With any luck, tomorrow will see the delivery of Christian Crumlish’s book, Designing Social Interfaces, co-written with Erin Malone. I’m really quite excited about getting my own copy and getting my teeth into the lessons it contains. For those who want a more personal learning experience, Christian is running a workshop in London on 9th June. I really wish I could go, but I’ll be in Sweden at the time.
links for 2010-05-20
-
Kevin: Another great visualisation and chart generating site. Upload your data and easily create graphs, maps and other charts.
-
Kevin: It's great when I learn something while I'm doing training. ChartBeat is a great simple web analytics package that allows you to easily see the activity on your site. Referrals, real-time data and 'engagement' all easily available on a rich graphical interface.
-
Kevin: A good summary of a discussion on BBC Radio 4's Media Show talking about the impact of the paywall that The Times will shortly be building around its site. The headline says it all. Is The Times really preparing to lose 90% of its traffic when it puts up the paywall? Will the revenue from 61,000 readers really be enough to offset the revenue from advertising? We shall see soon enough. It's about time that we had experiments and not just assertions. (Having said that, I'm not sure we'll see honesty and transparency about the outcome. The Times did remove itself from the ABCes ahead of this move.)
Fun makes for passionate users
How much enterprise software is truly fun to use? Aarron Walter discusses the importance of fun in his article Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users. It’s a very interesting read with some enlightening examples.
But to take the ball and run with it a bit, I think ‘fun’ is one reason that people who use social media can get so passionate about it. We engage much more with tasks that are fun and enjoyable, and we work better on projects where we are working with people who are fun. Just think about the tasks on your to-do list, and think about the ones that you find fun. I bet they’re the ones you actually want to do!
For me, blogging is fun. Working on a wiki is fun. Setting up a Kickstarter project is fun. Heaven forfend, but I even like playing with numbers in spreadsheets on Google Docs. (Don’t tell anyone, but I love setting up spreadsheets with formulas that suck data from one cell, transform it in some way and then spit out a number in another.)
Putting my numbergeekiness aside, the one thing those tools have in common is the presence of other people. The fun to be had in writing a blog increases the more other people engage with it. Wikis are both productive and fun when you’re working with other people on achieving a shared goal. Kickstarter is fun not just because it offers the opportunity to do cool projects, but because you’re doing that cool project with the support of other people. GoogleDocs allow me to collaborate with other people and even discuss the document in real time whilst we’re working on it.
Other people make things fun. Fun things are things we want to do, and keep on doing. The more we want to do something, the better we get at doing it. The more we enjoy a task, the better we get at doing it, the more efficient and productive we becomes.
Which begs the question: Can we make work more fun? Of course we can. And we should.
links for 2010-05-19
-
Kevin: Google, Sony, Intel and Logitech, will demonstrate technology this week enabling users to flip seamlessly among shows, YouTube videos and home videos on their sets. It's called SmartTV, and while big backers don't guarantee adoption, this is definitely a major move in the "War for the Living Room". With consumers adapting apps on their mobile phones, there is an increasing expectation that previously closed devices should use software much the same way that computers do. With consumers also watching more video content via their computers, both trends are driving adoption of apps for the television set. There is a great stat in this story. There are already 1m internet-enabled TVs, and another 10m will be sold this year. It is estimate that a quarter of all TVs sold in Europe in 2010 will have networking capability.
-
Kevin: Yahoo buys low-cost content producer Associated Content. We've now got Deman Media, Associated Media and SEED all competing in the "low-cost, crowd-sourced content". This is going to be a brutal, hyper-competitive space. I'm not entirely sure what value this adds to Yahoo. As a hedge against long-time rival AOL, it might make sense. However, I just don't see what they stand to gain by entering a market that will be all about cutting costs at any cost.
-
Kevin: A look at five new news websites by Mashable with the conclusion: "Enterprising communities, a DIY culture, mobile devices, and better ways to sort through the flood of information (like semantic web) will be essential to the new ways in which we’ll stay informed each day." Everyblock, Spot.us, Wikileaks, Chicago Now and Fwix. Most of these sites aren't new, but they are trying new things in terms of news and information.
