couple of years as I’ve had more and more hands-on experience in business, introducing new tools to a suspicious workforce. I have asked businesses if they know who their influencers are, and they all claimed that they did, but I didn’t really see any evidence either that I was actually talking to influencers, or that the people they thought were influencers made any real difference to the widespread adoption of a tool.

That is my dirty little secret. I propagated a meme that I hadn’t critically examined and didn’t believe in. For that, I apologise.

Yet, for me at least, the idea that ‘influencers’ aren’t as influential as we’ve been lead to believe is good news. And for my clients too. I’ve always been worried that trying to tap into a network of influential staff was a pointless waste of time, because it’s very hard to know who actually has influence and who’s just got a big mouth. Identifying the influencers is a task inextricably bound up in status and position in the org chart, yet these three things do not correlate simply. A bad manager who’s high up in the food chain may believe himself to have status, but is actually widely ignored by his subordinates because they can recognise a bad manager when they see one.

If you’ve read my social software adoption strategy, you’ll see there’s nothing in it about ‘reaching the influencers’. I’m way too pragmatic, and the problem of influencer identification has always put me off recommending it as a tactic. Instead, I focus on how you identify ‘low hanging fruit’ – people who are already chomping at the bit to work differently, or people who are doing tasks that are just perfect for a transition onto a social platform. Those are doable tasks. They don’t require any special magic, they just require the ability to ask the right questions and listen to the answers.

I also talk about converting users into trainers by giving them the materials and confidence to introduce their own colleagues to new tools. Centralised training can only fail when you’re trying to introduce optional software to a huge workforce. The only way to reach large numbers of people is for a ripple effect to take over: users become trainers and train their colleagues who become users and then trainers who spread the virus throughout the company.

This doesn’t require influence, it requires utility. If the tool is useful, it can succeed, given the right support. It’s not, “Oh, look at this! It’s so cool!”; it’s, “Oh, look at this! It’s going to make my life so much easier!”

I’m far happier with the idea that anyone can start a trend, and that the concept of influencers is at least less important than previously stated, or possibly even a complete red herring. It leaves the door open for much more sensible, reliable and workable strategies. Admittedly, they may take more time and effort, but at least the outcome will be more predictable. Focusing on what people need, instead of their status, can only be a good thing.

04.08.08
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Are we the signal or the noise?

I recorded this video for a project that the Guardian is doing with Current TV. I recorded it after reading a post by a friend and one of my heroes

, Steve Yelvington, in the wake of the recent conflagration over Barack Obama and his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Steve asked whether we were listening. We could be interpreted as journalists, politicians, pundits as well as the public.

Today I see journalism falling into two traps. One is the passive abandonment of responsibility that sometimes comes along with the “objective” mode, and the other is the crass exploitation of divisive opportunities that you see from infotainers like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.

And that brings us back to my point. Is anyone listening? And is the press helping us all listen? Are we working to further understanding?

Or are journalists just parroting words and perpetuating the racial divide that has scarred this country throughout its history?

It’s one of the things that many journalists don’t do enough of when they blog: Listen. That’s one of the important skills for a blogging journalist. Blogging is not just publishing my thoughts. I can do that in any old media. Blogging is about the conversation.

Why I’ve chosen to do the kind of journalism I do is that I see great potential in being able to foster civic discussion and participation using the internet. It hearkens to the ideals of journalism that I learned as a j-school student. I really don’t understand why more journalists don’t see it.

As I said in the video and the discussion that followed on Current, I want to find ways to expand who is taking part in these discussions and actually explore important issues. As a journalist, I can add some reporting to provide a for some of the issues, which isn’t to say that the participants can’t add their own reporting. There is such scope to explore the issues of the day and be in a constant, rolling, evolving conversation. It’s exciting territory to explore.

But too often, either through neglect or active provocation, the media are turning these online spaces into brawls. It’s not surprising. It mirrors talk radio, cable news shouting matches and some bizarre version of Jerry Springer for intellectuals. The media is just turning the internet into what it knows. Bring on the noise.

But isn’t good journalism supposed to amplify the signal, find it in the noise? Aren’t journalists supposed to help find the important data points, turning points to help people and themselves make sense of the world? It’s an abdication of our professional responsibility if we stop trying to find the signal and become the noise.

That’s not going to save our profession. It’s not going to help use cut through the clutter in this very busy media landscape. But it’s easier to try to shout above the crowd than to find the wisdom in it. It’s easier to be provocative than to be thought provoking. I don’t have much time for it, and increasingly, neither do our former audiences.

03.31.08
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F2C: Susan Crawford

Susan Crawford: I have an image of a ticking clock because all good talks have a sense of urgency. And life is short, so we should tackle big questions today.

What makes a life significant?
– and inner ideal, intellectual, conscious, novel
– joined with active will

These ideals have to be joined to will and action.

Back to the ticking clock. My father’s life is drawing to a close, not this month, but soon. So the ideal for him is to listen to music, as he is a composer. For him, the ideal is pure human expression in music. It’s the most powerful thing to him – as his mind gives up and his body decays, the music stays.

Going to tie together music as an ideal, the great subjects of this conference. I do believe in an open internet and want to make this talk as human as possible.

We will spend a lot of time talking about network operators, because in the US these companies suffer inadequate competition for high-speed access. We’re paying a lot for low speeds, but they are not monopolies. This is an oligopoly, with a few sellers providing for the industry. They act for the industry as a whole, so there will never be ruinous competition, but prices will never serve the users, it’s not a competition model, it’s something in between.

There is incomplete substitutability, as products offered aren’t the same. These differences amplified by huge amounts of ads. Market power different only in degree from a monopolist, but similar in kind.

Can’t go to antitrust, as their actions will always adhere to the letter of the law, and it would undermine the economy, and litigation would be ruinous.

What’s the model? Stuck on the idea of competition, the idea that enough actors competing will give just he right results. Does restraint come from other companies? Doesn’t seem so.

In an oligopolistic world, the restraint comes from retailers or consumers/users of the good, and that countervailing power is what answers the power of the oligopoly.

But the users aren’t there. we need to find a way to organise the users in a way that would make restrains real. Doesn’t have to be present in regulation, doesn’t have to be law, if there were adequate countervailing power from users.

We can be as smart as we want to be, but without votes, without the ability to affect how a congressman feels about an issue, we’re nowhere. The problem with net neutrality is that it’s not actively connected to people who vote. Source of the countervailing power has to be user stories, human communication, made possible through the internet, that makes those lives more significant. The stories that give your life purpose need to be told.

I’m not the one to tell them, the way to do this is to simply the message, make it as simple as possible, as musical as possible, so that is’ about the openness of the internet. Each one of them has these ideals that can be empowered, and we have to tell that story that aggregates the response to oligopoly.

Galbraith who thought about countervailing power used to go singing on NYE, and used to lead Auld Lang Syne, and need to do more of that. If I die tomorrow, I want to have talked to you about the effort to bring those stories forward via One Web Day. Out of character for me.

Purpose is to globalise a constituency of the internet. Whatever local issue are, to focus on those, could be connectivity, censorship, etc. 22 Sept. Third one this year. Opportunity to tell stories and teach about how it makes our lives better. Offline and online events. Lots of blog posts, twitters, videos. To make visible the constituency that will provide the countervailing force to the oligopoly.

But the leader isn’t me, it has to be you. Be a part of the celebration this year.

Each talk can have only one message. Mine is that whatever you do, do something to bring people together. Our work and our lives are so closely intertwined, and there’s a great source of countervailing power in all internet users that hasn’t been called on to tell its stories, and I’m here to ask you to do that.

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