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Kevin: Tony Hirst of Open University shows how to do an easy map-based mashup using Yahoo! Pipes and Google Maps. Tony is worth adding to your RSS feeds. He has some great, simple guides for representing data.
Proofreading the Public Domain
This is cross-posted from Chocolate and Vodka, but I’ve included different invite codes in this post.
For the last few months I’ve been working with Book Oven, a Canadian start-up whose aim is to make it easier to prepare long texts for publishing by making it a simple, collaborative process.
The first thing we’ve focused on is how to proofread a manuscript for typos. The problem with reading a whole book all at once and looking for typos is that you can get so caught up in reading that your brain starts to skip the mistakes, seeing what it thinks should be there instead of what actually is. But what if you were presented with just one sentence at a time? You’d lack some context, it’s true, but you don’t really need a lot of context to know if “teh” is a misspelling of “the” or that “their” should be “there”.
That’s what we’ve built at Book Oven, and we’ve called it “Bite-Size Edits”. It presents you with a random snippet of text, with a sentence above and below for limited context, and if you spot a typo you can suggest a correction by editing the sentence and clicking “Suggest changes” (click on the images for a closer look or visit our complete How To).
You can also tell us that the snippet is OK as it is by clicking “No changes”, or that there’s something confusing about it by clicking “Skip”.
If our calculations are correct, it will take 100 people just 10 minutes to proofread a 100,000 word book, and we want to bring that collaborative power to bear on on the public domain. Thousands of texts have been uploaded to Project Gutenberg, but although they have been very carefully proofread some still have a small number of errors. Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg’s founder, called for help in removing these errors, so we’ve set up a version of Bite-Size Edits, which we’ve called the Gutenberg Rally, to focus just on texts from Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders (Gutenberg’s proofreading site).
If you’d like to pitch in, all you need to do is pick an invitation code from the list below and visit the Book Oven Gutenberg Rally site to create a new account. When you’ve successfully signed up, please leave a comment with the code you used and I’ll cross it off the list.
Now, just a little word of warning. The site is in alpha, which means that you will almost certainly find things that are broken! We have a feedback form that you can use to let us know and a forum to discuss things (which, is itself something that’s not entirely finished, as it’s not yet fully integrated – just sign in with the same username and password that you create when you join the main site). We’d love your feedback, so don’t spare the horses!
If you explore the site, you’ll find that you can start your own projects, upload your own text (.txt files only at the moment) and can send it to Bite-Size for the community to proof. Please feel free to experiment, but be aware we’re still ironing out bugs and that we have a lot more social functionality still to unveil!
So, for the love proof-reading, get cracking! Oh, but be warned. Bite-Size Edits has been described by one usability tester as “evilly addictive”. Don’t say we didn’t tell you…
(Obviously I can’t update the list whilst I’m asleep, so if you pick a code that doesn’t work, list it in the comments and try another!)
Invite Codes
64sBhU00
9cmRd303
2SZWT4VN
CMIMAPxN
DnZ8idpk
2wAcreZV
INuDo0QJ
Ea4Cx9G3
XHLEILQl
O6yuVrkM
pRZXtN20
t9FQdS3F
o9B2I7T4
eOGMdeK7
gBj9Aqad
bApjyzOw
dZ2OzmLD
dIAgKFHH
MBr9KcfD
amc60MoK
8Mq2UzGd
WiK1TR3U
rCvYJ23b
ysSRF0ig
ZUiOzf5l
Street View in the UK
There’s been a bit of a furore recently about Google’s Street View, which has now come to selected cities in the UK. When it was launched a number of images had to be removed because they showed people in situations that could be potentially embarrassing or which people said invaded their privacy. There was the ambulance crew; the man coming out of a sex shop; the rock star enjoying a pint at his local. Complaints ensued and Google took down the images.
I am slightly perplexed as to why this kerfuffle happened at all. Google had a similar reaction when it launched in the US in May last year, and its face-blurring policy is a result of that pushback. Surely it was ready for a fuss to be made here? Especially as Privacy International pre-emptively threatened them with legal action last July. (PI kept its word and complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office.)
