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Kevin: Mathew Ingram takes issue with Steve Jobs of Apple who has said that he believes that creating an iTunes marketplace for news is possible. This might work in terms of selling news applications, but it's not going to work for individual news stories. As Mathew points (and several others before him), news is not the same as music or movies. People don't buy a news story to read over and over again as they listen to a song over and over again. People have free options, which they have said they would choose over paid options. The market supportable price would most like be "pennies, or even fractions of pennies, instead of dollars". News orgs would also be handing over control to Apple. It is an act of delusion, desperation or probably both.
links for 2010-06-02
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Kevin: Daniel Bennett looks at some of the problems with traditional content analysis in terms of blogs and their use of content from traditional media, and vice versa. Daniel also refers to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism suggesting that blogs did very little original reporting, but he quotes Amy Gahran in highlighting flaws with the analysis because it focused on a part of the blogosphere that discussed mainstream news organisations. Other studies have suffered from selection bias and a very narrow definition of news such that they defined news as what newspapers cover. If you looked at other blogs, especially ones focused on niche coverage areas, blogs do often carry original information and analysis. It's one of the problems in defining the blogosphere in a monolithic way. Blogs cover a range of topics, not just traditional news. Focusing on that misses a lot of the complexity in the content published on blogs.
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Kevin: Lots of fuzzy thinking from David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. To accuse web 'evangelists' of dogmatic, monolithic thinking and then lob grendades at the 'information wants to be free' brigade shows how polarised this discussion has become. The New Yorker is not a general news publication. It is a very high production value magazine. It is premium content, and I have gladly paid for it in the past. (I'm less willing to pay for its price here in the UK.) Comparing The New Yorker to almost any newspaper is like comparing a Porsche to mass produced family sedan. They are two entirely different beasts, and the economic models that sustain them will be different.
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Kevin: Responding to an article by New York Times' journalist Nicholas Carr, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb looks at inline links. Are they a detriment, a distraction, a problem for comprehension? Marshall says: "aybe links could be added tastefully and well to the footer of posts. It might not be as good for machines, but it could be better for the human brain. Linking may be what blogging is largely about – but let's be honest: if links to read more where always found and well-placed at the end of articles, wouldn't you get used to it as a reader?"
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Kevin: Onnik Krikorian looks at how mobile phones, especially ones with multimedia capabilities, are being used for reporting. He highlights the Nokia N82, the phone I have, and the work of Guy Degen in Africa and the Caucasus with such a phone.
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Kevin: An article looking at the global trends in mobile TV. "Free, on-the-go viewing is common just about everywhere except the United States and Europe, where operator resistance and a maze of conflicting technical standards and program licensing hurdles have kept the technology out of the global mainstream." It looks like it is gaining some critical mass in terms of key players in the US market to begin a roll out with major operators in that space coming together to pool spectrum (a major issue in developed markets) to provide mobile TV.
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Kevin: Andy Carvin talks about an app for the iPhone and Android phones that allows people to upload reports about the oil washing ashore from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. The app was developed by the CrisisCommons coalition of volunteer software developers. "Oil Reporter lets you to snap a picture of the oil or tar ball, describe the context and offer additional details regarding wildlife and wetlands impact. When you submit your report, the app detects your location using your phone’s GPS, so your report can be pinpointed on a map."
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Kevin: I don't want to focus on the politics of this piece but rather a good overview of the use of free media tools by activists trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. There are a lot of low-cost and no-cost tools here that could easily be used by media organisations. It is really surprising to me that media organisations, especially ones struggling with their finances, continue to favour high-cost, proprietary solutions. Five years ago I might have understood because low-cost tools lacked the ease of use of some proprietary solutions. Now, the competitive advantage of proprietary solutions is much less compelling, especially on cost.
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Kevin: Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, pulls out another slide from Google Chief Economist Hal Varian's recent presentation about media economics. This one looks at the US advertising market and compares the share of total spend of US advertising. Fred says that the slide showing the internet growing from zero to 5% of US advertising spend in a decade is bullish.
I see other interesting elements of this graph. Look at how the growth in TV and cable ad share almost mirrors the steady decline of newspaper advertising since 1949. What is really interesting is how the decline in newspaper advertising plateaus in the first part of the 1970s only to accelerate in the latter 70s and early 80s, which was the arrival of cable TV in the US. Again, it's another sign that the internet isn't solely responsible for papers' woes.
