So I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference today, sat in Kensington Town Hall with 800 real proper geeks, hearing about how to develop, er, well, web apps. I’m sure at some point during the day someone will give a deeply techie presentation which will go right over my head, so notes may be patchy. Note are also going to be up on the wiki, but I’ll live blog too.

Bear Storm Media and London South Bank University

(Bear Storm Media is a spin-off company from the London South Bank University.)

Intro

So a friend of mine told me about this mini-conference, and when I looked at the wiki I saw a bunch of names I didn’t recognise, which seemed like a good reason to go along and see what was going on. These are my notes, raw and unedited. Make of them what you will. A small origami giraffe, for example.

Greg Tallent

The way we access content is different. More digital content now, so because there’s more the customer is paying less attention to the content, advertising, anything we’re giving them.

Vin Crosbie, NY journo, said he pays more for his digital media than print, because the online versions are worth more and are more useful – archives, email-able etc. Print is not very easy to repurpose.

News and most other media content will be delivered either exclusively on the internet or as well as on the internet. Digital channels will proliferate, communities will develop, and the content (free or paid) will drive them.

Moving from an information world to an attention world: too much info; too little time; not enough attention.

NBC Universal CEO Bob Wright, says that network news will always have a place because people can’t be bothered to wade through online content.

At the moment

– too much digital content

– little customer attention

But is this changing?

Digital media will get and keep the customer’s attention. How? By making it relevant to the person. This is a big issue. People won’t buy content unless it is relevant.

– make it personal

– make it worthwhile

– make it valuable

In other words – talk to people

– look at the customer

– learn from customers in real time

– communities work best with market dynamic

– treat customers as people

– quality of individual experience is what matters

– delight the user

– interact and engage – has to be relevant and at the right time

– build trust

– chart interactions with the product.

Any media biz in 2006, who want to integrate quality content into a digital channel will ahve to consider

– communities, vast thin networks of members

doughnut communities that are temp and come together round a site

– combine human/algorithm filtering to make it simple to follow who’s saying what

– tags

– metadata (ensures that content can be used again and again)

All this becomes relevant to the reader.

Who’s building relevancy now?

– Microsoft

– Google

– Yahoo

– AOL

… and a bunch of others

How big is this?

Well, Google’s selling $6.1 billion ads, double what is sold last year. Have grand ambitions. Microsoft fighting back. Looking to build a seamless experience, capture some of the advertising revenue etc. But Microsoft look dated – the slide from the Microsoft Live Platform presentation that Bill Gates gave looks really dated. Compare to Steve Jobs presenting the iPod Video. Microsoft lost the plot a bit in the past two or three years.

[The shows Epic 2014, the Googlezon animation.]

There’s some truth to Epic, it’s not all sensationalism. People are working on changing the way we produce and consume media. It will be sooner rather than later that we use these new ways.

Leave you now with a brief mention of something planned for next year – this is just a mini-conference, and we’re planning a bigger one – News Media UK Convention, in March 2006. See Bearstorm for news of that.

Mike Butcher, Paidcontent.org – The Holy Trinity, or The Future Of News Media

Haven’t watched Epic for a while, and a copule of things occured to me. The idea that millions of people edit stuff and it turns into trash TV, and one thing that popped into my head was Paris Hilton – her mobile phone address book was leaked onto the internet earlier in the year, and of course it was blogged everywhere, because it’s just so fascinating. And that’s just trash. But everyone’s interested in it. And that’s what Epic is about – that a lot of rubbish gets put out there.

But the Googlezon idea of the video does kind of work. But it said NY Times became just a print magazine circulated to the elite and the elderly, but if the elite and the elderly can’t be reached by new media, how do we take part in their conversation?

Blackberry is used across Yahoo so people can get their email at any time. But the really powerful people at Yahoo don’t have Blackberries, so are unreachable. And the elite are more unreachable by new media than we think.

Trinity No. 1

– You and me

– blogs, podcasting, user generated content

Rupert Murdoch, not Trinity No. 1, but he said that newspapers were threatened by the net, that people wanted control over the media not to be controlled by it, and that the newspaper industry has been complacent.

Citizen media is really a tools revolution. There is a lot of stuff out there that makes life easier. Stats go out of date really time, so these are too, from 2004

8 Million American adults say they have created blogs

58% read blogs

12% of users post comments on blogs

[Yes, these stats are out of date!]

Most internet users do not know what a blog is.