I think Google could have prevented a lot of this bad press by removing suspect images prior to launching the tool. Computers are really bad at figuring out what’s in an image, and even though face recognition software improves every year, a computer cannot make a judgement on whether that face is in a compromising position or not. But humans can, and there are millions of humans online who are not only capable of spotting an obviously unsuitable photo at a glance, but also willing to do so if it’s made easy enough for them.
Google could have put together a Galaxy Zoo-like tool to allow volunteers to assess each photo, after the face-blurring, but before it was accepted into their database. If Galaxy Zoo can find a few tens of thousands of people to check pictures of galaxies, Google can find a couple of million to check Street View photos.
I suppose some people would complain that even if you showed a compromising photo to just three people – which is all it takes to pass reliable judgement on an image – that’s three people too many. But I don’t believe that’s a reasonable stance to take. If you are in a public place then why should you have an expectation of privacy? My dad was once filmed getting off a train at Reading station, and for years afterwards his face showed up on every news story about trains. We have to accept that when we are in public places our image may be captured and may sometimes turn up online, or even on TV.
In my opinion, Google should have assessed the photos prior to publication because it’s good customer care. Google isn’t perfect, but if it has a fault, it’s that it often seems to lack a human dimension, using computer engineering to try and solve what are often human problems. The question of Street View isn’t, to my mind, a privacy question as much as it is a simple issue of empathy. Even the PR angle, really, is secondary, a side-effect to caring/not caring about the people around you. Would there have been as much bad press about Street View if Google had cleaned out any potentially embarrassing photos prior to launch?
Community Conference 2009: Jake McKee, How to build a community that’s crazy about your product
Jake McKee begins by talking about ‘success by a thousand paper cuts’, which is thinking about the smallest thing possible you can do without approval to get you closer to your goals. He also said that we’ve talked a lot about community, but what we’re really talking about is ‘social engagement’. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s difficult.
Rather than talking about building a community that’s crazy about you or your product, he talks about how to throw a great party. We already build relationships with people in our lives. Parties connect, excite and engage. He lists ingredients to create a great party:
- Your party needs a reason to be. What is this thing? Is your party a 12-year-old’s birthday party or a cocktail party with friends.
- What’s the higher calling? What are we here to connect about? What is the need we are addressing? What problem are we trying to solve?
- Your party needs good planning. Every good social effort starts with good strategy. Prep for scale. Make it simple and flexible so you can constantly evolve. Keep in mind the 1-9-90 principle.
- Your party needs a host. We need leaders in social groups. It gives direction to where we’re going in this social group. It gives accountability and direction, and it builds the culture.
- Your party needs a few introductions. It doesn’t happen often enough. In the early days of Flickr, every new user was introduced by one of the staff. Every single person who signed up and posted a picture was introduced to others with similar interests. That might not be possible when you’ve got 200 sign-ups an hour, but Flickr had established the culture.
Not enough communities have mentors, volunteers who welcome people and help them find their way around. - Your party needs an invitation. The site needs functionality and tools that make it easy for members to invite other people. Make it portable such as the share this buttons for Facebook or Twitter. Be explicit with the invitation.
- You need social norms. Guidelines and rule are important. Guidelines are guiding principles. How do we translate guidelines into something that people will pay attention to? He points to Flickr’s community guidelines: “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”
It is about building culture, not blocking content.
It creates collaborative ownership. It’s clear and fun. In online environments - Your party needs a bouncer. “Be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”
- Power in n00bs and nerds. It’s so easy in a social group to get caught up in the history and the legacy.
- You need your attendees to pitch in. People want to be heard, but they also need a something to do.
- Your party needs you. These things don’t get outsourced.
- Everybody goes home happy. This is what it all boils down to.
He was asked what it takes to be a good community manager. He says it’s all down communication skills.
links for 2009-03-31
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Kevin: The New York Times seems to pissed away a lot of its Google Juice as it shuts down the International Herald Tribune site. Instead of redirecting people from the original IHT story to the same story on the New York Times, they have redirected all of the old IHT stories to a single landing page.
Community Conference 2009: Tommy Sollen, social media manager Visit Sweden
As I said, the Community Conference 2009 in Copenhagen is a mix of business, media,
Tommy Sollen talked about how he set up a community for Visit Sweden. While he did this, he set up a WordPress blog to talk about the development of the community and the site. He was working in the open. Tourism organisations across Europe and in Canada, which helped in the development. They developed Community of Sweden.com. It focuses photos and stories. The main goal is to help the members of community to inspire each other. It’s built on the EPiServer content management system.
