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Last year, over 3500 people pledged to support Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over 1200 people added their link to our map mash-up and we got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!
But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech on Wednesday 24 March. We have 197 signatories so far, we just need another 2875, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge and let all your friends know about it.
It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.
Last Friday I wrote a blog post on my own blog about The Impenetrable Layer of Suck and did what I usually do with blog posts these days: I Tweeted it. I saw a few people reTweet it, so thought I’d check my stats. This is what I saw:
I’ve heard many a time from friends at Guardian Technology, who all regularly Tweet links to new articles and blog posts, that Twitter is a greater driver of traffic than Google News. I’ve found it to be true here as well. On days that I Tweet a link, traffic is much, much higher than days I don’t.
I rarely see links from other websites listed in my referral stats, apart from my own site where there’s a feed in the sidebar and weekly roundups. The decline of the trackback is an interesting, and sad, thing. They got so polluted by spammers that they became unworkable for most people and now I rarely see functioning trackbacks. Blogrolls have also fallen into disfavour, probably because they were such a pain to keep up to date and the technology to look after your blogroll didn’t develop much functionality beyond very basic add/delete/sort links.
This is a shame. In the early days of blogging, I felt like I really was a part of this huge network of bloggers, all passionate about the opportunities this new technology gave us, all excited about the democratisation of publishing. Now blogs feel much more isolated from each other, less connected, less like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. More like lone voices howling in the storm.
Twitter brings traffic, as sometimes does Facebook, but it doesn’t make me feel that this blog is connected into a wider network. Whilst information flows through my network, just as it did before, that flow is mostly invisible. Twitter doesn’t show me whose Tweet is sending me the traffic, it’s all just a nameless wall of http://twitter.com. The network has slipped behind a veil.
It’s great that Twitter brings readers, but I miss that sense of connection that my referrals stats used to bring me.
So, how important is Twitter to you, compared to other sources of traffic? Do you get most of your referrals from Twitter? Is Twitter now where you find most of your news?
In Eggs-actly what ARE the chances of a double-yolker? Hanlon points out that young hens tend to produce more double yolks than older hens, and that flocks tend to be of the same age, so six double-yolkers is not an unusual occurrence for a young flock. Further more, double-yolkers are heavier than single yolked eggs, so when the eggs are sorted by weight they will tend to wind up in the same box. So really, a box of six double-yolkers isn’t that much of a surprise.
The second was from WNYC’s RadioLab, a great radio show and podcast from NPR in the States which has now become a must-listen for the gym. I love RadioLab – they cover science stories in an engaging, entertaining and though provoking way. Their programme from Sept 9 last year was called Stochasticity, “a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness”. The first two sections should be compulsory listening for every journalist:
A Very Lucky Wind Laura Buxton, an English girl just shy of ten years old, didn’t realize the strange course her life would take after her red balloon was swept away into the sky. It drifted south over England, bearing a small label that said, “Please send back to Laura Buxton.” What happened next is something you just couldn’t make up – well, you could, but you’d be accused of being absolutely, completely, appallingly unrealistic.
On a journey to find out how we should think about Laura’s story, and luck and chance more generally, Jad and Robert join Deborah Nolan to perform a simple coin-toss experiment. And Jay Koehler, an expert in the role of probability and statistics in law and business, demystifies some of Jad and Robert’s miraculous misconceptions.
And then the first half especially of:
Seeking Patterns Fine. Randomness may govern the world around us, but does it guide US?? Jonah Lehrer joins us to examine one of the most skilled basketball teams ever, the ’82 – ’83 ’76ers, and wonders whether or not the mythical “hot hand” actually exists.
Then we meet Ann Klinestiver of West Virginia, an English teacher who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991. When she began to take a drug to treat her disease, her life changed completely after one fateful day at the casino. Jonah discusses the neurotransmitter dopamine and the work of Wolfram Schultz, whose experiments with monkeys in the 1970s shed light on Ann’s strange addiction and the deep desire for patterns inside us all.
Statistics is something that you constantly see journalists getting wrong. The Bad Science forums are rife with examples of statistics abuse. It’s not surprising, because it’s actually very easy to get statistics wrong: Probability in particular can be very counter-intuitive and assumptions that seem to be common sense are frequently just our brains playing silly buggers with us. Personally, I think that all journalists should have to study statistics, even the freelances, because it’s so easy to get it wrong and so useful when you get it right. But, in the meantime, I’d settle for more people listening to shows like RadioLab and reading blogs like Good Math, Bad Math, Bad Science, or Junk Charts.
