As a lifestream for a programme its got some value to start to describe the effect of the programme.   Using that stream of comment and annotation as a way to deliver semantic value on the programme itself could create interesting ways into programmes especially as programmes often suffer from a lack of meta-description, a lack of hooks with which to snag you in the long tail of their life (most broadcast stuff seems to disappear into the Long Tail rapidly).

So what could you do?  You could look for the tensions in the data. For example, undertaking term frequency analysis on the tweets and the transcript could show how the programme and the listeners’ experience coincide. You could also start to look at the frequency of the comments themselves, do they relate to the contentious aspects of the programme?  They may be good proxies for “interestingness” in the timeline.  Parsing this data through something like Daytum would provide a first means to test if it is indeed interesting.   

This is all good.  But the thing that has been playing with me since I took part in this was how it brought back a sense of the “watercooler” effect.  That Holy Grail of social phenomenons that define a programme as an event.  In this case however, as the listeners provide a commentary to accompany the programme (like SMS text message tickering on acid especially when viewed in a UI like Monitter), what is being created is a “social TX”, a reason to take part in the original broadcast.  This is critical because as programmes are increasingly subject to time shifting the social ‘value’ is dispersed to.  Bringing people together around a TX enables value to coalesced, the scheduled TX is a trigger and the Good Radio Club is an example of a Proximity Fuze. 

A Proximity Fuze  is a fuze which triggers close to something rather than on impact (and which itself is based on the Doppler Effect) and it strikes me that it could be a useful way to thinking about designing for programmes.  Not sure about the military overtones but I like the idea of proximity being a trigger.  Proximity, nearness, as defining a relationship is nice.  And #goodradioclub is nice because it starts to provide some value to the TX (transmission date) based on your proximity to it.  The twitter feed or #goodradioclub is representation of a Proximity Fuze, a trigger to provide value around a social TX.  The anticipation and involvement of listeners starts to create ‘ripples’ into the programmes and out to other audiences who are at different proximities to the TX.

Of course there are issues. Scaling is a bit messy.  The #goodradioclub exercise on Clever.com was mentioned by Stephen Fry at the top of the programme which meant the ‘club’ was larger than anticipated and it did limit the ability to engage with other people around the content.  But it’s a relatively minor issue.

Building programme experiences around existing social technologies, forcing the ‘overhead’ onto the users (in this case through the use of the hashtag) means you can innovate and be flexible in creating those experiences rather than trying to create bespoke, proprietary experiences. 

Searching for “iplayer (programme name)” you get the most ‘relevant’ search results, in this case an episode of the programme rather than say, the series, as it turns out there is no concept of a “series” as the model for iPlayer is based on pips (programme information pages), now pids (programme IDs), the key thing there being ‘programmes’:

And, this is the view when following that top link for “something special” a cbeebies programme (which my eldest son finds for my youngest):

This is the view from iPlayer for the same search:

To make matters worse when you land from Google the programmes that are presented back as “similar” are not from the series “something special”, they’re not even from the same strand, cbeebies (they’re from cbbc).

It can’t be difficult to resolve the out of date programmes displayed when coming from Google to those within the seven day window can it? 

 

And yet we’re still in a position where one of the main industries that create knowledge, Higher Education, are bound by arcane copyright laws.  I say arcane because there is no reason why they need be.  We have a situation where Bristol University – but one of the Universities I could get stats for but not atypical – spends £376000 on books in 2006/7 or £22 per student and £2 455 847 on serials or £142 per student.  Thats nearly £2.5 million pounds in one year on buying in the knowledge produced mainly by academics funded to do their work by the taxpayer through research bodies like the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

There are approimately 171 Universities and Colleges of Higher Education in the UK.  They won’t all spend as much as Bristol.  But if the average spend was just half of that it would amount to £213 000 750. A lot of money for something where the cost of an open solution would be negligible and would actually be fit for purpose. 

