05.05.06
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Where’s the we in WeMedia?

I spent two days this week at the WeMedia conference, organised by The Media Center, the BBC and Reuters. I started this blog post yesterday, but couldn’t find time to finish it. I should probably post a health warning on it, though, for those of a sensitive disposition: this is an account of my experience and opinions. Others may have had more fun than me.

Day One

Held at BBC’s Television Centre, in (apparently) the same studio they used for Top of the Pops, it was a highly stage-managed event with cameras everywhere, men with head-sets and BBC people all over the place.

As I had feared, it was a complete waste of time. I’m sorry, I’m never normally this critical of a conference – particularly as I know first hand how much damned hard work it takes to put one on – but it was unexpurgated garbage. I had thought it might turn into ‘MeTooMedia’, but it went one step further than that and became ‘TheyMedia’. Instead of progressing the conversation, or even bringing it up to date, the BBC managed to thrust us into a timewarp and take us back at least two, maybe three years.

Bearing in mind, this was a conference basically about big media and its relationship to ‘citizen journalism’, (a term I am coming to loathe – I’ve started calling it ‘participatory media’ which is a bit of a mouthful but, I think, more accurate), but there was only one blogger on stage, and no podcasters, vidbloggers, or photojournalists. Instead, the speakers were almost entirely from the mainstream media, primarily the BBC, Reuters and the Media Center, all sitting on stage talking as if they know what is going on.

I’ve news for you, guys. You don’t. You don’t have a clue.

There were two entirely separate conferences happening – the one that went on onstage and amongst the big media attendees, and one that happened in the backchannel and in the coffee breaks amongst the more clueful attendees. And never the twain shall meet. They should have, because there were three ‘online curators’ – including myself – who were gathering questions and commentary from chat and the blogs. In the morning, the conference allowed one of the curators to actually speak up at the end of each session, but the moderators frequently cut him off, and he hardly had any time to flesh out the points that were being made, or encourage more discussion from the floor.

The choice of moderators was not always good, either. In particular, the BBC’s Nik Gowing was entirely unsuitable for the role. Used to dealing with media-trained professionals, he didn’t have any respect for the audience at all, was patronising and rude, and was far too enamoured of the ‘important people’ on the stage. That particular panel included Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, and was entitled The Leaders’ Forum. Gowing took that L-word just a bit too seriously, repeatedly reminding us that we were listening to the leaders.

Leaders of what, exactly? A game of buzzword bingo?

The level of defensiveness that oozed from the stage when bloggers either managed to get a word in edgeways or were brought up as a topic of conversation, was astonishing. Old chestnuts such as subjectivity vs. objectivity, the accuracy of bloggers, and fact-checking were brought up by the media representatives, the same issues that I was trying to get beyond two years ago, and which were vexing people like Tom Coates far earlier than that.

The lack of understanding of blogs, bloggers and participatory media shown was astonishing, and the false dichotomy of journalists vs. bloggers was emphasised by the speakers throughout the day. It was very disappointing indeed, because I had hoped that we had moved beyond these sorts of non-issues and into the real substance of when, why and how you begin participatory media projects.

All in all, the day was very insular and introspective, with a lot of people appearing to think that they are doing very well, thankyouverymuch, without the input of anyone who knows what they’re talking about. By the end of the day, I was beyond my usual state of British reserve and just about ready to spit feathers. I’m used to people not getting it, remember – I do this stuff for a living so I have plenty of experience of people talking out of their arse. But this conference brought me to a new level of frustration.

And a new level of embarrassment. Halfway through the day, the BBC trotted out 25 ‘digital assassins’, primarily young people (I think to show that they were hip wiv da yoof) who were brought in to talk to the attendees and give them the opportunity to interact with a real live blogger. Oh, please. Could that have been any more condescending.

It reminded me of a story a friend of mine told me about a comedy show that he went to once in Chicago, where one of the comedians asked the audience, ‘Who’s never met a gay man before?’ and then went up and introduced himself to whomever raised their hand. It felt a bit like the BBC were saying ‘Who’s never met a blogger before?’ and then helpfully provided some specimens for attendees to look at. Cringeworthy.

Live radio from a conference – a missed opportunity

So the final hour of the day was given over to Africa Have Your Say, an ‘interactive radio’ show broadcast nightly on the BBC World Service and the African edition of World Have Your Say. Now, Kevin, my partner and co-author here, works on this programme, so I’ve had a fair bit of exposure to it. Doing an hour’s radio from a conference, though, is a challenge. The murmur level in the back of the room really rose during the programme because suddenly the presenter started talking about things – such as bloodshed in Iraq – that were nothing to do with the conference. Now, for the listeners, that makes sense, but for the attendees it was a bit of a weird one.

I didn’t really feel that the WHYS team really made the most of the opportunity. I have listened to their show before, and it works best when they allow their callers to talk to each other, to have a real discussion about the issues. They need to allow people time and space to breathe, to talk, to get to the nuances of the issues they are discussing. Instead, and sadly because I think it did the show a disservice, they turned it into a full-on phone-in. There was just a string of people commenting, there was no conversation. A shame.

What I think they should have done was to be a little less rapid-fire, and a bit more considered. Pick your topic, then get people from the conference to discuss the issue with someone who’s called in. The presenter kept telling people in the conference to raise their hand, but never actually directed any questions at us, so it was hard to know when to put your hand up because it was hard to know what they were going to start talking about next.