RAJAR – no figures yet for podcasting but Pew says

6 million have downloaded at least one podcast

29% of 2021 users interviewed used podcasting

11 – 15% of US population owns an MP3 player

In the UK:

BBC In our time – 40k downloads a week

BBC Beethoven – started as 600k a week, ended up a million downloads

Virgin breakfast show podcast just links between songs, run at 80k downloads a week (3 months ago)

Perhaps this is why Murdoch is worried, and maybe that’s why he bought MySpace.com for $800m.

Thing is:

– early days

– emerging trend

Only a 20% of 18-34 year ols rank newspapers as their primary source of news

44% check out Google and Yahoo for updated information

Definite move away from old media.

Tools:

100% mobile phone penetration in W Europe by 2007

At least one mobile handset for every person – means ability to create content, photos, text etc.

Widespread internet access, broadband penetration etc, allows for proliferation of content

Where’s the money?

Advertising agencies interested in blogs because they are created by you; also want to track conversations in blogs; want to buy advertising on blogs.

Dyson was the first to use blogs in a major ad campaign, on Shiny Media.

‘Truth tools’ are out there – MSN opens blogs and IM to advertisers; Yahoo bought Flickr; Microsoft trials RSS Collector; London bombs: moblogging.co.uk ran one of the first pictures, which was syndicated to Sky news.

Because of this tools revolution, the big guys want to get involved. Yahoo! in particular are so interested in this because they want you to create content so they can sell ads for it.

Means of distribution are in the hands of the workers – RSS, Technorati, Feedster, Google/Google News.

Publishing passion – Andrew Sullivan’s Tip Jar; Treonauts; Weblogs Inc (sold to AOL, $25m); Gawker-branded blogs; Shiny Media; Google AdSense.

But: bloggers are not necessarily the ‘new journalists’. Marqui recently launched an adverblogging campaign, paying 20 bloggers $800 a month to mention their product and link to their site.

Why are the media interested?

– TV’s dominant share on verge of long-term decline; ad-skipping

– ZenithOptimedia predicts market share will decline from 2007.

Trinity 2

Advertising

Big media hiring bloggers; launching blogs.

Can’t just go out and launch a blog because they’re creating their own.

Final trinity

Search. 80% of lineusers start at a search engine. Very influential, are the leveller between gib and small media.

Search, big media and user generated content forms a holy trinity of online media that feed into each other adn rely on each other.

Conclusion

News media has to be more transparent.

Big media will co-opt citizen media

Big media’s not dead, it’s just resting

Difference between fast and slow media, raw and cooked, un-edited and edited

But blogs could be as big as Time.

Al Tepper, head of Online Dev’t, Caspian Publishing – Professional blogging

Word blog is misleading – blogging is software, it’s actually a website. The word blog is probably the biggest reason that blogging is not mainstream. People visit blogs and don’t know it.

Why is it Google vs. ROW, is because seeing a devolution of information, tools, opps, and anyone can broadcast anything on the web for virtually nothing in under 10 mins. Ish. Because there are bad bloggers. 99% of blogs are dross, and the whole Epic movie gets that point across. But we already do. But blogging gives everyone the opportunity to be heard.

Caspian is a B2B publisher. In a world of info overload, editors are really important. Great quote by Frank Zappa: A computer can tell you a story, but it can’t tell you the whole story. It just doesn’t have the eyebrows.

There is no AI that will be able to edit 500k words into a 200 word article. Impossible for a computer to do. Semantic web will be very slow to develop and not convinced it will be able to deliver relevant content.

Caspian launched a blog: www.thebusinesseditors.com. have 20+ editors, and they are all experts, and they all talk amongst themselves about what they’re doing.

Hypergene.net/blog have a recommended reading section and call it ‘usable exhaust’. Use Del.icio.us to put websites they come across into their blog, but it gets them lots of traffic.

Caspian’s ‘usable exhaust’ is their blog, where their editors blog the stuff they can’t put in magazines. Value is that it’s great content, good for search engines. Learnt that they need to provide good navigation between different sites. Didn’t learn quickly enough about editorial policy – getting offline editors to blog is difficult because they don’t know HTML, even using Typepad, and on OS9 the formatting doesn’t work so have to get people to mark-up. Learnt about comments process and libel issues, so has to be approved before publication.

Key stuff to understand is the value of it – good marketing tool. May monetize it down the line, but no great vision of that at all. Starts a conversation with the readers. Can be a part of the conversation or a subject of that conversation.

Andy Corcoran, Marketing Lecturer, Lincoln Business School – What’s the business model?

Current situation. Relevant content is there, but people don’t know how to get to it. Anyone can publish, and you could be the next Nick Denton, but the barriers to entry to that marketplace are very low. Highly competitive marketplace.