Participatory media: Encouraging people to ‘level up’
Derek Powazek has an interesting analysis of the quirky quiz show on US public radio (NPR) called Wait, Wait Don’t Tell me and looks at the lessons the show provides in developing participatory media projects. What I like about this post is that he’s looking at a relatively traditional media format, the radio quiz show, through a different lens, from the point of view not of radio but of social media and gaming. I like from the start how he re-defines the term “crowdsourcing”.
For my purposes, it means collaborating with the people who used to be the silent audience to make something better than you could make alone.
I’m going to focus on two of his points and let you read the rest of the post to get the full monty. I couldn’t agree more with his second point about structuring input. You have to give crowds a goal, something to aim for.
Too many crowdsourced projects create a blank canvas and have a rather utopian view that the crowd will create a masterpiece. It just doesn’t work like that. You’ll most likely get obscene graffiti rather than a Van Gogh because not a lot of people engage with something when it isn’t clear what they are engaging with. A vacuum encourages vandals. They assume that no one is looking after your particular corner of the internet and will usually start trying to sell Viagra if you’re lucky. I still hear Field of Dreams strategies at conferences, a “build it and they will come” ethos that was discredited by anyone with credibility a decade ago. (If someone espouses such a strategy and dresses up with a lot of buzzwords stressed to impress, run away. They really are just snake oil salesman.)
I think Derek makes another good point when he says “Encourage the audience to level up”. Again, this is taking a concept from gaming and applying it to participatory media. Most people still passively consume media (although many more people are sharing and recommending media). It’s often referred to as the user-generated content pyramid or the 1-9-90 rule (although this might be changing). A participatory media project or service should give “new users a clear path, limited tools, and an awareness of that those on the next level can do”, Derek says.
Too often, media create crowdsourced projects that are akin to bad dates, they are all about us. It’s focused on what we, the media, not what we, the people, get out of it. As I’ve been saying for several years now, if user-generated content plays actually provide value to users, not just media outlets, then more people will participate. Creating levels for users and clear benefits for them as they contribute more is one solid strategy for achieving greater participation and better results.
Saying goodbye to Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise blog
Last week, my discussions with Computer Weekly’s new editor ground to a halt and the decision was made to close the blog. This was my last blog post there.
I’m sad to say that this will be my last post here on Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise. The sums, apparently, no longer add up, so I’m afraid I must bid you farewell. I don’t know what’s going to happen here, whether someone else will take over or whether the archives will be preserved in aspic. But I do know that I’m sad to see the blog go and will miss it.
It’s been a really great time writing here. I’ve read a lot, learnt a lot, written a lot, and met some lovely people. So thank you for reading, for being a part of this experience with me. If you want to carry on reading my stuff, I’ll now go back to writing regularly on my own blog, Strange Attractor so please do feel free to join myself and co-author Kevin Anderson over there. And if any of you fancy hiring me, feel free to get in touch.
There’s more to say about all this, particularly as it pertains to wider industry trends, but I’ll leave that for another blog post.
Luckily for you, oh Strange Attractor reader, this does now mean that I’ll be back blogging here much more often. Kev will be pleased! (I think he’s been feeling a little lonely here the last few months…!)
links for 2010-05-27
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The Sunlight Foundation in the US announces winners of its digital design competition. "Submissions ranged from an impressive redesign of the IRS to a brilliant infographic showing how a bill becomes a law, to scrollable guide to the Senate, to an inspired UI redesign of the Social Security Administration."
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Kevin: Mark Sweeney of The Guardian writes: "The tie-up with Facebook and Twitter, which will allow iPlayer users to recommend programming to their friends as long as they log into the BBC website first, forms part of a strategy to make the service more social.
However, users will have to sign up to the BBC's own website ID service, already used for posting comments on the site, so that the corporation can maintain a "complete social eco-system" with iPlayer users. The corporation has more than one million users already signed up to BBC ID." -
Kevin: A Dubai-based public relations agency, Spot On PR, says that there are more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers. There are 15m Facebook users and newspapers have a circulation of 14m.
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Kevin: The amazing data viz people at Gapminder release an Adobe Air app to explore the data and visualisations at Gapminder.
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Kevin: A good overview of a report by business and technology analysts Ovum by Laura Oliver at Journalism.co.uk. "News and magazine publishers should instead be developing products and a workflow that caters for the iPad as just one of a range of digital and non-digital readers, says the Reformatting News & Magazine Media report." The iPad is part of a multi-platform strategy, not a single solution for all that ails traditional publishers.
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Kevin: A very clear post on how to use Processing both to gather data and to create simple visualisations. This is an excellent tutorial walking you through the data collection and also the visualisation of the data. Highly recommended. I've tried Processing before, but this will help me understand it much more.