I actually had my hand up for ages (and I had an inside line – being an online curator I got one of my colleagues to tell them I wanted to say something). The VIPs from Reuters got to speak before the lowly blogger, but I eventually got to make my point about the BBC/Reuters/Media Center trust survey, saying that asking people if they trust ‘bloggers’ is not a valid question because ‘bloggers’ are all different, so some people will trust some bloggers but not others. Crowing that people trust the BBC but not ‘bloggers’ is really arrogant and out of order.

I got a round of applause for that from the crowd, so I think I wasn’t the only one to feel like the survey that was released at this conference was flawed. I’m not going to rip that apart now though, I’m going to do that some other time when I’m feeling strong and able to deal with the bullshit.

The WeMedia Fringe

The price tag for We Media was $795, which is far too expensive for most people to afford, and it put the conference firmly in the ‘professional jolly’ bracket (although it wasn’t a very jolly jolly).

Because of this, Robin Hamman put together a fringe event, at which I spoke. By the time I got there I was feeling rather ill – not enough food at the BBC, too much stress, and creeping exhaustion.

(By the way, wtf is it with conference catering? Are the BBC too tight to serve a decent lunch? I couldn’t even eat most of it. Good job I had prawn sandwiches to back it up.)

I’m not going to blog about what I said, other than to say that I took my lovingly prepared talk and threw it out the window, preferring instead to do an off the cuff talk which I entitled, ‘Why WeMedia Sucked’. You can watch it, thanks to James Cox.

Day 2

OK, so yesterday we were at Reuters, at Canary Wharf. I was fairly tired even before i got there. Didn’t stay long at the Fringe, and didn’t get home late, but spending a day getting increasingly wound up took it out of me.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get off to a good start. I got told off by one of the other curators for recommending that people wanting to chat in real time about the conference should use IRC. The day before, we’d been trying to use Mapable, a browser-based chat service who were sponsoring the event. Sadly, Mapable couldn’t hack it – the UI was awkward, the site behaved bizarrely with regards to minor things like log-ins, and then in the afternoon it all went horribly wrong with the chat splitting into two (like a netsplit on IRC). It proved incredibly difficult to reconcile to two because even when you logged out, restarted your browser and then logged back in again, it logged you in to the second chat. The service was up and down more times than a whore’s knickers, and it was a very frustrating experience for all. It’s no wonder that people wanted an alternative.

The content of day two was better, it has to be said, but the communications amongst those who were there with a role to fulfil was awful. No one told us that Global Voices‘ Rachel Rawlins and Rebecca MacKinnon would be taking the online curator role for their four sessions. It made perfect sense, and they did it very well, so it wasn’t the fact of it that I minded, it was that no one bothered to tell us other online curators.

Meantime, power problems and aggressiveness from the ushers and Media Center staff continued to rile me. By lunchtime I was ready to walk out. I felt very much like I was being seen as a ‘whiny blogger’ because I had fed back on problems with the chat, issues with power, and people’s feeling that this conference was not giving enough of a voice to the people in the audience and online, some of whom were more expert than those on stage.

By the time that I was asked to take the mic for the feedback session for the Middle East session, I declined. I was in such a bad mood, and felt so disillusioned and disengaged that it would have been an error for me to take the mic.

A long lunch, missing one session, and talking at length to some of the other attendees put me back on an even keel, though. Thank you to those who helped me chill out a bit amidst a sea of frustration.

More missed opportunities

I can’t really comment on the validity of the Global Voices sessions, but they seemed a lot better than the previous day’s rubbish. I’m not expert in the use of technology and social media in the developing world, but the impression I got was that Rebecca and Rachel did a very good job within a limited time-frame of addressing some of the issues and telling some of the stories that are illustrative of what’s going on.

But for a conference about the media and how it relates to the public, WeMedia missed tricks left, right and centre. In the audience for day two was the very man who brought us We The Media, Dan Gillmor. Dan was originally listed as a speaker, but he never took the the stage. He wouldn’t be drawn on why that was, and I respect his discretion, but I feel we lost out because we didn’t get to hear about his experiences.

Also present but unable to give us the benefit of his knowledge was Michael Tippett, who started the participatory media project NowPublic. Michael’s site was launched at Northern Voice two years ago, and in the intervening time it has grown and developed and become very successful. I would have loved for Michael to be able to talk about his successes and failures, and to talk about the way the people who use Now Public feel about it.

Others I would have liked to have heard from include Ben Hammersley and Neil McIntosh, and the Comment Is Free team. The Guardian have been pushing away at the boundaries of what big media does with social software, and I would love to hear more about what they struggled with, and what was easy. I wish more than anything that Hugh Mcleod had been there. He would have punctured a few bubbles, no problem.

I would also have liked to have heard Rebecca and Rachel talking about Global Voices itself – what problems and triumphs have they had? How does it all work? What about at the nuts and bolts level?

When I started to mention this to one of the Media Center guys afterwards, he just snapped my head off saying ‘This wasn’t about citizen journalism’. Well, that’s kinda funny because a lot of people I was speaking to there thought it was.

The only really good voices in this conference were Rachel North, who had a lucky escape from the 7/7 bombings and then became a blogger (and got picked up by the media); and Dave Sifry from Technorati, who provided a breath of fresh air in the ‘monetisation’ session. It’s a real shame that in two days, there were only two people who really stood out. Maybe I’ve been spoilt by some really high quality conferences where nearly every session has been stellar (Future of Web Apps springs to mind).