Media fragmentation. Mass media in decline, ‘other’ media on the rise. 249 channels on sky, not counting the +1 channels. Multiple media vehicles. Most content presented in really bad way. Sky TV guide is awful – laborious and difficult to do. Similar to new media – convenience, ease and accessibility are key factors.

Media is producing more places to get the same content.

Cash rich, time poor.

Individual households – people spend more time online to find community because they are living on their own.

Digi-phobic – 33% of the population don’t see the need or can’t afford to get online.

Increasing advertising spend on the internet

Trends

Stable TV viewing – 209 minutes per day in UK, 275 per day in the US; more media, more media consumption, so not dying just fragmenting

Stable newspaper market, (paid for media, not free), decline has arrested because newspapers easier to read now (smaller!)

Online everywhere, wireless. Will see people online in Starbucks, but also will be reading the Times. Easier.

Someone makes life easier by choosing stuff for us.

Growing no. of bloggers. Even a blog about brass rubbings in Madagascar. Riches in niches. Shift in the marketing paradigm.

Life is complex, with networked relationships

Danger of analysis paralysis – too much information so people can’t make decisions. People buy on emotion and the ability to communicate that emotion is crucial

Orgs need to deliver one of the following to succeed

– operational excellence

– product leadership

– customer intimacy

Moving away from 4Ps towards relationship marketing

Mass customisation not mass production (not bespoke, that’s too expensive)

30 sec commercial not dead

Product placement more attractive

Magazines more convenient, people are reading more magazines

Era of ‘must’ – must see, must hear, must watch, must read

Move to pictures – which is why we still watch TV. Visuals, logos, etc. More whitespace = perception of value and quality.

Google will be competing with Murdoch, Sky, etc.

Business Models

1. Drudge report style: get big and sell; but you won’t be the only one trying to do that. Producing a lot of stuff is hard work.

2. Riches in niches

3. Connecting and communities

– Drudge report

Lots of money in press classified advertising – 19.5% of the advertising spend in the UK.

Difficult for blogs to break in, but it’s going to have to be good, and you’re going to have to get people to visit.

Is it possible to become a big publisher? Yes, but difficult.

Hugely competitive market. Newspapers giving away DVDs, and are not going to lie down and die.

– Riches in niches: Treonaut. Sugar icing blogs. Got too be unique. Got to provide something useful. Lifesytle and psychographic profiling is done. RSS enables.

– connecting and communities. Net provides this as biggest opportunities for companies and business, not about space or advertising but finding out what people think about your products. relationship marketing. Dialogues with customers. Focus groups. Research. Brand communities. Tools like Flickr allow people to connect despite geography, and if companies can capitalise on that they can benefit. But must be congruent with your product.

Most likely business models are 2 and 3.

(Oops… should have posted this last week but, um, have been a bit busy.)

Finally made it up to Cambridge to Our Social World, having forced Tom Coates and Ross Mayfield to catch a slightly later train so that I could spent an extra hour on the floor of Tom’s lounge, tossing and turning and having nightmares about trying to give a talk to six people, with a tea lady trying to lay out scones and cakes on the podium whilst elbowing me in the face.

Notes will be sporadic. I’m sure others will take better. (I’m actually trying to kill my reputation for being a great note taker, so expect rubbish.)

Ben Hammersley – 300 Year History of Blogging
The BlogFather – Sir Richard Steele, 1672 – 1729. Starting blogging in 1708. Political and social situations then was similar to now – arguments about Europe, worries about the growth of Islam, social revolution is in the air.

Using new technologies of printing presses and street urchines, he started the Tatler, April 12 1709. Posted three times a week, 800 readers, comments, lots of coffee.

Social revolution of courtly society to enlightenment society, more publishing and science based. Enlightenment based on a few core concepts – science and technology; manner. The idea of manners was invented by blogging. Steele’s sort of blogging. Fashion was to wear very similar clothes, and meeting together for the first time without class boundaries in coffee shops, so no social boundaries.

Re-define social norms of behaviour via the Tatler – Steele was writing about how to behave, how to write interact and deal with each other.

The Spectator was the first group blog, daily, 6 days a week. More influential than any other publication at the time. Advice on how to behave in town.

Amateurs, drinking lots of coffee, and writing short pieces and you have social revolution.

Technology isn’t important, it’s the social side of things. Agit-prop. Blogging is pamphleteering extreme – we’re now able to convey our ideas across to everyone on the planet.

Differences between blogging and Steele?

– Much bigger sphere of influence now – about 2.5 billion people have access to the internet. With paper, you can only read it if you have the piece of paper.

