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Kevin: The Guardian (my former employer) is trialling hyperlocal advertising system Addiply on its local beatblogs, launched in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff earlier this year. Journalism.co.uk reports: "The system, which offers low cost adverts that can be sold on a weekly or monthly basis with different rates for different sized customers."
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Kevin: PARC researcher Ed Chi has piped Twitter streams through Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) to extract meaning from tweets much as search engines extract meaning from search queries. This gets around the issue of extracting meaning from a limited message, such as a 140 character tweet. He is using this method to create a service called Eddi to help users find relevant information based on their Twitter stream.
How many friends can you make in a week?
The New Scientist reports some research by Susan Jamison-Powell at Sheffield Hallam University which seems to show that prolific bloggers are more popular, regardless of the quality or tone of their posts.
[She] studied the popularity of 75 bloggers on the site Livejournal.com. She looked at the number of friends each blogger had, the number of posts they made, the total number of words written and the overall tone of the posts. She then asked the bloggers to rate how attractive they found each of their peer’s blogs.
She found that the more words a blogger posted, the more friends they had and the higher their attractiveness rating. The tone of their posts – whether they contained mostly positive or negative comments – had no effect.
The BPS goes into a little bit more detail, explaining that the Liverjournalers were invited into a new community and then asked to rate their fellow community members after one week. I’m not sure if this falls within the bounds of Bad Science, but it’s certainly not an accurate reflection of how communities build in the real world.
My first problem is that you just can’t extrapolate from communities on LiveJournal to blogs in general. LiveJournal has always had a different demographic to, say, bloggers using Typepad or WordPress. LiveJournal has always had a gender bias towards women, for example: currently it has 62.5% female and 37.5% male, the rest unspecified. And the bulk of users are between 18 and 34 (with an impressive spike at 30), historically much younger than demographics for other tools.
Furthermore, LiveJournal is culturally different to many other blogs and blogging platforms and has traditionally been the meeting place for people who felt that other platforms were too open for them or who felt disenfranchised by mainstream tools and wanted to be with their peers. LiveJournal, for many, was where you could be yourself and enjoy the company of people like you, no matter how weird others thought you were.
LiveJournal isn’t a typical blogging community and results from studies on LiveJournal can’t be applied to other bloggers.
But furthermore, after only a week of getting to know someone, you have very little information to go on. Those who talk most will almost certainly get higher rankings than those who are quiet simply because they stand out and can easily be remembered. If you are trying to get to know 75 people in just seven days – and you have to ask if that is even possible – you’re going to rank the noisier ones higher just because they are the people you’ve had most exposure to. If you’ve had very little conversation with someone you are bound to rank them near the bottom simply because they are still strangers and humans tend to be stranger-averse.
How would this study have turned out if they had got to know each other over the course of a month? Or six months? Or a year? You know, real human friendship timescales. And how does the nature of the community change how people react to each other? The study doesn’t say what the raison d’être of the community was, and whether these people were gathered around an issue they cared deeply about or were just mooching around online, killing time.
The lesson that this study appears to be teaching is that bloggers should write more, and not worry about quality. Frankly, I call bullshit on the whole thing. The way that we form relationships through blogging is a complex and nuanced process, just like the way that we form friendships offline. We get to know people over time. We decide whether we agree with their points of view, whether we like the way they present themselves, how they interact with others and we build a picture of them that is either attractive or not.
That this study should get headlines in The Telegraph and BusinessWeek shows how poorly social media is still being covered by the mainstream press and how little understanding or critical thinking they do.
We do need a lot more research into the use of social media and particularly its use in the UK. Studies like Jamison-Powell’s, however, do not advance the debate in any useful way.
US paper sets limit for free local articles
In a hint at the thinking behind the New York Times’ paid content strategy, a local paper it owns will allow subscribers to read all news content, but non-subscribers will be asked to pay after viewing a “predetermined number of staff-generated local news articles“. The Times owned Worcester Telegram & Gazette writes:
After users pass that limit, they will be asked to pay a monthly charge or buy a day pass. The price and threshold have not been determined.
The article states that most content on the site will remain free with the pay meter being set only for content produced by the Telegram & Gazette news staff.
This is yet another refinement in the paid content strategies being proposed, and it moves further away from the kind of binary, universal paywall versus free argument. The binary argument makes good copy, a nice bit of media biz argy bargy, but it hasn’t done much to help the failing fortunes of the newspaper business. Besides, most sensible people in the business know that a more sophisticated, hybrid model has a greater chance of success.