I could continue

I really could continue. The flaws in this conference were so numerous. But you know what the biggest problem is now?

The people in the media who need to be thinking about what just happened aren’t. They believe that I am just a whining blogger. If they even read this, they’ll say that I should get over myself, that I don’t understand what their aims were and that I am hostile on principle. Worse than that, they believe that I’m anti-media. I’m not. I worked for two years as a music journalist, and I have a column in Linux User now, so why on earth would I be anti-media? Why would I be against the people who contribute to my income? It just doesn’t make sense.

One of my friends suggested to me yesterday that I was so wound up because I cared too much. And maybe he was right. But why should I care that the big media players at this conference didn’t get to hear about what’s really happening? Why should I care that all they heard were meaningless platitudes? Why should I care whether or not they get an insight into how participatory media works?

I care because I am actually pro-media. Having a fit and healthy media industry is really important to having a fit and healthy democracy. Having information flow easily increases levels of understanding amongst the public, the government, the industry, and everyone in between and that improves our society. Participatory media can be, I believe, a transformative force, and the media could help create projects that could bring real value to the participants.

But hell, if they wanna keep their eyes shut, there’s nothing I can do about that. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

05.03.06
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WeMedia: Accountabiliby and quality

Neha, part of the brilliant Global Voices network, had this brilliant post about Citizen Journalism, a term that I really don’t like for a number of reasons I can’t write about now, but will later.

Here’s what Neha has to say.:

Over and over again – the point about how journalists are equipped to fact check (which apparently bloggers can’t) is being repeated. So here’s the deal. Blogger and Amateur aren’t synonyms. There are journalists with incredible experience who choose to blog for the freedom it provides, and because it lets them lay out more information and reflect on the nature of news. A blogger may or may not want to be known as a journalist. It’s NOT an Us Vs. Them situation.

You tell ’em Neha.

I was being snarky in my last post about Helen Boaden’s discomfort. But I get the feeling that some of us in large media organisations want citizen journalists’ content but they don’t want the messiness of the blogosphere. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways. It’s messy out there. Always has been. A simplistic worldview filtered through a media defined by scarcity.

05.03.06
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WeMedia: Reading body language

I am sitting here at the WeMedia conference, and as a professional journalist, I of course have a degree in reading body language. It’s an incredibly important skill that all journalists are trained in. It’s what sets professional journalists apart from these amateurs. Look at the insightful analysis that the Washington Press Corps does everyday in reading the body language of our leaders. It’s essential to our role as the press in a democracy.

I’m sitting here watching someone several levels of bureaucracy above my head at the BBC, Helen Boaden. And she’s talking about blogs. Using that skill of interpretation of body language that only years of training have provided me as a journalist, I noticed that she was intensely uncomfortable when talking about bloggers and how they claimed the head of Eason Jordan of CNN last year. Bullying is what she calls it. But she’s bullish about citizen journalism.

Discomfort about blogs, but not about citizen journalism. Discuss.

(I’ll have to let Suw vouch for me that as an American I do actually have a sense of humour and sarcasm.)

UPDATE: Ms Boaden just said: “I want to know who checks the bloggers.” There’s a nugget for ya. WeMedia. More like US and THEM. And remember this, people who pay my bills. Just trying to prod us to be better so smile and breathe.

05.02.06
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WeMedia

Both Kevin and I are going to be spending the next couple of days at the WeMedia conference examining citizen journalism, the media and trust. Organised by the BBC, Reuters and The Media Center, it hopes to shed some light on participatory media and help mainstream news companies understand what they need to do to thrive in this shifting news landscape.

OK, so that’s how I wish it was. Instead, look at the schedule and shout Bingo! When you see a real, honest to goodness blogger.

Quiet, isn’t it?

The thing I am worried about is that this is going to turn into a happy clappy back-slappy smugfest, with the Beeb and Reuters competing to see whose day (they each have one) has the biggest names, who can draw the biggest crowds, and who trusts who most. They already have a survey that they’ve completed, and which they’ll be promoting at the event, which shows people trust national TV news the most and bloggers very little. So much for ‘citizen journalism’ being a symbiosis of equals – this sounds more like ‘we Media, you Jane’.

But if you were one of the people who took one look at the $795 price tag and winced, you can still participate and, indeed, I would encourage you to do so. You can watch the video feed, listen to the audio feed, monitor the blogs (including the various official ones), an take part in the backchannel. Your IRC choices are going to be an in-browser client or #wemedia on irc.freenode.net.

I am participating on both days as an Online Curator, so will be on IRC, and in as many other places as possible online, looking out for comments to feed back into the mix. I think I get to sit on stage at times and ask difficult questions and quote people’s opinions, so I’m depending on you to give me something juicy to work with. Without you, I’ll just end up looking silly, so please do pop into IRC and let me know what you think of proceedings.

I’m also talking at the WeMedia Fringe, where all the cool kids are gonna be, on Wednesday night. The Fringe is fully sold out, so no real point coming if you don’t already have a ticket, but it’s cool that there should be so much interest. I’m going to be talking on the three things that media should be prepared to do before they even think about running any sort of participatory media project.

Right, time to go prepare. See you tomorrow.

05.01.06
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Your brand can’t save you now

Bleary-eyed and bleary-brained the other morning, I was jolted awake by a trailer on the BBC World Service for a programme on the damage done by US troops to the ancient city of Babylon.