They have tags on all the content including geo-tags and activities. One of the things I liked is that they also have a tag for the seasons. He talked about how they encourage people to tag photos because the titles provided too little information to properly index. Photo sharing has surpassed their expectations, and they now have more than 12,000 photos (the site was launched in late 2007). He highlighted some of the photos and said that they could easily create an online magazine just with user-generated photos. If they use a photo in their print magazine, they give full photo credits to who uploaded the photos and offer to buy the photo.
One of the users, from Italy, had taken a photo that their print magazine editor thought was perfect for an article. They contacted him and offered to pay him for the photo, but he refused to accept payment.
They do no marketing for the site, but they now have 6,300 registered members, 12,000 photos and more than a thousand travel stories. They have a community and the development blog, but they wanted to know what came next so they integrated Community of Sweden.com more tightly with the Visit Sweden website.
They have also created Sweden pages on Facebook and a Sweden channel on YouTube. “It’s about placing ourselves in the social media sphere,” he said. They also have created widgets that allow people to add these to their blogs, sites or social networks.
He was asked about the issue of people on Facebook saying that they would come to an event but didn’t. The person asking the question asked if they had tried to offer a coupon to encourage them to turn out. Tommy said that he wanted events but hadn’t got the budget yet for it, but he believes that events would help support the community.
He was asked about how 6000 users was seen as a success. He said that people have spent not just minutes, not just hours but days on the site and had ‘created ambassadors for Sweden’.
Community Conference 2009: Lois Kelly, Communities and business
I’m at the Community Conference 2009 in Copenhagen. The audience is a mix of media, government, NGOs and business folks.
Lois Kelly of Beeline Labs talks about how she got into the field. In 1992, she became involved in the AOL miscarriage community. “This is what the internet is about. It is about creating ways to connect people.”
In 1998, she launched her own consultancy. She found Alan’s Forums, a community for consultants to help each other with tip on how to market each other and build your business. People were all over the world. People helping people.
In 2001, she and her neighbours joined together to save a local landmark, an old bridge. People wouldn’t show up for meetings or sign petitions. People would go online at night and voice what they wanted.
In 2005, Ning makes communities free. It’s so inexpensive and easy to use that almost anyone could start playing comunities, 900,000 communities in February 2009. There are 4000 new communities a day with almost 40% outside of the US.
Tribal behaviour has been here forever. We want to connect with each other. The biggest challenges are how to attract people and get them engaged. Only 40% of the communities set up on Ning are active.
What makes communities successful:
- Communities need a purpose. They need a clear purpose
- The community needs deeply felt or widely felt issue
- Help and get help. Trust.
People do not trust businesses or governments. They do not want to be marketed to. A Nielsen study found Denmark had low levels of trust in advertising, only 28%.
What drives people’s use of communities
- Ability to help people
- Ability to connect with like-minded issue
- Community focused on hot topic issue
The value of communities to businesses and non-profits is for market insights or research. She gave the example of an ’employee community’ that saved $5m a year through insights gained in the community. They were little ideas not huge complicated ones.
The unexpected value of communities from a case study:
- Insights and Ideas. The case study company said the community had become ‘an unlimited source of R&D’.
- Sales. They had higher average sales per community member ($1200) compared to a typical customer ($500)
- Customers are creating their own marketing in the community.
- They could cut down their PR or even get rid of their PR.
She suggested the people ask 5 simple questions that businesses need to ask before creating a community:
- Why are we doing this?
- How will people (not the company) benefit?
- Do people care enough?
- What do we expect to get? (There needs to be business value, which is tied to the first question.)
- How do we measure?
She suggested the businesses creating communities need to be customer-centric versus product-centric. Focus on ‘behavioural tribes versus demographic segments’. She pointed to how a scissors company had created a community not based on scissors but rather based on how people used scissors, in this case scrapbooking. She also said that companies need to foucs on ‘networks versus channels’. IBM created an internal community called beehive. Employees were able to connect with each other. Employees with really good ideas started promoting their projects. Instead of going through usual channels, employees were going through this network to promote their ideas. People also thought they could get ahead faster – ‘climbing’. She had interviewed a 27-year-old employee who said she was able to advance more quickly because she used the intranet to show off her skills. “Before this, she would have been anonymous,” Lois said.