Kevin: My takeawy from this post is Iris Chyi's comments. She finds "Her research has consistently found that even while online news use continues growing, its preference lags behind that of traditional media." And she adds: "More research, as opposed to guesswork or wishful thinking, on the perception of news products is essential."
Kevin: paidContent panel discussing paywalls with Jacob Weisberg of Slate, Politico co-founder and Editor-in-Chief John Harris, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau and Bloomberg Chief Content Officer Norm Pearlstine. Paywalls are a practial issue not an ideological one. Bloomberg's Perlstine said: "“It’s supply and demand. If you can suspend those laws, you might as well try. But our own experience is that you can charge a lot of money from an audience that has a special need for your content. The report on where all the best football players are going to college is important to some people. But most general news is not sufficiently distinct. There are some smart people who are betting on it. It seems to me more out of desperation than from an actual business plan.”
Kevin: Mark Glaser writes: "In the view of some traditional media execs, Google is a digital vampire or a parasite or tech tapeworm using someone else's content to profit. As that rhetoric heated up in the past year, Google has responded not with equal amounts of invective but with entreaties to help publishers." It's the text that accompanies and in-depth interview with Google's Krishna Bharat and Josh Coehn about Google News. I agree with Mark's assessment in terms of response to some pretty rough punches thrown their way by newspapers. Google is doing well so can afford to turn the other cheek. It's a good interview and well worth watching.
Kevin: The Washington Post reports: "The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity." How Google and the NSA might cooperate isn't clear. One thing I would say from this piece and others is that Google's threat to quit China has brought attention to cyber-attacks originating from China (whether the Chinese government is involved is difficult to prove but implied by subtle details in Google's announcement).
Kevin: A great head-to-head comparison of Data.gov and the recently launched Data.gov.uk (a launch that I covered for the Guardian). The verdict: "While Data.gov.uk was just recently launched publicly, it has many advantages over Data.gov. It's easier to use and geared towards developers, who, let's face it, are the only ones who are going to do more with the data than open it up in Excel. Data.gov has some catching up to do. Both still have a long way to go. Both are good steps in the right direction."
For any of you interested in intranets, I’m going to be talking at the IntraTeam conference in Copenhagen at the beginning of March. I’m onstage at 3.10pm on Wednesday 3rd, talking about email and how we can use social media to shift the burden of certain types of communication away from email and onto more suitable platforms.
If you’re going to be there, please do come and say hello if you see me!
Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.
Brass predicted that unless Microsoft was able to overcome this dysfunctional corporate culture and regained “its creative spark” that it might not have much of a future. In highlighting Brass’ piece, Steve wrote in his tweet:
Every behavior that’s killing Microsoft, I’ve seen at a newspaper company. http://bit.ly/9W30W8
Kevin: US streaming video site Hulu marks a milestone, having served 1bn stream. Now, it will be exploring paid models with offering of a $4.99 to get rid of the ads or $14.99 for seasons of shows and a back catalogue.
Kevin: "Outspoken billionaire cum provocateur Mark Cuban charged Google and other content aggregators Tuesday of being freeloaders — or worse. "The word that comes to mind is vampires," he said. "When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood."
Kevin: Miguel Helft from the NYTimes writes: "YouTube said last month that it would dip its toes into the digital movie rental business with five independent films tied to the Sundance Film Festival. The company said the five films, which were available for 10 days, received a combined 2,684 views.
Kevin: Peter Kirwan (who I shared a stage with last week at the Frontline Club in London) writes: :"If the new rules of media end up writ large on tablet devices, a series of battles will need to be fought and won. The biggest conflict of all pits hardware and software companies, mobile operators and content producers against one another. Each wants the lion's share of the value chain." Interesting piece.
Kevin: My colleague Steve Busfield at the Guardian writes: "After a little prompting Rupert Murdoch gave it straight when asked what he thought of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's vision of a future without paywalls: "I think that sounds like BS to me." Murdoch says in announcing News Corp's $254m profits for the last three months of 2009: "Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things digital. We're on the cusp of a digital revolution from which our shareholders will profit handsomely." Shareholders will profit handsomely. Murdoch will profit handsomely. Make no mistake fellow journalists, you will not. Polish up your CVs. Launch your own projects. Murdoch's digital future won't mean job security or living wages for you.