Now, I have to admit that I find that BBC radio is frequently rather tedious. The World Service and Radio 4 both have a tendency to be oh so very worthy, so very full of the earth-shattering (self-)importance common to those who have the kind of tenure most in the media can only dream about. Indeed, the only reason we had the World Service on was because Kevin works for them and it’s his job to grok world news each morning. If it was up to me, we’d listen to the far easier on the brain XFM where the most complex thing I have to do deal with is figuring out to what degree Carl Barat‘s new band, Dirty Pretty Things, is better than Pete Doherty‘s trainwreck combo, Babyshambles. (Answer: very much; number of brain cells exercised: near to nil.)

Back to this trailer. I get really depressed when I think of all those wonderful antiquities destroyed by the stupidity of whomever is currently invading whichever country. I don’t care that it was US troops filling their sandbags with archaeological artefacts, I care that it happened at all. That wasn’t what got up my nose though. It was a phrase along the lines of “The BBC assesses the impact”. As soon as I heard that, I bristled.

The BBC? Assessing the impact of US Troops on the ruins at Babylon? Since when did the BBC employ experts in Babylonian archaeology? Last I looked, the BBC employed journalists, and I have a sneaking suspicion that journalists expert in Babylonian archaeology are few and far between, and unlikely to be on the BBC’s payroll.

This is not to say that this programme is not capable of providing an accurate portrayal and discussion of the problems at Babylon (I have no idea whether it did or not). It is to say that it will not be the BBC doing it, it will be the various doctors, professors, conservationists and researchers – the real experts – who will provide the story, the analysis, the conclusions. All the BBC can do is provide a conduit for the real experts to speak to a wider audience.

Yet the BBC, like so many other mainstream media outlets, seem to have forgotten this. They have slipped into a Cult of Brand, where asserting the primacy of their corporate brand is more important than the story they are reporting. This is an ugly development of the Cult of Personality that I first observed infiltrating music journalism back in the mid-90s.

I am a huge music fan. My life is dull and empty without music, and like many music fans my age, I grew up on the music inkies – the Melody Maker and the NME. Well, it was never an ‘and’, but always an ‘or’. You had to choose. Either/or. I chose the Melody Maker, because I thought that the writing was better. But as the 90s wore on, the writing deteriorated badly, with journalists trying so hard to be the next Nick Kent or Lester Bangs without ever having their talent.

Instead, two-bit hacks spent more time writing about themselves and their experiences than they did writing about the bands they were interviewing. It was a Cult of Personality, manifested too in the music industry itself, where lead singers became more important than their bands, where managers and A&R men became more important than their charges.

The problem with the Cult of Personality was that it was tedious and dull. I wanted to know what my favourite bands were up to, I wanted an insight into their lives, into their music. I didn’t want some talentless teenaged hack with all the experience of a brick – and journalistic chops to match – insinuating that they were the most important thing since sliced bread.

Not that the Cult of Personality was (or is) restricted to the music press, or to the Maker and the NME. Oh no. Kate Adie, anyone?

It is, you could say, a natural development to move from a Cult of Personality to a Cult of Brand, where the arrogance of the entrenched media can blossom forth in all it’s glory. Who needs to worry about rigorous journalistic standards, or those pesky ethic things when you have brand to paper over the cracks?

When the BBC World Service says “the BBC assesses the damage to Babylon” I bristle, because that statement unnecessarily inserts the BBC into the story, and asserts an unwarranted authority over it. By saying that the BBC is going to assess the impact, they make it sound as if the BBC are the only people who could, but in actual fact the story is really about the experts that the BBC has consulted, and what they think has happened to Babylon. The trailer ends up saying not “Here’s a story you might be interested in”, but “Oh look! This is a story you should be interested in because we, the BBC, know best.”

Believing in the power of brand is spectacularly dangerous for media companies. It makes them arrogant, sloppy and (almost worse than that) irritating. They then start to rely too much on so-called analysis, which really is just a platform for the face du jour to expound upon what they believe, and spend nowhere near enough time reporting the facts so that the audience can make up their own minds.

Indeed, this attitude is the very antithesis of Dan Gillmor‘s honest and humble assessment that “the audience knows more than I do.”

I don’t want to hear about what ‘The BBC’ has to say, I don’t want some brand message topping and tailing my news. I want to know what the experts know, and if the BBC can’t get the hell out of my face and just tell me, I’ll go elsewhere for my information.

04.30.06
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Exploding the limits of linear media

As I wrote in my last post, one of the things that we realise on the BBC World Service radio programme that I work on is that we’re joining a global conversation that is already going on in a million ways, virtual and real.

Of course, one of the ways we try to take part in that conversation is through weblogs. For instance, recently, we discussed Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the US. We asked whether the world had something to fear in China.

We invited Dan Harris of the China law blog on the programme. After it finished, he had this to say about the programme:

Just finished my show on the BBC and found it both interesting and frustrating.

Dan went on to explain his views in a way that he thought that he couldn’t on the programme. He’s not the first blogger that we’ve had on the programme who felt frustrated by the format. As a matter of fact, Fons Tuinstra, an internet entrepreneur and China consultant, who has been on the programme said this in a comment on Dan’s blog:

At least you have a weblog where you can make your point. I have been a few times in the program and I found it an interesting chaos. It tries to focus on easy to consume tidbits without trying to really make a point.