– Interconnectedness. Paper can’t lead you to other sources, but can only tell you other sources exist. On the web, links take you straight to the other sources.

– Findability. Paper’s hard to search. Scholarship was less to do with your ability to research and more to do with having access to the library – you had to be a member of a university because it was the only place with the books. Now the internet, everybody has access to everything, but also everybody can search through everything. And the most important thing is timeliness.

Writing a book, it takes a year from when he finished writing to when it’s published, so it’s basically out of date by the time that it’s published. A blog post is published immediately and becomes available to everyone.

Fundamental changes in information flow. Fundamental change in the way that mankind communicates. Just by publishing thoughts and allowing people to comment and link to them, you can have communities grow up, connections, interactivity, commerce, development of ideas. The limitations are falling way, we now have technology that makes it free, and in both beer and speech, to express your ideas to as many people who want to listen.

We have new concepts of reputation, of groups, of friendships, of how we can work together.

This might seem a bit overblown, except that it’s true. What we’re looking at today is a social revolution akin to nothing we’ve ever seen before. The freedom of the press is free to those who have the money to buy a press, and now everyone has a press.

EM Forster said ‘Only connect’. Connecting is more powerful that you can possibly imagine. You may now see it only as a marketing too, but hopefully by the end of the day you’ll see that this is not going to not only change your life but the lives of your children.

Simon Phipps, Sun
Set up blogs.sun.com. Blogging is not about technology, but about social interaction.

I believe that we are right on the edge of a shift from consumerism to participative life, because connectivity has got into the soul of society.

In 1994, travel was very disconnected, but ten years later, no longer need travellers cheques cos have a credit card; don’t need airline tickets; don’t need a line of credit for hotels; use email, don’t need to be psychic to send news by post in advance. Society has got connected – connectivity is assumed and unnoticed, and we’re now seeing second and third order effects.

It’s no longer cool to be online, it’s expected to be online. Lots of things are happening now because we’re all connected.

Sun blogs set up, happened by word of mouth. Jonathan Schwartz writes once a week or so, his biggest problem is being concise.

Leaving stuff to PR professionals is a nightmare. But on Open Solaris (?), much better relationship because it’s non-PR.

Not so much about no. of readers, but quality. Famous for 15 people.

In starting blogs.sun.com – had to reverse a company policy which had stated that if you spoke in public about your work you could get fired. Had to change it. Need a blogging policy. Make sure people are allowed to tell the truth.

Tom Coates
Started first blog 6 years ago, when there were about 200. Things have changed a bit since then, but Britain is still way behind the curve on this one. The States are huge, the French are doing well. Here there is still a reservation around it.

Policy being drafted at the BBC that says blogs are a public conversation and that people should have that conversation so long as they don’t say anything too stupid.

Social internet was the first stage of the internet – IRC, emails, usenet, mailing-lists, messageboards, MUDs/MOOs/games. It’s not a change, now, to a participatory internet – it’s always been there.

The web then came along and transformed the net into something more publishy. So Usenet was eradicated by AOL user. Got away from social behaviours.

What started to shift it back was weblogging and Amazon. Enormously distributed platform for social debate.

Friendster. You can engage with people you know online, and get to know others. Spread like a plague across the world and really re-ignited the social aspects of the web. Where we’re at:

– social networks with a point
– collaborative annotation of stuff
– collaborative creation of stuff
– new ways of sharing experiences
– new ways of harnessing individual creativity
– new ways of harnessing play

Then goes through Flickr, Upcoming, Wikipedia, Last.fm/Audioscrobbler, Technorati, microformats.

Demos BBC Radio 6 Music’s PhoneTags – bookmarks songs, tag them, rate them, find songs with specific tags e.g. songs about summer, find the best rated songs. Is about music bookmarking. BBC then gets related metadata about songs, so good for them too.

Also working on allowing the Radio4 audio to be annotatable – can add tags, metadata, or maybe treat it as a wiki. BBC has need for metadata, and people like to add metadata and also derive value from metadata, and they are hoping to work with people in an honourable way to do something more than can be done individually.

Johnnie Moore
Hard to do notes for this – Johnnie never really gives talks. Started off asking for a volunteers, it took a while for someone to stand up. Johnnie then drew a face with them, each drawing one part of it, and named it writing a letter each. Then got people to draw a face in pairs too.

Everyone drew a human face. Most of the names were English. People felt a bit uncomfortable doing something that had an unknown consequences and outcomes – terror of the unknown [or looking like a prat?]

Johnnie gets this reaction when talking about technology to people in business. People feel fear, and that’s a natural reaction so maybe a good idea not to be too judgemental.