It allows great talent to network and share.
She found that many companies do not have internal networks but will create their own through Facebook (or LinkedIn, I would say).
She said that businesses with communities need to measure against business goals. New product ideas? Earn customer confidence? Reduce customer service costs? Awareness in category? Reduce training, education costs? Change perceptions? Get votes, get sales? That will help drive design.
Communities are a lot of work. If you want a successful community, you have to put the resources in.
She also said that some companies need to be more ‘social’ but don’t necessarily need a community. She showed how Panasonic.com had created customer reviews and recommendations. She compared a number of social strategies – badges, tagging, Twitter and communities. Communities take investment and resources to be successful, but there might be simpler social strategies to achieve your goals rather than creating a community.
There was an interesting question about Facebook. They need to pay for the service but communities are resistant to advertising or marketing messages.
Lois: In the US, a lot of us think that Facebook is over and we’ve all moved to Twitter. We’re nomadic tribes. Last year, it was Facebook. This year is Twitter. I don’t know what it will be next year. Value needs to be there for a payment value. (She talked about some of the features that Twitter is considering as a business model including adding a service for business ala Yammer.) Advertising model still has value.
links for 2009-03-28
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Kevin: John Dvorak says: "For too long newspapers have taken on the role of cultural arbiter and distribution channel for popular culture ideas. That is all over and can never return." He criticises The New York Times for considering a pay-wall for their content. "The problem with the subscription model for today's big newspapers is the fact that there is very little exclusive information of any real value." He adds: "The Internet added comparison shopping to the mix. Want a story about the baby stuck down in the well? How about 3,000 stories about the baby in the well?
Pretty soon the public began to notice that 2,975 of those 3,000 stories about the baby in the well were the exact same story, with the other 25 being rewrites of the exact same story."
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Kevin: Robert Picard looks at the problems with proposed legislation to allow newspapers to operate as non-profits. It's a fundamentally flawed bill in its current form that would help few newpapers and creates opportunities for abuse.
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Kevin: Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, guest blogging on TechCrunch says his "basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it". He says that consumers don't trust, want or even need advertising. I think one of the important elements of this post is thinking about other revenue streams beyond advertising.
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Kevin: Fitz & Jen of Editor & Publisher write about the three factors that they believe killed "The Ann Arbor News". They say: "In the case of The Ann Arbor News, which is closing in July to be replaced by a mostly Web business with a TMC and a twice-weekly print paper, three factors conspired in its doom – its state market, its home market, and its family owners."
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Kevin: Social media strategist Woody Lewis gives five ways that he believes newspapers can avoid extinction. The thing I see most in this is that newspapers will have t become more collaborative, especially when it comes to technology. Most newspaper companies simply do not have the resources or the culture for rapid technological development. And I agree with Lewis, "Doing nothing is not an option."
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Kevin: "The new Obama administration’s emphasis on transparency and the recent economic crisis has focused a great deal of attention on the value of online APIs for accessing government data. One of the latest examples comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis who have recently released a new API to access their FRED database, a comprehensive collection of U.S. economic trends. The API also provides online access to ALFRED, an archive of historic economic data, which features information dating all the way back to the 1920s."
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Totally agree with Charles about how broken email is, but we need a way to ween people off email, otherwise the problem's just going to get worse.
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Kevin: As the New York Time announces pay cuts to deal with the advertising recession. Jon Friedman at MarketWatch says that bad news from newspaper businesses will be accepted as routine. Jeff Jarvis says that he expected an orderly transfer of the traditional newspaper to the digital model. "Instead, we have great confusion." I think that we reached a tipping point in audience behaviour beginning in 2004-05 in the US, even while most newspaper execs still believed that the dot.com crash had dispensed with the threat from the internet to their businesses. Once, conservative advertisers make the digital transition the 'confusion', as Jeff calls it, will become even greater.
Yo Vodafone! 15MB per day is not an ‘unlimited data’ plan
I don’t usually write about commercial products or services here on Strange Attractor, unless they are really, really good or really, really bad. This would be a case of the latter, at least in terms of honesty regarding terms and conditions.