From this and other comments, I sense that the bloggers we have on the programme sometimes feel constrained. Many in the Mainstream Media fail to realise that some of our audience now live and communicate in a world where they control the terms the debate, not us in the MSM, so I think that bloggers find it a bit jarring when they are suddenly pulled back into the old world of broadcast media where they have to cede some of their new found freedom.

Secondly, blogging is nonlinear, like many things on the internet. On radio, we have an hour for the discussion. It’s linear. The world of broadcast is also one of scarcity. Scarcity of spectrum. Scarcity of time. That is not to say that the age of broadcast is over – the BBC radio signal reaches places far beyond the reach of the internet.

What happens when you wed the nonlinear, interactive, many-to-many networked power of the internet and mobile phone networks with the global reach of radio? I don’t know yet. We have a lot of work to do to bridge the worlds of the internet, the mobile phone and the radio – especially the internet. But the glimpses of what could be keep me going, keep me pushing those boundaries between media.

I believe that the limits, the constraints, the shortcomings of what bloggers feel when they come on the radio could be exploded if we break down some of these barriers between media. I’ve been trying to do that, to create a new media for 10 years now. I thought we would be further along than we are, but the dot.com bubble and crash came along: The bubble gave us a lot of hyperactive, hyper-funded ‘me-too-ism’; then came the Crash, which destroyed many people’s faith in the Internet. I used to think it was all bad, but from the ashes of the crash came a return to the Net’s grassroots: Social software and social media.

But now I’m straying into the territory of the next post: Social Media Me-too-ism. Suw and I will have a lot to say about that this week. Watch this space.

UPDATE: Dan left a comment and said he wasn’t frustrated by the being cut off by a higher authority. As an attorney, he said: “Please remember I am an attorney, so I am very much used to being cut off by a higher force: the Judge.”

That reminded me that was another more nuanced point I was going to make but forgot. For this, I’ll blame Suw. She was watching Doctor Who on here iBook while I was trying to write this.

The more nuanced point I was going to make was about nuance. There are limits to what we can pack into an hour, and I think Mike’s comment below about too many voices is spot on. It’s a fine balance. We want to include as many voices, as many points of view as possible, but too many voices becomes a cacophony of unexplored threads of thought. This is the limitation of linear media and where the internet can fill in the gaps.

Both in audio, video and text, we can explore more ideas in much richer depth than we ever could in one hour of radio. And as I’m seeing, the conversation that begins on air spins out in a million directions over weeks. We’re still receiving comments on discussions that we had in early April. Hopefully, as we plug into the online communities better, this conversation will deepen. And I’m enjoying the challenge of building bridges between the world of the internet and the world of radio.

And I’m also enjoying this conversation about this process. As a matter of fact, without this conversation, it would be a much more difficult and lonely job.

04.25.06
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NLab Seminar: Blogs, Communities and Social Software

I’m up at De Montfort University in Leicester at the Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries (NLab) seminar, Blogs, Communities and Social Software. I’m speaking later, but managed to get up here in time to catch the first panel discussion.

The Institute of Creative Technologies, who runs the NLab, has got a new building, and this is the first event to be held here. It’s half-finished, but already has a small kennel of Aibos and is apparently also going to be getting some flying insect robots too. Cool! I’ll have to come back when they’ve got them installed.

As to my own talk, that’s about blogging and writing, blogging writers, and Creative Commons. Thinking about the things that authors are doing with blogging in preparation for this talk got me really quite excited and, if I can find the time, I’ll write more about it.

The audience here is mixed, with some people knowing about blogs already, and some people being complete novices. That makes it a hard audience in some ways, because you either bore or baffle, so I’m very much focusing on showing what other people are doing, and am not really going to talk about concepts.

Right… to the first panel.

Speakers

Josie Fraser, Educational Technologist

Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media, De Montfort

Chair: Gavin Stewart

Sue Thomas – Why RSS is important, and why you should have it

What is RSS? The easiest way to find out what RSS is is to go to the BBC site and look at their explanation, via the ‘What is RSS?’ link.

[Goes on to provide very basic explanation of RSS.]

[Demos Bloglines, as aggregator, the clippings function, publishing your blogroll, seeing other people’s blogrolls via subscription to the same feed.]

Josie Fraser – Weblogs and Web 2.0 in eduation

Used to write for Engadget – gadget based movie reviews.

Interested in getting teachers up to speed on what’s happening in the rest of the world. Edublogs: blogs in or about education by learners, practitioners, researchers, policy makers etc. Blogs are individual, groups e.g. schools, universities, etc.

Misconception that schools in the UK are lagging behind in tech, but they’re not. there is a lot of exciting stuff going on. Warwick Uni, for example, offer blogs for all universities, and people are using Amazon-type models in their blogs, so looking at book reviews, film reviews, CDs, etc.

Walsall Schools have a large blog community, with subscribers across the UK. Marketed as easy way for teachers and learners to have a web presence. Traditional websites never get updated, and for schools that’s not useful, so with a blog they can put info up straight away. They can have headmasters posting info for parents, for example.

Notables:

Barbara Ganley

Gateshead Central Library

James Farmer’s edublogs.org, also learnerblogs and uniblogs, all hosted online. Problems that he has had are with firewalls in schools.

Edublog Frappr map.

Edublog Awards in third year.

Use of emerging tech reflects state of learning tech in all institutions in the UK – it’s patchy, it’s not embedded, and it’s not joined up. But bloggers are all about community, so there is a different agenda. Web 2.0 techs are sociable and community building, so fundamental shift now in how tech is being delivered in schools and university.