Discusses a blog that he set up with some other bloggers about Sainsbury’s. Just set it up out of a sense of play, and it’s developed organically. Now Sainsbury’s are interacting on the blog, and it’s taken on it’s own life.

This is down to the fundamental human need to communicate.

Lee Bryant, Headshift
Tags are about negotiating social meaning. In order to communicate you need:
– shared situation
– shared perception
– shared cognition
– shared language

Semiotic dynamics. Ok… lost me now…

How do terms develop? Why do they develop?

Hegemonic discourse. (Small pig with spikes?)

Enterprise social software. (Sorry, I sorta faded out during this.)

Loic le Meur
Six Apart – 8 million users worldwide. 100 employees worldwide.

Long tail – brief explanation. Media blogs – Le Monde, Business Week etc.

Perseus stats: 30 million blogs in may 2005, 50 million expected by the end of 2005.

Technorati stats: Blog created every second. Blogosphere doubles in size every 5 months. Blogs vs. MSM slide.

Media are starting to get it. In France, Skyblog have 3 million blogs. vnunet. 01net.

Double F Radio Blogs, radio station, blogs. Podcasts, drag and drop to iTunes.

MonPeteaux.com – popular blogger, videoblogs. Vocal critic of Paris (?). Can sub to video in iTunes now too.

Le Monde – give a blog to every journalist, and provide blogs to their readers. They do top 10 blogs of journals and bloggers so can compared.

Lafraise.com – sell t-shirts online but have never advertised. Customers design the products, vote on them, then he makes the ones that are popular.

Loreal. Someone decides to launch a brand blog, and did it all wrong. Invented a fake character, put a picture of this fake person on the blog, the text was written by a pro and weren’t authentic, comments were filtered so no negative comments went up, took an hour from going up before someone flamed it and it went round the blogosphere like mad. 48 hours later, cover page of Le Monde. Big crisis.

Dealt with it by apologising. Sort of new. Posted their pictures. Asked bloggers to tell them what to do and got a lot of help. Bloggers said they want customers talking, real comments, and so that’s what they did.

Has wikipage about Euroblogosphere. Source: best guess of bloggers.

Dec 5th/6th, Les Blog 2.0, Paris.

Euan Semple, The Beeb
Missed the beginning of this. BBC blogs – Richard Sambrook’s blog, using blogs with aggregators so as soon as Richard says something it appears in people’s aggregators.

But still a ‘who do you think you are, and why are you saying what you’re saying’ attitude. So people use them as link blogs, to point as other things.

Wikis encourage people to be as open as possible, to collaborate. Wiki’s grown faster than other tools – 1000+ users. Not just a regular text editor – have to learn wiki markup, but people have taken to it because they were fed up of sharing Word docs.

E.g. staff were frustrated at not being able to take part in a BBC photography competition, so ended up using a wiki and Flickr to organise their own. 300 photos submitted. Very dispersed thing, happened very quickly.

Social software tools have been introduced over the last 3 years. Bulletin boards are noisy, quick, intuitive, viral. The blogs are more about personal space. Wikis are being used for more formal communications.

All tools have RSS, so want to get in a desktop RSS aggregator.

It’s beginning to democratise the organisation.

Believes it will become more prevalent in more organisations. Kids who are used to using social software personally will start to come into the workspace and expect this sort of tool. And if they don’t see it, they will work for someone else.

Euan didn’t want to ‘own’ it, different way of managing it, managing status.

Me
No idea what I said or whether it was any good. You’ll have to ask other people for that. The slides are online though. Pretty, aren’t they?

Julian Bond
A nice bit of English cynicism.

Gives rapid-fire demo of usual business comms – veeeeery much impossible to follow. Culture of powerpoint, email and chocolate biscuits. Used to use memos, but the culture hasn’t changed.

People in senior management are very nervous about going into print. Hard to persuade them that communication is a good idea.

Places where blogs are going to be most successful is whre they come in bottom-up communication, rather than where they are top-down broadcast.

The Geek Imperative – tell everybody everything you know in excruciating detail.

Doing biz with the FTSE1000. They can’t do stuff on their own, so they ask you do to it, but because the software is free they expect it to be veeeeeery cheap.

– sell to consultancy to FTSE
– sell solutions to the S of SMEs

Simon Gryce
Identity – in the last hundred years, identity was letters of introduction, passports, driving licences, library cards, usernames/passwords, form filling, silos in data, in-efficient CRM, business cards, privacy policies.

Next 1000 years – personal digital identity.