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Kevin: Mark Potts writes about the porous paywall at the Wall Street Journal. He also wonders why it would have been cheaper for him to subscribe both to the website and to the print edition. (My guess is that print ads are still far more lucrative to the Journal than online advertising.) This is an interesting post that covers a lot of issues about paywalls, pricing and also the relaxed attitude that newspaper sales teams have towards subscribers. Well worth a read.
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Kevin: Excellent piece from Patrick Smith comparing the nascent market for media apps with RSS feeds and either online or application-based readers. He doesn't have a lot to say positively about smartphone and iPad apps. RSS is an invisible technology for mot news consumers. They aren't even aware of it but use it in a number of applications. I think Patrick's point at the end is intelligent and nuanced: "Of course, the everyday Man On The Clapham Omnibus doesn’t care or want to know about RSS, much less mobile apps that create a mobile version of their OPML file. But Journalism.co.uk readers are media professionals – and I’d wager that most of you are capable of using free or cheap software to create a mobile news experience that no branded premium app can match."
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Kevin: What I call the 'war for the living room' is definitely getting more interesting. With so much video shifting to IP-based delivery, it's suddenly addressable, findable and sharable in a way that TV hasn't been before. Definitely worth watching these videos to see what kind of features these startups are pursuing. They are definitely the 'Davids' in this battle with the likes of Sony, Intel, Logitech and Google teaming up for GoogleTV and Yahoo already having a presence on other connected sets, but features tend to be poached from these startups. Look to the edges for the innovation.
Life is not a marathon, it’s a series of sprints
If you can get past the slightly rambling intro, this conversation between Jonathan Fields and Tony Schwartz is a fascinating look at what’s wrong with the way we currently tend to work. It really starts to get interesting about 8 minutes in.
Although very focused on American business and culture, pretty much everything they say relates to British and European work culture.
One important idea they discuss, and something I’ve found essential myself, is the idea of pulsing or sprinting when working: to focus for a while and then relax for a bit. This idea is common in athletics, where it’s called the work-rest ratio: “It’s as important to renew energy as it is to spend energy if [you] want to be a consistently great [athletics] performer.”
We forget too easily that the brain is an organ that requires periods of replenishment as much as muscles do. If you work your muscles too hard, they ache, so we learn very early on not to overdo it. Yet we expect our brain to perform at maximum capacity, consistently, throughout our workday. It’s just not possible, yet we don’t allow for this fact in the way that we work.
Schwartz also says, “It’s not the number of hours people work that matters, it’s the value they produce during the hours they work, so stop worrying about how many hours that person spends at their desk, and start figuring out, What can I do to help this person design his life so that when he’s working or she’s working, she’s really working?”
To me this is the essence of what social media is in business is all about. We, as humans, work better when we are socially connected. It fulfils a fundamental human need to be part of a group whose whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. Social media also provides ways to communicate and collaborate more effectively and more easily, to benefit from the wisdom in the crowd. As we become more enmeshed in our community, so our ability to solve problems by drawing upon the resources of that community increases.
Social media is, at the moment, only doing a fraction of what it could for business. It’s an area full of potential and as we start to marry technology, psychology, business and human nature together, we are beginning to find ways to unlock our potential, not just as individuals but as members of a huge social gestalt.
Most businesses using social media at the moment are dabbling, going for the easy, obvious wins like marketing or some internal Wikipedia clone. We need more business executives to be brave, to think about their business as a multi-human organism that has its own needs and that isn’t being properly fed by current business practices and cultures.
When I look at what could be done, how we could use social media to really change our work environments in to something more effective, more enjoyable, I really do think we have a long, long road ahead of us. Change is often slow and incremental. We need some businesses to take a deep breath and leap, to remake their internal culture, to be more human, using social media as the agent of change.
But ultimately, I think what we’ll see is the old cultures dying off as new, nimble, socially aware businesses rise up in their stead. This new era of socially capable business is only just now dawning.
Conflict of interest: Success vs the user
I’m very wary of what sort of metrics and definitions of success are used to decide whether a project is working or not. To often, the wrong metrics and definitions are used, resulting in bad managerial decisions that are based on flawed assumptions.
A couple of good posts about how metrics and definitions of success (and, therefore, business models) can work against the user: OKCupid talks about why you should never pay for online dating, and Joshua Porter points out a paragraph in one of Mike Davidson’s posts which explains why companies’ iPhone/iPad apps are often better than their websites. In short, on a mobile app they don’t have the opportunity to finagle the user experience to artificially bump up their metrics.