Many constructivist arguments for using blogs, not just in education, but generally. It’s an ideal platform for citizenship, participation, collaboration. Develop e-literacy which is fundamentally important. Formative value: Develop voice and provide ability to explore online, v. empowering.

Positivist concerns: retention, achievement, progression; evidence and supporting the curriculum. Very specific aims, don’t always sit well with blogging.

Issues that need addressing re: staff skills and current practice

– e-literacy and legitimacy of new tech (still in question, lots of suspicion)

– small pieces loosely joined vs. one size fits all

– training and support (some teachers are still struggling with email, so how do they go from that to engaging with blogging and social software?)

Duty of care, re: child protection

– literacy and resilience vs. moral panic (over sites about anorexia, etc.)

– online identity. what happens if you’re blogging through university, become completely googleable, and what you did ten years ago affecting how you are perceived now; lots of employers Google

Systems, re: network management:

– privacy, spam, filtering. these systems are often imposed on schools, and they have no control over them.

– hosting, ownership, data protection

Debate

Q: What makes certain software social?

Josie: The difference is, people talk about Web 2.0 in terms of social software, but the truth is that socialability has being going on on the web for years, chat, user groups, discussion boards, these are all sociable. The difference is that social software is more geared up to making friends online, although that’s been possible online for a long time. More online dating sites, which is a huge market and is becoming acceptable in a way that it wasn’t two years ago. But you can interact with it easily, use it easily, and interact with the writer.

Sue: I’d add to that the fact that social software society is a different kind of society and it has its own rules and behaviours, so the other side is the society that is produced by the software. It affects the way we regard each other, what we know about each other, what we make public. The idea of social software enabling your data to be added to the mix. E.g. MySpace, the engagement that people make involves a trade-off – their clicks, prefs, data is being logged. Same as your loyalty card logs your shopping data. That’s the hidden trade-off.

Was asked, Don’t young people worry about privacy? What is going to happen when they realise there’s so much data being held? Young people know they are making their trade-off.

Josie: But it’s not being talked about in those terms. General practice for blogs is that you are being very honest, very earnest. In a way that’s sad because it’s played off against going online and creating a fake life, and playing with identity.

I am on a crusade against the word virtual, because it’s not virtual. there is no distinction anymore. It is real. The number of people who have fallen in love online… there is no separation. It is as real. And if we pretend there is a distinction we are kidding ourselves.

Q: People develop new coping mechanisms for making sense of what is happening online, because it is different from everyday life. That’s a difficult aspect of social software, because the making sense mechanisms that we have are different from the ones that we need to develop.

Sue: You have to use it to be able to critique it, because often looking from the outside it really doesn’t make sense. It’s the difference between being a passenger in a car, and driving a car.

Josie: This comes back to digital literacy. How do we talk about this stuff to people who don’t even like using email. There are techs emerging at the moment that are characterised by the fact they are very user friendly. So a blog is where you go online and fill in some forms. It’s easy. So the way that I get people into it is to get them to go into eBay, and they manage that ok when they see something they want to buy.

There is reticence amongst a lot of teachers to engage in this, but Web 2.0 makes it easier for them. I’ve tried to teach teachers how to use Dreamweaver and it’s a nightmare, and it’s not what they need to know. But show them Blogger and you can get them up and running in half an hour.

Q: Quite often people know how to do the digital side, how to create the blog, but they are becoming aware now that they are creating an identity. People don’t always want their world online. They have something against the social side of it, rather than the technical side of it.

Sue: The problem is that blogs have got a name for being boring and petty. So when you say ‘you should start a blog’ people think that you are saying ‘you should write about what you had for breakfast’. I even thought that myself. I thought I’d be in a constant state of panic about what I’d written.

I got into it when my book Hello World came out, and I needed a website, and a blog was easiest. I just used it as a content management system.

But I think people do, because they don’t know what else they want

Gavin: I got interested in people using blogs, playing with cultural identity, e.g. hamster blogs, dog blogs, etc., and this is a sort of creative writing class blog. These blogs have minute readership.

Q: People think they have to write for an audience. My blog is writing for myself, and it was portable – could access it from anywhere. So part of the problem is that you’re immediately faced by this audience issues. Took me a long time to send a link out to people about my blog.

Sue: You’re interested in vlogging. Do you want to tell us about it?

??: It’s video blogging, but with hypertext. A true blog can’t be a book because you can’t print the links that make sense of it. So a vlog has hyperlinks, and links in the footage itself that bring other content in, people are working on video commenting etc. People are basing it around traditional, old media, in terms of it being news content. It lends itself to that, but it’s more than that. In the way that people are doing blogging as creative writing, vlogging is creative film work.

Kate Pullinger: There’s a ticking bomb, which is the business of privacy, and what it means for everyone to be publicising their lives, such as the undergraduate. For example, Heather Armstrong (Dooce). It’s a huge issue.

Me: No one got fired for blogging, they got fired for doing or saying something stupid. And with privacy, maybe we will have to learn to be more forgiving in future.

Josie: Digital literacy in terms of children and learners understanding the implications of what they are doing is important, but we need teachers and parents to understand this.

And we can bury stuff. We can blog solidly for three years and bury the older stuff. Employers don’t spend hours on this. Stalkers do, but employers don’t.