But what really grates is that as a taxpayer and someone involved in research and who likes to knowl what people involved in similar research are doing there’s a big chunk of knowledge that I am excluded from unless I pay for it (again).  It’s copyrighted.  Danah Boyd has written about the frustration of being someone who is essentially doing Public Good and paid to share their knowledge of the world through the research work they’ve done, being tied down to a closed system.  Sure many academics can get around this by publishing drafts of their work or amended versions.  And some Universities are biting back by creating Open Access Repositories such as OpenDOAR (which now has over 1200 listings).  
 

My Tool Box April 2006, originally uploaded by geishaboy500.
Link: marktd: Brands 2.0: Branded Utility – Jack Cheng

There seems to be a belated realisation that comms planning is all well and good but you need to have something decent to communicate and that over time it gets harder and harder to be interesting and communicate well and to enter the world of the individual.  Brands just inherently struggle to find things to talk about in a way that is interesting and believable.  I think this is where some of John Grant’s work on brands as cultural concepts, looking outward rather than than closing down and defining can be useful.  But the digital age requires brands to up the frequency with which they engage and of course engage in a more well, engaging way to cut through to the fragmented groups that come together often only to disperse again as quickly as they formed.  That, combined with peoples ability to ‘read’ marketing’s referential system in more sophisticated ways and of course more cynical ways seems to have led to this "branded utility" meme.  Provide some *value*.  Deliver. Don’t talk, *do*.  Which of course all seems so right for today’s [primarily younger] ‘audiences as co-creators’.  This isn’t of course to the exclusion of other more emotive, ‘fluffier’ stuff as Katie mentions with reference to Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship:

Take Aristotle’s concept of friendship. He proposed three models: friendship based on utility (a friend who provides something useful to us); friendship based on pleasure (we enjoy a friend’s company); and friendship based on virtue or mutual admiration (we find a friend who shares our values).

Whilst the latter are according to Aristotle the most enduring friendships, utility had the least longevity as it was based on a very functional relationship.  And you do need all three.  But from my experience of using Google‘s GTD product suite [and I think it can be called that now], wordpress, AIM in different guises, flickr, del.icio.us  [god and the list goes on.. magnolia, twitter - dammit!, the various extensions to firefox inc performancing and of course the myriad of widgets]… I’m far more likely to develop pleasure and admiration as a result of using those services and consequently utility for me is the driving force in brand engagement.  Services themselves enable a more emotive connection in the social web of things.  So why have we not seen much in the way of branded utility in practice?  I can only really think of the BA Google Earth mashup by agency.com as truly deserving of the name by a non-web business.  I’d love to know why it’s such a struggle to push utility / services through a marketing budget.  I’m imagining that it’s to do with the fact that:

1. you can’t present the outcomes easily and prototyping to pitch to a client is an expensive risk
2. large organisations tend to have strict budget allocations and ‘utility’ probably falls in product areas or even worse between the gaps
3. and of course a lot of clients still don’t "get it".  yadda. though how long have we been hearing that for now?

You seen any good utilities from non-web businesses? Why are they slow to come through? 

And on a similar note I;m going to try to post less stuff that adds little or no value to a conversation and do more stuff that does add value.  The noise may be the signal in development but I’m sensing in planning it’s still mostly noise. With that in mind perhaps we should propose "planning utility" with  the strap-line "more than just words"?  Mr. Richard Reynolds always seemed to me to be that kind of planner.  A do-er planner.

It’s kind of a reverse colnialism isn’t it?  Al Jazeera is now colonising the airwaves with a move to start an English language news channel, having done deals with 83 distributers including Sky, but not it seems Freeview.

Al Jazeera intrigues me.  They had an interview with a senior Al-J rep on the Today programme today – which does not seem to be included on their interview download – where he was quite open about Al-J trying to re-balance the news agenda with news from the South to the North.  And it’s opinionated stuff too with the ‘editorial’ line being openly sympathetic to some of the concerns in the South – not least an aggressive western foreign policy, inequitable GATT terms etc.  That shouldn’t take away from the some of the great ‘objective’ reporting they do do [but i think it probably does at least in the minds of the white middle classes in the West!].