I’m not familiar with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The big questions for me are around how much original content they produce on a given day and the competition they face from local radio and television. The bulk of their website will remain free even for non-subscribers. Will the staff content be enough of a draw to get people to pay? We shall see, but it will be great to get some data from an increasing number of experiments so that the paid content discussion moves past some of the faith-based decision making stage.
Enterprise 2.0 Beta
Via Anthony Mayfield, I discovered this video from KS12:
Anthony pulls two ideas out of the video: How our need to assign and take the credit for ideas can mess things up; and how sometimes information should just fade from view as it gets older, rather than being always perfectly preserved.
I pulled out another: That releasing software in beta is an important statement about the underlying attitudes towards innovation and development, and sets the scene psychologically for change and progression. In the Web 2.0 community, the ‘release early, release often’ ethos is well known and frequently used. Start-ups release the most basic version of their software, gather user feedback, watch for emergent behaviour and then develop the next release accordingly. Users are primed by the word ‘beta’ to expect problems – so they are less upset when they occur – and also to expect change. The process doesn’t always go smoothly, but it is a cost-effective way of developing software and web services quickly.
Enterprise really needs to embrace the idea of beta, not just in software development but in their project planning too. The idea that everything has to be perfect at launch, that launch is an end instead of a beginning, and that addressing bugs and flaws after launch is somehow a sign of weakness is an anachronism. I can’t count the number of projects where all the effort has gone into a final deadline and the results of all our hard work withered on the vine because no one thought about what to do with the work we had produced.
This is especially true of social software and social media projects where the tools are evolving faster than even the professionals can keep up. Social media projects of whatever stripe should be be seen as an ongoing process of change as the tools, ideas and culture all slowly mature. It’s much more like cheese that ripens slowly than a souffle that flops if not consumed immediately.
LinkedIn gets a little bit more social
LinkedIn is one of those tools that I almost always showcase in my social media workshops and which often makes an appearance in the strategies I write. It’s a tool that, used cleverly, can go well beyond simply allowing people to build a professional network and can help businesses form relationships too. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has always had a bit of an old-school feel to it, which is not in itself a bad thing, but it’s good to see them now providing more sophisticated functionality around sharing news items. This video explains all:
(Via Adam Tinworth)
Euan Semple: Being Human
Euan Semple always provides food for thought and his contribution so the Social Business Edge conference is no exception.
Being Human at Social Business Edge from Euan Semple on Vimeo.
And the discussion in this related post from earlier in the month is also well worth a look.
links for 2010-04-22
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Kevin: Alan Mutter dispenses some free advice for how newspapers could charge for content. He looks at the current ideas for paywalls but challenges publishers on their paid strategy. He says: "Pick a system, any system. Or make up your own. It won’t matter what pay model publishers choose, unless they produce unique and compelling content, tools or applications that readers can’t find anywhere else."
“Don’t moderate comments” message from High Court
According to Out-Law, Alex Hilton, who runs Labourhome.org, has failed to get a libel case brought against him by Johanna Kaschke over a post written about her by contributor John Gray thrown out by the High Court. Hilton argued that he had no control over Gray’s post and that he should enjoy the same ‘safe harbour’ protection afforded to companies like ISPs or search engines who are not responsible for the content that flows over their networks.
But the High Court ruled that, because Hilton did sometimes exercise editorial control over parts of his site, that his case needed to be heard by a court to fully examine the issue.
Mr Justice Stadlen said that even to fix the spelling in a post could cost the host the protection of Regulation 19 [safe harbour].
“Mr Hilton stated in terms that where a blog is promoted by him he may check the piece for spelling and grammar and make corrections. That in my view arguably goes beyond mere storage of information,” he wrote.
This should concern anyone who runs a blog or other site where users can add content, especially if they moderate contributions, even if just to fix the spelling or filter for spam.
Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons, who publish OUT-LAW.COM, said:
“Even an attempt to filter for profanities or comment spam, if done manually, involves a risk for the publisher. If you want to be sure that you’re not liable for what your users say, the judge is basically saying you need to ignore user contributions completely until you get a complaint.”
“That’s not a new principle,” said Robertson, “but it’s a warning to site owners about how to interpret it. Some owners may think they have less responsibility for user comments than they really do, and they may wrongly assume that a post-moderation policy is completely safe.”