Sue: We are growing up on the web, we are learning how to do all this stuff. When you learn to write, you gradually learn that there are certain things you don’t write, or don’t show people. Now we need to become literate with the web. Someone I knew a couple of years ago, who is very literate and started teaching, and started blogging about his class as you would tell your friend. And you think ‘Don’t you realise that the students who made your life difficult today will read your comments tonight?’. And people don’t grasp it, it’s naivety.

Q: It’s part of the growth process. And the important thing is often not the host blog (e.g. Slugger O’Toole), but the conversations that they are hosting.

Josie: The use of blogging in the US elections was something that highlighted the fact that blogs weren’t all about personal diaries, and that it could be a professional tool that’s very powerful.

Some of the meetings I go to, if you say a blog is a diary they will shout at you and throw things at your head, because it’s not. It’s a website. The difference is that it’s easy to use. You don’t need to know HTML.

04.17.06
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The challenge of fostering community

I’ve been away for a while, doing some real heavy lifting launching a blog at work. The programme I work on at the BBC, World Have Your Say, launched its blog now just about a month ago.

It’s been a real challenge. The technical stuff is easy, and we’re blessed with great geeks (and I say that as one of them) at the BBC.

The struggle has been two-fold. I’m going to be diplomatic here when I say the first challenge is developing a sense of ownership of this blog, this new media thing, amongst a radio team. Suw would call it adoption.

How is it core to what we do? How does it help us put out two hours of radio everyday? It’s part of my job to sell it to them.

The other challenge is selling it to our listeners. They listen to radio. What does the blog give to them? How does it enhance radio and the global conversation that we’re trying to foster?

If you would have asked me in the middle of last week, I would have said I wasn’t doing a very good job of selling it either to my team or to our listeners. I was learning the hard lesson that Dan Gillmor learned at Bayosphere: Community building is hard.

As Dan said:

Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)

How do I help foster a sense of community using this blog wed to a radio programme with millions of listeners around the world?

Well, it doesn’t happen overnight, and a month is really a short amount of time. And the BBC blogs are being launched rather quietly and are pretty well hidden in the vast digital thicket that is BBC.co.uk. At one time, we had 1800 subsites under that domain.

And we’ve only got so much online billboard space to promote all of the things that are behind our front door.

But the last few weeks have only reinforced my fundamental view that Big Media blogs have to remember they are taking their place in a pretty well established community: The Blogosphere. We’re not top dogs here. We’re in many senses johnny-come-latelys. And my view is that we must participate as equals not arrogant superiors.

I am a blogger just the like millions of other blog writers out there, and I play by the rules of the blogosphere, not the rules of Big Media. My team is joining a global community, and we have to do it with a little bit of humility.

Obey community rules, and the gift economy of linking and quoting will pay you back for good behaviour. It’s starting to work. We’re getting comments pretty regularly now live while we’re on air. Last week, we even had a contributor from Australia send in a phone number while we were on air, wanting to take part in the programme. That’s exciting, and it helps me sell the blog to my team.

We’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m glad to be back blogging. I always say that blogging keeps me closer to my audience than the broadcast model of Old Media. That’s where I want to be. I find having a conversation with my audience much more personally satisfying than talking at them.

04.07.06
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What would audience-driven journalism look like?

There has been an interesting discussion, both online and offline, about audience-driven journalism over the last few weeks. It’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about for my journalism X-project.

Leonard Witt had some ideas about how the open-source movement could inspire a reinvention of journalism (podcast here – audio 4.7MB download). And Jay Rosen of PressThink wanted to kick-start some ideas at BloggerCon IV about what he called, the ‘users know more than we do‘ journalism.

I really liked Jay’s practical approach to it. He’s asking some of the right questions.

  • What kinds of stories can be usefully investigated using open source and collaborative methods?
  • Which user communities are good bets to be interested enough to make it happen?
  • What will it take to start running more trials that could yield compelling and publishable work?
  • What needs to be invented for this kind of journalism to flourish?

Like I said in my previous post, there are some projects and audiences for which this approach is best suited, and there are other stories where quite honestly, traditional methods of journalism and storytelling work just fine. Jay set up his post by having Ken Sands of the The Spokesman-Review in Spokane Washington guest blog.

We know there are local knowledge networks. Should we try to “tap into” them, or is it better to leave them alone until something happens to make partnership possible? Correspondents— we’re familiar with them. But we don’t know how to operate a vast and dispersed network of correspondents, linking hundreds or even thousands. Does anyone?

He has a few ideas: Local sports, transportation watch, weather watch. It’s all local. It’s about things people are passionate about in their own communities.

And I couldn’t agree with Ken more when he says that there’s no traction in the citizen journalism out of mainstream media outlets. Yes, as we’re about to look back a year after the July 7 bombings here in London, everyone remembers the iconic cameraphone pictures. But I think Ken is talking more about community around content rather than the flood of pictures we now get at the BBC during large news events in the UK. Is there a sense of community, a sense of participation in sending off cameraphone pics to large news organisations? I’m with Ken who points to Flickr, YouTube and MySpace.

Those sites work; the mainstream media versions—the industry calls it user-generated content—do not. Why?

I’m going to be doing some thinking out loud about these questions over the next couple of days. But one last thought before Suw and I shut the computers off for the night. We used to talk about broadcast networks, but the future is obviously in social networks. What is the role of the journalist in the age of social networks?

03.27.06
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Changing Media: Final keynote and closing remarks

The distribution of the future

Tamar Kasriel, Henley Centre Headlight Vision.