In both cases, you have a situation where the metrics and definitions of success upon which the business model relies distort the user experience by forcing them to take actions which are not necessarily in their best interests. Indeed in these cases, a swift and satisfying experience for the user is damaging to the business providing it.
When you’re putting together a social media project, think first about what the most beneficial outcome for your users would be. Then figure out it can form the basis of a business model (hint: your income/ROI may be orthogonal to your desired user outcome) and then how that can be measured.
Do not start with a metric, build a business model on top of it, and then force the user to have a shoddy experience for the sake of your bottom line. And yes, this applies just as much to enterprise social media as any other sort. Don’t start thinking that ‘number of edits’ on a wiki is a definition of success, because that just means you’ll push people into more pointless editing and will take your focus of signs of real success, e.g. people being able to achieve their goals more quickly and more efficiently.
How offline social networking works
This is a great video explaining how the ‘Widower effect’ works, and how it applies to all offline social networks. In short, what you do and what happens to you is affected by more than just the people around you, but also the people around them… and the people around them.
This is essential information for anyone working on the adoption of social media in business.
Hat tip to Adam Tinworth.
Google to add Blogger to Google Apps
Google have announced that they are adding a raft of tools to Google Apps, including Blogger. Perhaps it’s a sign that Blogger is growing up, although they’ll need to develop it much further for it to really compete with WordPress, but it is certainly better than an awful lot of so-called enterprise blogging systems.
The addition of Blogger to the Google Apps infrastructure will make it trivially easy to create and maintain internal blogs for businesses who are not interested in running their own intranet servers. This makes the social media intranet much easier for all types of business and could be an important move for the wider adoption of blogs in business.
Al Jazeera Unplugged: Kaiser Kuo on China
This is a live blog. It may contain grammatical errors, but I tried to be as true to the essence of the comments as possible?
Google’s announcement in January that it would shut down rather than continue to submit to censorship in China. It created a lot of column inches about foreign businesses operating in China and also about cybersecurity.
Kaiser believes that focusing on censorship and The Great Firewall in China is actually crippling our ability to deal with China. It’s a too convenient narrative. He used the image of Sergey Brin standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen? Square. The Chinese internet is very robust and interesting and deserves attention in its own right. Quoting a Chinese scholar, he says that The Great Firewall is being seen as the Iron Curtain 2.0. The US government is sending very clear messages by referring to this The Great Firewall as another Iron Curtain.
We have this image of Chinese netizens as a group of skinny patriotic hackers or cosmopolitan aspiring democrats. Often, he says that the reality is somewhere in between. Chinese rarely go outside of China to see content. They very rarely bump into The Great Firewall, although Twitter, YouTube and other western sites are blocked. He finds that regrettable. They often bump into self-discipline censorship. Any site whatsoever will receive from any number of ministries what the provisos on content. They will redact words or ask you to close accounts. If companies don’t comply, they can face penalties all the way up to being shut down.
However, the focus on censorship obscures the development of technology and the internet in China. There are 404m internet users in China, more users than people in the US. There are 800m mobile handset subscribers in China. There are companies such as the instant messaging service QQ, which has 80% of all internet users. The number of accounts, because of multiple accounts by individuals, dwarfs the number of internet users in China.
The internet in China can be described more as an entertainment super-highway rather than an information super-highway. In the last two or three years, internet censorship has become more draconian in China. More sites have been blocked, and the restrictions on domestic sites has become more onerous. At the same time, in recent years, the internet has emerged as a full fledged public sphere in Chinese life, something that has never existed in China.
There is discussion about issues that are assumed to be off limits, but there is a great level of creativity to conduct these discussions. Officials at all levels of government are constantly taking the temperature of online opinion. You see policy decisions changing in response to online public opinion. A picture was taken and posted online of an official wearing a watch and smoking a cigarette “clearly out of his pay grade”. The official was jailed.
A woman was accosted by a couple of men and one was a party official. She stabbed the men and killed them, but there was such an outcry online that she wasn’t prosecuted. We are seeing a real development of a public sphere in China. When we focus solely on censorship, then we miss this phenomenon.
Everyone here wants to advance internet freedom in China, and Kaiser is quick to say that he supports it. But when the US government that it is dedicating millions of dollars to support internet censorship circumvention technologies, many people changed their minds about the official party line. Some liberal Chinese users came to accept the view that the internet was being used for imperialism. Planting the American flag on this operation might have backfired.
The development of the Chinese internet will eventually overwhelm censors. These freedoms should be taken from within. They cannot be granted from without.
He applauds private organisations and companies working to help create that change, but to paraphrase Kaiser, government involvement brings baggage.