I’ve been a Vodafone pay-as-you-go customer since I moved to the UK four years ago, mostly because when I came here, Voda was the only company I could find with international roaming on PAYG. I also didn’t know how long I would be in the UK and so I didn’t want to get locked into an 18- to 24-month contract. Besides, I don’t really use my phone to make calls much. In the UK, unlike in the US, you only pay for calls you make so if people called me, I don’t have to pay for those minutes. Instead, I text people, and I could get 70 texts a month for about £5 plus all the calls I ever made for £10 a month all in. Up until recently (although their website says different things on the tarriffs), Vodafone also would sell PAYG customers 15MB of data a day for a £1, which was generally reasonable for the amount of data I was using. It made economic sense, and it fit with the way I used my phone.
However, since I’m relatively settled here in the UK and have an Nokia N82 with a lot of data services, I decided to look into their new SIM-only plans. I don’t need a new phone. I also noticed that my PAYG credit was disappearing surprisingly quickly, even though I wasn’t making more calls. I spent a goodly amount of time clicking around on my account on the Vodafone site trying to determine where my credit was going, but Voda doesn’t actually seem to let me in on the secret of how I’m spending my PAYG credit. It might be buried in the website somewhere, but there isn’t anything in My Account that says, ‘See your latest bill’ or latest usage. I was none the wiser. I can only guess that I must have been going over the 15MB limit so a £2 per megabyte charge kicks in. Ouch.
Still, I was paying about £15 a month for text, calls and data, and with a new £7.50 monthly data plan for pay pay monthly customers, it looked like I could get ‘unlimited data’. Of course with any of these things, there is the fine print. ‘Unlimited data’ actually doesn’t mean unlimited in any traditional definition of the term, which isn’t surprising. In the UK, most of the broadband plans are capped at 5 to 8 GB a month. Like many others, the Voda ‘unlimited’ data plan has a ‘fair use limit’. But what exactly is this ‘fair use’ limit?
For £1 a day you get unlimited data access in the UK only, subject to a fair use limit of 15MB per day (100s of emails and web pages). If you use over 15MB a day then we may ask you to moderate your usage. If after we have asked you to moderate your usage, you fail to do so, we reserve the right to charge you for the excessive element of your usage at your price plan’s standard rate or to suspend or terminate your service in accordance with your airtime and/or price plan terms and conditions.
‘Unlimited’, to Voda, equals 450MB in a 30-day month. The chap in the Vodafone shop up the road assured me that “no one ever goes over the limit” and besides, “all of the data is compressed [using their Novarra internet service] anyway”.
What a lovely bit of thinking from 2006. Memo to Voda: People use the data plans on their phones for so much more than surfing the mobile web though your portal. My phone has a Flickr uploader. If I want to upload 15 pics from the N82’s very capable 5-megapixel camera on the road using the phones built-in uploader, I’m getting pretty close to 15 MB right there. I use Google Maps all of the time, and the N82’s GPS uses network servers to speed location-locking. Using Vodafone’s own data calculator, they reckon I’d use 1GB of data a month if I only spent 1 hour browsing the internet a day, sent and received 10 emails each day, (what planet do they live on?), download or upload 5 documents a day, downloaded 10 music tracks a month, uploaded 55 pics a month and downloaded 1 software program or system update a month.
Also, chaps, why do you call it ‘unlimited’ subject to a ‘fair use limit’ when you tell 3G data dongle users exactly how much data they get with your laptop plans: £20 for 1GB and £25 for 3GB. Why not just do that with your so-called ‘unlimited’ plan for phones? It’s not unlimited even with the ‘fair-use’ fig leaf.
This is much more than taking liberties with the English language. For the annual award for Greatest Abuse Done to the English Language in Pursuit of Profits, Voda’s lawyers seem intent on challenging the marketing departments in the landline ‘fraud-band’ industry that routinely quote speeds you would never get unless the switch was in your bathroom. Deceptive marketing practices really piss me off, and this is deceptive, which is why right after this post, I’m headed to the Advertising Standards Authority website (or the Trading Standards folks). Let’s file this one under lies, damn lies and terms & conditions.
links for 2009-03-27
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Kevin: As an up and coming internet commentator, are you Dave Winer, Mark Cuban, Michael Arrington, Seth Goden, Chris Anderson, Nichalas Carr or Jeff Jarvis? Use this simple flowchart to determine "Which Blowhard am I?"