But what intrigues me most is that Al-J is a news broadcaster, a cultural concept, which is becoming increasingly popular at a time when news is struggling to engage people.  Opinions, passion, a POV and a specialism [geography, an 'angle' etc], mark  it out as distinctive which in many ways is what other broadcasters are so unable to do.  Other broadcasters – and I’m thinking primarily of BBC and SKY – tinker with style [sets, to sit on the desk or not?], the ‘metadata’ around the content which allows you to follow a story and see the context to a story but the story, the objectivity if you like, itself remains sacrosanct, untouchable.  Yet here we have a news channel breaking the rules and doing well, selling its stories back into the North. 

In terms of strategy, the Al-J approach it could be argued is on some parallel editorial line to user generated content in general, opinions rather than facts, personality, point-of-view etc.  And blogs are viewed sceptically by hacks because of their subjective, undisciplined style but ultimately that’s what makes good blogs stand out. Is Al-Jazeera the blog broadcaster, the Southern citizen news agency, always destined to be relatively niche, but punch above its weight, be far more engaging to it’s core audience and  innovate editorially?  Maybe the analogy is misplaced, after all in many ways it’s a very traditional broadcaster  [addendum - in fact it seems to be even more traditional then the others in trying to gain a foothold in the English speaking world], but it’s a great challenger ‘brand’.  Must scare the shit out of senior broadcasters here and those that are tied to old [Western ideals] of the Fourth Estate. 

The distributed media malarky allows us to experience and engage with the event in so many different ways as they ‘folded’ back into the event and then existed as a life beyond it.   Of course that brings some teething problems, not least is distributing resources to the edges where the communities have distributed to! Following conversations to manage any potential problems is one of the key issues with an ‘open’ and inclusive media strategy like the one the BBC employed here.    This open approach was exposed somewhat by the use of flickr discussion groups to get answers when the postie scam hit .  It would seem that flickr is the pre-eminent platform for  extending mainstream social experiences online.  Perhaps Flickr’s move from ‘beta’ to ‘gamma’  [lol] is recognition of this fact, that and their re-design.

It’s not just flickr of course.  The big news from the Weekend was simulcasting the event in Second Life.  Despite the PR, actually perhaps because of the PR from the Second Life experiment I’m left a little disappointed by the fact that it seemed so, well, er, dull.  Am I allowed to say that?  The seeming adulation afforded MMOGs is almost cult like and as an outsider looking in it can’t match the hype.  Innovative, sure in the sense that it utilises a different platform to showcase the event.  But where’s the playout from the ‘event’ in game? The ‘ripples’ don’t seem to have a different ‘life’.  And where’s the social innovation in game?  Perhaps I’ve missed something.  Oh. No. There it is, there’s the Daleks!

BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend VirtualFestival uploaded by Louise from the makers of the BBC Second Life event RiversRunRed.   

Perhaps I’m expecting too much but it would have been great if there had been some offline playout of the game at the event [there was a screen apparently].  This could have simply been in the form of  a conversation to develop between those at the offline event and those in game, so that the ‘tension’ between the experiences were exposed introducing a reason for dialogue.  It wouldn’t be easy but a rather crude model like the subservient chicken shows how calls to action from both communities could be initiated.  The big screen relaying the Second Life event exposes messages to the people watching at the offline event "dance like a dalek" etc etc.  There’s a level of sophistication in the creation of the experience that I clearly haven’t had time to work through but you get my gist.  Shortcodes to txt back into the game and send images of "dancing like a dalek" could all work.  It’s just one very simplified thought.  More interesting ideas start to come through in gaming an event itself… cues set in game that people have to solve in the physical environment of the event to determine which acts perform, when, what etc… or making a mainstream viscereal experience akin to that shown by Blast Theory  in Uncle Roy All Around You early last year.  Experience design on that level gets really really exciting. 

spies, originally uploaded by JamesB.