What changed? Why now?
– tipping point
– possible
– efficiencies

Data currently resides with individual orgs and businesses, and is silo’d.

What’s driving it?
– internet services
– always on culture
– mobile devices
– personal directories
– personal privacy

Our personal identity should be managed by us. Ability to be anonymous should be cvontroled by us.

Can find out where someone is (currently, with their permission). Need society where individuals are in control.

Legal requirements. Getting harder and harder for companies to retain personal data.

Personal Digital Identity Summit
17-18 Nov. www.pdid.org or email summit@pdid.org

Data Protection law in Europe, stronger than in the States, you have the right to ask for all the data about you. Went to Vodaphone and asked them what mobile data they have about them. The pile of paper you get is huge – including physical coordinates for hte last six months.

Max Neiderhofer
(Oops, missed the beginning, due to too much good conversation. Again.)

The majority of bloggers are 18 – 24 (ish), and they make up the majority of bloggers. Not the experts.

They are young, and there are more of them. Relatively technologically savvy. Internet is part of their lives.

Blogging is like games. but MPOORG not Noughts and Crosses. Games come to an end though, blogging doesn’t. Blogging is one of the best games, but it’s not a game it’s play. Lots of variations, never solved.

Point of blogging is positive human interaction. Getting confirmation for the things you’re doing, getting love from other people.

Rules in blogging – rules are important because if you don’t deal with people on their terms they wont’ come to you. If you bullshit a blogger you will suffer for it.

And example of someone who’s getting it right is Stormhoek – giving away wine, no strings attached. You blog, or you don’t blog, but they give away the wine anyways.

Ross Mayfield, Socialtext
Been working with social software for the last three years. Going to talk about the way that social software is used in enterprise.

LA Times wiki debacle. Decided to take an editorial, slap it in a wiki and then let the world have at it. Within 24 hours the side was shut down, because the internet ‘had at it’. Did the wiki all wrong.

Have been talking more about blogs than wiki – wikis are more group voice, blogs are individual voice. French like blogs, Germans don’t like blogs but like wikis. So the Germans talk and come to consensus before they post anything.

So cultures are different. People use tools in different ways.

We’re all talking about social software. People doing something for social rewards, not finanicial. User generated content is a sucky term. Control is shared. Wikis’ are about shared control. But all our other software is about the opposite.

Email – organisational spam, push network, point to point. Wiki is hub and spoke, can be a bit smarter, RSS etc, pull model.

Best features of RSS is the unsubscribe button.

[Sorry for the crap notes this afternoon. I really ran out of steam.]

OurSocialWorld

Here at OpenTech 2005, feeling very much in my natural habitat: surrounded by fellow geeks. Although a bout of delayed jetlag knocked me out a little this morning and I spent the second session sitting in the hallway talking to Alan Connor, who was suffering dreadfully from a hangover and thus was pretty much in the same state of mind as I.

The session I chaired, Practical Open Content (with Rufus Pollack, Paula le Dieu, Steve Coast and Tom Chance – thanks guys!), went pretty well I think. We discussed various open content projects, including Science Commons, Remix Reading, Free Culture UK and Open Street Maps, and the various issues faced by them. It was all videoed, and as usual I feel a bit of a loss about what was said because I was so busy concentrating on it that I can’t remember it. I’m sure someone somewhere took notes, but it was a good discussion with interesting questions from the audience.

Because I’m feeling a bit tired, I haven’t taken notes of everything. In fact, there’s just the BBC Backstage launch and the discussion about launching a British/European version of the EFF. I’m sure that others have taken notes, so maybe try the Opentech tag on Technorati. Oh, and don’t forget the Essential OpenTech 2005 Primer, which is just ace.

BBC Backstage

Ben Metcalfe announced the official launch of BBC Backstage, wherein the BBC make various bits of their content available for non-commercial use – as they put it ‘use our stuff to build your stuff’. He went through a bunch of slides explaining what sort of stuff they are releasing and how, and what sort of stuff you might like to think about building with their stuff.

Really cool examples:

– Dynamite, which is a site remixing BBC Travel news, local news, Flickr, weather and Google maps. Ubercool.

– BBC News Front Page Archive, which shows every change made to the front page of the BBC News site, e.g. the archive of July 7th. (Related fact: BBCi was fielding 50,000 hits a second yesterday.)

– Rebotcast Reads BBC News, which is a podcast of a bot reading the news

He also announced a competition for BBC Backstage developers, to encourage people to come up with prototypes that demonstrate new uses for the BBC’s programme schedule data and win actual real prizes such as a server. Geek bling!

Should there be a British EFF?