Incentives don’t
I’ve featured Dan Pink talking about incentives before, but this animated version of his talk is so spectacular I thought you’d forgive the repetition.
More Twitter research gives us an insight
Last week I blogged about research by Meeyoung Cha, from Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, and her colleagues that showed on Twitter, the number of followers you have doesn’t correlate to the influence you have.
Corroborating that is research from Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon from the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. According to Shiv Singh, in this second piece of research:
The researchers also analyzed the influence of Twitter users and found that there’s a discrepancy in the relationship between the number of followers and the popularity of someone’s tweets. This basically means that the number of followers is not the only measure of someone’s value.
Singh draw out seven points of interest from the research, some of which are interesting and some of which are blindingly obvious to anyone who’s spent any time on Twitter:
- Twitter users have 4.12 degrees of separation on average
- The reTweet is powerful
- 75% of reTweets happen within an hour of the original Tweet
- Followers != influence
- Trending topics are mainly news headlines or ‘persistent news’
- Only a minority of users have reciprocal relationships, and there are a lot of observers
- ReTweets spread quickly
Read the whole post for the Singh’s full analysis.
It’s good to see researchers digging into the nuts and bolts of social media. As I said about Cha’s work, those of us who’ve been in this area for a while have built up through experience and observation a set of instincts about how things work. We use heuristics to get a sense of how the whole system functions, but like any assumption built from personal experience there are risks that we are wrong. So it’s very valuable to have those assumptions tested by research which can then ground us in evidence rather than gut feeling.
Making time
Amber Naslund writes a good post about how important it is to make time to experiment with social media and to explore what it can do for you. It’s very easy, she points out, to say that we don’t have the time, but “Here’s what you have to face down. You make time for what matters.”
Spot on.
The comments are just as interesting as the post, as people come up with reasons why it’s not just a matter of making time. People are overloaded, too busy, scared to step out of their comfort zone, the skill set required is hard to acquire. It’s easy to come up with excuses why some people won’t take the time to learn social media, but they are just that: excuses.
Here’s the thing: We waste loads of time simply checking our email inboxes. What about if you reduced your time in email and gave that time to social media instead? What about if you went to one less meeting each week? What if you used your phone to check up on Twitter and blogs and such, and used some of that dead time when you’re waiting for other things to happen?
It’s actually very easy to learn about social media. A quick search on Google gives an awful lot of stuff to start reading, even before one starts dipping their toes in the tools themselves. How much can someone learn just by reading round for 10 minutes a day?
“I haven’t had time” is an excuse we all use, but it’s not a reason.
links for 2010-05-15
-
Kevin: Mark Potts looks at the community interaction on the new site Civil Beat in Hawaii. Only subscribers can comment. The site has already tackled the issue of civil unions, which usually would be a cue for a god awful fight on most sites. However, the discussion is polite. It's an interesting model where anyone can read comments but only subscribers can contribute to them.
-
Kevin: Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi talks about using the platform for non-political purposes. "How do we inspire active participation in a project that is non-political, and not related to a crisis?" The key? "To make it work, however, this kind of application requires aggressive marketing and online awareness campaigns, and mixing and matching online and offline initiatives."
links for 2010-05-14
-
Kevin: CEO John Paton of the Journal Register Company is letting his actions speak for themselves. He has adopted a digital first strategy, and he's just announced the appointment of three digital execs to seniors posts.
"The Journal Register Company has adopted a strategy of Digital First,” CEO John Paton said in a statement. “The appointments of Dan, Adam and Jon to these important roles with a focus on digital rather than print are indicative of our commitment to that strategy."
Where are your Facebook privacy settings?
Just in case you have lost track of where all Facebook’s privacy settings are hidden, the New York Times has crated an awesome infographic to shows just how well they are squirrelled away in different corners of the site. It illustrates beautifully just how difficult it has become to manage your privacy in Facebook, showing all 50 settings – which have over 170 options – spread over 10 different pages. Apparently, the company has had an emergency company-wide meeting to discuss the problem. Fingers crossed that some common sense prevails.