I’m not a media expert. I did have a stint at the Guardian, but I’ve been at the Henley Centre for nine years, and we try to understand consumer trends.

Was some talk about asking consumers what they want and they ask for faster horses. You can’t ask consumers straight what they want but you can identify trends.

One useful way to think about the future is to see what the trends are now, and then push them, look for the extremes. And what can our response be to those? Try and rehearse what we can do in that scenario so that when the future happens we’ve thought things through and can respond better.

Consumer change and technology are chicken and egg. But any technology has to have a clear benefit in order to take it up. People in this room are not typical – more media savvy, interested in change and complexity, but for the vast majority, if it’s not easy and I can’t see why, I’m not going to do it.

The issues we are trying to grapple with are not new. E.g. 17th C debate on whether Catholic Mass seen by telescope counts. Is that participation?

Era of blind faith, collectivism, command. That has waned, towards individualism. Now moving to reasoned faith, elective, collectivism, contract. Rise of the personal network to navigate these things. Net has been very important in this.

Way we build identity is very complex, and the urge is to simplify. Global homogeneity, diverse locality, cultural boomerangs (stuff that goes away and comes back in a new version), hybrid identity.

World is changing, but every era says that.

Paradox. Time lords vs time slaves. Powerful, in control of out time… but we also end up a slave to time. Money-time trade-off. People willing to spend money to save time. Considering other consumer currencies, info, time, energy, money, space. Not perfectly comparable, but can get a view of how people feel about these resources. People think about money more often, but value time and energy more often.

Always on culture. Pizzled – how you feel when you are talking to someone and they just inexplicably take out their Blackberry and look at it. Pi(ssed off and pu)zzled.

Don’t have weekends anymore in the same way. Great to do chores on the weekend, but our weekends are lost now because we do all the weekday stuff during the weekend. Can be a burn on people.

Impact on news – tyranny of immediacy. Dominance of image culture changes the nature of news.

Going through a revolution in time, comparable to industrial revolution. Prior to the revolution it was about seasonal time, but with a rail network precise time became important, and this was when industrial time happened. now we have a flexible, Dali-esque view of what time can be. Being able to tell the difference between a live event and a time shifted-event becomes difficult.

What happens when time becomes this flexible? Talk about end of prime-time, and it being whenever you want it to be. Already major social changes, such as around the mobile phone, e.g. ‘approximeeting’, where you arrange the meeting on the fly using the mobile phone.

Another paradox. Infinite information vs. simplicity. Infinite amount of information, which is empowering. You can never have too much information, but if you have too much you go insane. The same amount of people say you can’t have too much information, but also they don’t have enough time to process it.

Consumers put up shields and barriers. Consumers don’t want junk mail any more, doesn’t get looked at.

Paradox. Closer to brands vs. distanced from brands. Is this a fantastic opportunity to brands, or are brands just desperately running after consumers who are hiding behind their PVR shield.

Idea that buying a famous brands is good because it ensures quality has declined. Consumers don’t believe that anymore. Not to say that people reject brands, but there is a long-term decline.

We have the tech to move closer to the consumer, brands are saying ‘we’re open’, and when you get up close you find an awful things. Can be dangerous to invite scrutiny.

American Apparel invited a journalist in, but she found out about some malpractice (of a sexual nature).

Some brands might prefer translucent rather than transparent.

Co-creation. Smart, savvy consumer who understands brands. Trust and genuine co-creation hard to create and maintain.

Copernican media revolution vs. commercial redistribution. Is the consumer now sitting in the centre now, or is this just another cycle? Exponential power of consumers, people are increasingly recommending and acting on others’ recommendations.

Democratisation of images. Can create, capture, take pictures. Charged visual culture. More disposable. Important to say you were there, and take a picture. Consumers have a love-hate paradox because we know images can be manipulated but we still value them.

So who’s really running the show? In some ways it feels like just a reorganisation of the big media. You have someone who is able to experiment, create something with an independent DNA, but they get bought by the big media.

In ten years time, the heavyweights will be pretty much the same.

Is this an expanding world? Or shrinking? Diffusion of hubs, wonderful things from round the world. Strong sense of serendipity, following leads, and finding people you’d never otherwise meet. But can create a self-imposed ghetto of taste, that you just find more people like you.

Geography is history vs. local revitalised. Communities of interest, and communities of geography. Location-based services, e.g. bluetooth messages tied to a location. Deepen relationship with physical spaces. Talk to people in shops, at point of decision (i.e. the til). Apartments having their own intranet.

Enhancing human touch vs. eliminating human touch. Older consumers find a lot of digital media very alienating. If your’e less used to it you only use it if you have to. Then others find it a brilliant substitute. But in younger people, it’s not a substitute at all, it is a real relationship.

Real and online worlds blur. People mourning online for victims of Hurricane Katrina was the best way for those people to share their grief. Games are real life, it’s not some sad thing they are doing in their spare time. People raised real money online.

What will humanity feel like? What will it look like? How will you be able to touch your consumers and your customers?

Haptic technology that sends touch over the internet, e.g. lover’s cups – glasses that have coloured LEDs, so when you pick up your glass, their glass will glow and you’ll know when you are both drinking. Or pillows that display the imprint of your partner at a distance as they sleep.

Lots of possibilities. Tendency to pick your favourite scenarios, but it’s worth stretching in all directions including the uncomfortable ones. Not about being right, but it is about being ready.