Ian Brown, Rufus Pollock, Danny O’Brien, Cory Doctorow

Missed Ian’s short talk, sorry.

Rufus, has worked with FFII, UKCDR, Friends of the Creative Domain. But rather go through the organisations, why we are having these discussions because these issues that relate to the knowledge economy are suddenly becoming very important. Similar to the environmental issues from the 60s onwards when it became important. So there is a whole spectrum of groups who are working in that area – there is no single solution to how we organise activism and policy etc. Those of us here believe in an open approach but there’s not a lot of representation, e.g. at a political level, and in the media they are not taking both sides of the debate. At the basic level, we need to have a group that people, e.g. journalists, know they can call. FFII does get calls, but that’s only just started happening. But we need a spectrum of people – extremists and the guys who cut the deal are required, we need people to say XYZ is unacceptable, to stir things up, and the people who then actually do the deal.

Cory, from the American EFF. EFF is not a legal defence organisation, but they take very narrow cases which can change the law. They have no funding or resources to be a defence organisation, although they have contacts. EFF didn’t start out to be an impact litigator. It was founded and funded by some people who wanted to defend people in need, so they hired attorneys and it developed from there. Do grassroots organisation, work on policy/standards/treaties and lobbying, but what we don’t do very well is grassroots stuff that goes beyond letter writing and sending us a cheque. There’s a real concern that if there were chapters of the EFF that they would stray from the EFF’s position and could end up in court arguing against themselves. Are now leading some free software project, but need other things, say for designers, and any UK organisation needs to consider that. Cory is the entire EFF staff in all of Europe. Often bad laws are created by a sort of too-fro process by edging things forward on two fronts. Cory is here to work on the issues where American laws might have an impact on European laws. In the States, had a big victory for the Broadcast Flag, but in Europe there is a similar initiative that goes further than the Broadcast Flag did, and that’s the sort of thing that a European/UK activist group should be addressing. You don’t need to be a geek to understand some of these issues.

Questions from Danny: What works and what’s missing?

Ian – what doesn’t work is membership organisations, and things such as FIPR or No To ID which is a single issue thing and costs only £10-£15 to join, haven’t been successful. It’s not that people don’t like joining (look at Greenpeace or the RSPB), but for some reason these things haven’t worked as well as in the US. Activism in terms getting people to write to MPs for e.g., doesn’t seem to work either, and when people write it doesn’t really work in getting MPs to change their mind if it goes contrary to party line. Lobbying is better, e.g. House of Lords are far more interested in digital ID than the House of Commons, especially Labour MPs.

Rufus – potential approaches, we are lucky that we care about something and that’s what motivates people. Abstract issues are difficult, but concrete things involve people. Pitch actual examples to the grassroots, not the concepts, e.g. all software developers would be affected by software patents, but open source people were the most involved in the campaign to resist them. So getting people engaged is to look for people who are affected. Often membership organisations bootstrap from donations, although often membership orgs don’t pay their own way. Will be difficult to run a policy organisation on volunteers – activists yes, but not policy. If you’re doing to talk to the government and press you need funding, which is hard to get in the UK. Can provide a community and try to grow it, but without funding it’s difficult.

Cory – EFF doesn’t take government money. Here think tanks can get money, but activists can’t. EFF has built coalitions with other activists groups and that works very well. Appeals to the constitution also works, e.g. with strong crypto they used a free speech argument which worked rather than the arguments about technical issues. Human rights issues are very strong and powerful. There is the European Court of Human Rights, and it overrides local law and it’s important to look at that, because young lawyers will do it for free. Letter writing campaign, even duplicative letters, work in the US. If you get someone to write a letter, even a duplicative letter, introduces them to actually doing something. Appealing to industry does not work in the US.

Danny – Money’s what’s missing. Historically, every few years the idea of organising a big thing comes up. Danny’s done this and money is lacking.

Stef Magdalinski – We can do a lot without money, theyworkforyou cost £2k, and has gone round the dot.com millionaires and asked for money and they just vanish. Having given up on the UK guys, the US guys have made their money globally and shouldn’t we ask them to fund a global project.

Danny – there’s more than just dot.com billionaires, there are organisations that are in this area. But because we are used to doing this on a shoelace, and there’s no access to these people.

Richard Alan – Ex-MP. Was in the house of commons. Letter writing does work. Any MP that got 100 letters on an issue would act. Making it concrete is important, you have to make things relevant to people, say ‘this is what will happen to your constituents’, then that is concrete. Money is important and has been lacking. Another thing is about liberty, because although we have a Liberty, they muddy the waters by focusing on human rights.