Kevin: I think Peter Preston raises some important issues in this piece from the Media Guardian. I will agree with him that the paywall and paid content discussion has been largely ideological and not strategic. I think that even the use of the term paywall creates a binary position when really we've got a spectrum of options. I do think that newspapers will be bundled with other services such as pay TV. However, I think Preston makes some imperfect comparisons when he looks at the Optimum Cable-Newsday bundle and speculative bundles that Rupert Murdoch might create with Sky TV and News International.
Kevin: Robert Wright, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, believes that technology has made special interests more powerful in the US to the point of almost making the US ungovernable. "This generation of political technology — Special Interest 2.0 — has made Obama’s job a lot harder." Has technology turned the US into a direct democracy, or a much larger version of the failing state of California? It's an interesting argument that I'm not sure I agree with.
Kevin: Jake Dobkin, the publisher and co-founder of Gothamist, has some very harsh words for The New York Times. "I don't think a paper that loses millions of dollars a year and funds itself by taking extortionary loans from plutocratic Mexican billionaires can be said to be competing in anything, Metro or otherwise. My feeling is you only get to congratulate yourself if you produce a great product and make money doing it— you don't get any points for doing just the first half. And that doesn't just go for you guys— I don't think any magazine or newspaper that supports itself by sucking on the teat of some old rich guy (or his heirs!) should be giving anyone else advice." He says that goes doubly in terms of local. (What about City Room?)
Kevin: Robert Andrews at paidContent.org.uk highlights a brilliant bit of research on the turning point in the rise of the freesheets. Nearly half of the freesheets that have launched have shut. As Robert says, it's some fantastic research by Piet Bakker at Hogeschool Utrecht.
Kevin: Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a great example of Mark Cuban being a bit hypocritical about calling Google and aggregators vampires when Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, which Cuban has invested in, does many of the same things that Cuban accuses the bloodsuckers of doing. There is a lot of this kind of talk by media incumbents who really play both sides of the game. Danny isn't the only person to call Cuban out on this. It's important to do seeing as many in the legacy media are using their bully pulpits to call for changes in competition law to support their businesses. Emerging media companies don't have the platforms to counter this kind of lobbying.
Kevin: Staci D. Kramer at paidContent.org publishes a memo sent to the affiliates with Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz's Journalism Online LLC paid content company. The memo adds a little more detail. "Most are using some version of the metered model, though all are deploying their own variations. For example, one is combining the metered approach with the segmenting option; another is combining the out-of-market targeting with the meter; and a non-profit affiliate will combine the meter with a support campaign."
Kevin: Telegraph "New strategy will focus on content, commerce and clubs – not user figures, says Telegraph Media Group digital editor" Ed Roussel says that the strategy of linking increasing traffice to increasing ad revenues "broke around March 2008". Roussel heads up The Telegraph's Project Euston, "We have done it so that any one of our over 500 journalists who has a brilliant idea can apply for funding and other resource, and try to make it a reality." Smart programme, but as a friend says, it comes after hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs. Sad that it had to come to this.
Kevin: Jason Fry suggests that generalist advice for writing on the web should come with a caveat" "Take stuff like this with a boulder of salt. Such well-meaning advice oversimplifies our craft, and makes the mistake of assuming Web readers are all alike."
There are three main areas of practice for social media that your company (or you) should be thinking about: listening, connecting, publishing. From these three areas, you can build out your usage of the tools, thread your information networks to feed and be fed, and align your resources for execution. There are many varied strategies you can execute using these toolsets. There are many different tools you can consider employing for your efforts. But that’s the basic structure: listening, connecting, publishing.
This framework is ostensibly about external social media usage, but these concepts are just as important internally:
Listen to what staff what and need, and allow staff to listen to each other
Provide meaningful ways for staff to connect with each other
Allow staff to publish information in a way that makes sense to them
Kevin: There isn't a lot new in this report regarding Google's threat to quit China if it's nto allowed to operate an uncensored search engine. However, it does add some perspectives from inside of China. That's always useful.
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