The impact of this ruling on high-volume comment sites and short-term high-volume projects such as a user-lead mash-up advertising campaign, could be huge. It may be that, once this case is heard fully, such sites would have to decide between full moderation and the huge financial costs that incurs, or no moderation at all and the cost in reputation that comes from leaving spam and offensive comments up until someone complains about them. Hm, which do we fancy? Scylla or Charybdis?
Designing for real world social networks
Paul Adams has a great post on how our social networks are comprised of a vast variety of people, but we mainly restrict our interactions to people we already know. Yet most social tools fail to treat these groups – our intimates and our acquaintances – differently. Paul then splits our relationships out into three types:
- Strong ties: People we care deeply about.
- Weak ties: People we are loosely connected to, like friends of friends.
- Temporary ties: People we don’t know, and interact with temporarily.
and goes on to examine what these groups mean for social interaction design. These insights are just as relevant to business social networks as personal ones, yet I’d wager most people designing internal tools aren’t thinking in this much detail about the types of networks they are designing for.
Anyway, this is a really interesting post and well worth reading.
(Via Joshua Porter.)
links for 2010-04-19
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Kevin: One of the issues that comes up time and again in discussions about online community is the issue of anonymity. Some believe that verified identity would automatically improve behaviour. I personally think that anonymity is only part of the problem and often used as a scapegoat for other problems including a lack of editorial vision for social media and editorial content that has little reason to be beyond 'let's start a fight'. However, there is another way beyond verified, real identity. Anonymous identity. This post looks at how such a system could work.
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Kevin: Robert G. Picard fires a shot across the bow of publishers looking to stabilise their businesses by erecting paywalls. "Publishers keep asserting that things will be fine if they can erect pay walls and charge for news online and they argue that governments should provide legal protections for online news so they can make news a viable digital business product.
Their approach is wrong and ignores the fundamental reality that news has never been a commercially viable product because most of the public has been, and remains, unwilling to pay for news. Consequently, news has always been funded with income based on its value for other things."
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Kevin: Rick Martin is setting up a local news site, and he looks at potential revenue streams for the site including geo-targeted advertising (could be easier on mobile with more devices knowing where they are), selling ads against specific tags or categories, content as a way to sell other services such as social media consulting or highlighting sponsors as community supporters. Some good ideas here for people looking to pay for local news coverage.
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Kevin: From the annual State of the (US) News Media report: "The numbers for 2009 reveal just how urgent these questions are becoming. Newspapers, including online, saw ad revenue fall 26% during the year, which brings the total loss over the last three years to 41%.
Local television ad revenue fell 24% in 2009, triple the decline the year before. Radio was off 18%. Magazine ad pages dropped 19%, network TV 7% (and news alone probably more). Online ad revenue over all fell about 5%, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse.
Only cable news among the commercial news sectors did not suffer declining revenue last year."
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Kevin: The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looks at how the mobile phones and the internet have affected news consumption. For me the key take-away and one which I've known for several years: "The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone." Print circulation continues to decline in this environment, and a minotirty of a news websites unique users (about 20% usually) account for 80% of a traffic to a site. "Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day. "
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Kevin: Vadim Lavrusik, a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, looks at 12 things newspapers could do to change their fortune. I definitely agree with his calls to go niche. The internet rewards depth, and while it would be difficult to justify a print product on a narrowly defined subject, the cost of production and distribution of digital content makes the economics work. There are some interesting ideas in the post to differentiate print. I think just as digital should be used more effectively by leveraging its unique strengths, there needs to be more thought about areas where print has unique selling points. There also needs to be thought about the time frames in which digital and print are relevant. Digital can be fast, but it can also be deep in ways that print isn't. Print can provide good medium term analysis or summary information (like The Economist or the The Week.)
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Kevin: The New York Times reports how social media is actually driving TV ratings. It's a good look at the 'dual-screen' experience where people watch TV with either a laptop or a mobile phone. "Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV."
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Kevin: An interesting contrarian view about innovation from Andy Budd. It's actually as much about taking innovative ideas and transferring that thinking to effective product design and marketing. I think probably the most important point by Andy is that people point to innovation rather than changing their own behaviour. As Suw and I often say, you can have clever technology that is still hampered by cultural resistance to change. It's been my experience that most people don't want to change. They want to master a task because they believe that will ensure job security.