The Rest

Back in the hallway, mainly cos their’s wifi here. Probably not going to take anymore notes, but has been a damn good day.

OpenTech, OpenTech2005

Went to the New Media Knowledge seminar Blogging: A Real Conversation yesterday and did a 14 minute (it was closely timed!) talk on objectivity. Although I decided not to show my mindmap to the world during the talk, I’ve uploaded it to Flickr. It doesn’t encompass everything that I said – for the last five minutes I was extemporising on the blogosphere and how subjectivity is an essential art for marketers to learn if they are going to be capable of understanding and fitting into it. (Must learn to judge the timings of my talks better.)

Still, it was very interesting to see what else was said. I enjoyed Johnnie Moore‘s discussion on authority – who gives it to whom and why – and why we blog. Less of a talk and more of a chat, it was a nice change of pace.

I disagree, however, with Johnnie’s dislike of having speakers. Yes, having speakers stand up in front of an audience does create an us-them dichotomy which is especially false when you are in a room full of your peers, but in an ideal world that’s because the speaker knows something the audience doesn’t, and the audience wants to find out what. As a speaker, I don’t feel that I seize the authority to stand up in front of people talk about the stuff I talk about, I feel that I am granted grace to do so by the audience and that I had better damn well say something interesting. I do like more open-space/discussion type formats too, but I do see the value in a good keynote.

The corollary to that, of course, is that a crap keynote makes you feel like you’ve just wasted precious minutes of your life that you are never going to get back. But then, so does a crap discussion or a crap open space session. Can’t win ’em all.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas outlined a stark choice for marketers: either learn how to engage with your customers in a way which they find acceptable, or find yourself being forced into more and more outrageous attempts to capture attention. Her point that interruption-based advertising is outmoded and doomed to failure as we find better and better ways to route round it was well made. We are in an arms race now, as the marketers find new ways to grab our attention and as we create new filters (both mental and technological) to get rid of adverts. I wonder what the future of advertising holds – people are generally pretty media savvy these days, but when the kids of today grow up, having been used to dealing with the media their whole lives, will they be so savvy that advertising no longer works? Or will they be just like us, perpetually annoyed each new crappy gimmick?

I also liked Adriana’s equation:

bias + transparency = credibility

Works for me.

Was lovely to finally meet Rafael Behr, journalist and Observer blogger, and I say that not just (although possibly partly) because I’m on their blog roll. He had some interesting stuff to say about blogging and the media. I really like what he’s doing with the Observer blog – I particularly like the fact that it really is a bloggish blog, which just rambles along from day to day covering whatever subjects Rafael feels like writing about. Just like a normal blog, and not at all the journalistic behemoth that some people seemed to assume it would be. Good to hear Rafael’s perspective on how all that works and what the pitfalls are, though.

Sabrina Dent, the beginning of whose talk I unfortunately missed because I was a bit delayed getting to the venue, talked about whether or not blogging is a new communicationsn paradigm, and decided that no, it wasn’t. I missed the quote about the bees, so have had to lift if from Paul Goodison (who took notes – I’m going off memory):

Of most interest was her quote from a book called Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, which described the behaviour of bees when they find new food sources and how they communicate this back to the hive. The more vigourous and exciting the dance, the more bees visit that location.

Nice analogy.

Mike Beeston talked about how people have been doing bloggish things for centuries, but that the shift now has been the immediacy with which we can make links and transfer information. Couple of hundred years ago, one had to send off horsemen into the unknown with messages in order to organise insurrection. Now we can do it instantly via a whole bunch of technologies.

I think he missed a point out though – it’s not just instantaneous communications that are changing the way that we act and interact, but also persistency. Arrangements can be made for a temporally constrained event synchronously (e.g. proxy meetings which are organised on the fly via mobile phones) or asynchronously (e.g. via email).

We’ve always had asynchronous communications, and the problem with them is if you miss the boat – if the communication goes astray and it is ephemeral (a letter lost in the post, for example), then you never know that you didn’t get it. The difference now is that both synchronous and asynchronous communications have persistence – they exist online allowing that data to be more easily and more widely disseminated. If you miss the IRC chat in which your insurrection is being organised, the logs can be made available. If you’re using a blog, then it doesn’t matter when the details were posted, people can continue to read it up to and beyond the event you are organising.

Lloyd Davis has made a wiki for notes, and is posting the audio up too although that doesn’t appear to be available yet. UPDATE: Audio is now up.

I’ll be interested to listen to it, if only to find out what I said. (Oh, and on that note, if you were there, please do give me feedback on my talk – I really want to know whether it was any good or not, and what I could do to improve my speaking style.)

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