The BBC has opened up its catalogue going back to 1937. Well Done MattB and Tom. It’s a wonderful thing.

I worked in TV as a researcher/AP for the BBC between 1999 and 2002 first on Timewatch [for  a lovely bloke called Tilman Remme] and then in Current Affairs [and much later a short stint at Newsnight]. It’s great to be able to get the info. Though I don’t remember getting contributions from Hitler, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt for this film – my favourite [methinks the 'contributors descriptor is a little generous as it covers production staff, historical figures and interviewees]. I had 3 glorious months at the National Archives in Kew researching this one, my first job for the beeb.   Uncovering the many great stories that came out of the IIWW.  The film couldn’t do justice to the richness of what we found.   Of course there are bound to be issues with the cataloging – not least of which is that I don’t get a credit here grr… Still, you got to love those librarians.  Working diligently, without any of the glamour that most people see as a perk of working at the beeb.  They’re kinda machinic in the way they construct and adhere to strict data protocols.  I suppose in that sense they’re very high level code really.  Respect!

So the BBC is plugging into the world.   It’s all been said before but how great it is to be able to pull out and aggregate content by contributor, date, series, episode, channel etc and work that into bottom up data from other sources like wikipedia entries for shows, presenters, events. 

I see a useful application in this as a social documenting tool.  To be able to visualise the key ‘memes’ in broadcast by the BBC by year and see how that correlated with wider events.  Is the BBC a useful barometer for the zeitgeist?  Does it lead or follow?  Could be quite fascinating…

She then went underground, hiding for weeks in various
cellars while her escape could be organised. Waiting in the
snow-covered woods outside Oslo, she heard her first escape posse being
captured and shot.

On the second attempt Pytt
was concealed beneath a pile of logs on a timber lorry heading for
Sweden; she was accompanied by a lame old judge and a dangerously noisy
baby. The final stage of the journey was a long night’s ski across the
border. All those in the next group to use the route were captured and
killed.

She then went on to be a widely respected dancer and the first Westerner to be taught Tai Chi by a master and bring the art to the UK.  Remarkable, fascinating stuff made all the more wonderful because it is real and because these people, you feel were relatively forgotten, ‘ordinary’ and only ‘extraordinary’ in death.   It makes me extremely humble in these consumerist and often immoral times to read about great lives; the power of the story just makes you feel less of a person but determind to be more.   Radio 4 has cottoned on to this endless source of allegory and memory with Last Word it’s excellent obituaries programme and I’m sure there’s even more that can be made of the genre.  As an aside, it’s slightly ironic and quite sad that we seem to value old age and the physicality of death less than ever, with cemeteries short of space and becoming temporary spaces and more and more ‘retirement’  accomodation being built to remove the aged from  our sight and therefore out of our collective minds. 

Death is also a subject of Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, whose subtitle is "stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable".  And while the analogy is a crass one given what i’ve said, above, I think that we can learn a lot from death in the way that we do business, in the way we conduct our lives.  Certainly Seth has realised the analogy is relevant to brands.  In a chapter on "the remarkability of memories" an author writes that "sometimes being remarkable is about knowing when to move on", like Seinfeld did, in order to preserve a memory.  It’s a task I’ve started to initiate in some workshops now; write you own obituary.  It works to bring a degree of critical reflexivity to a business but also to the people in the room and their own lives.  The general reaction is a desire to be more honest, open and remarkable.  And often to bury something and move on.   

I’ve quickly tried to map some of the dynamics of different ‘community’ mechanisms, partly inspired by Tom’s Model for Mapping Group Activity.  It’s basically aimed at clients and intended as a basis for developing ‘community strategies’ and is a very rough first draft.

What I haven’t done is map offline activity or looked to illustrate the specific dynamics of each system via examples.   It’ll be interesting to see where the offlineactivity ‘sits’ with the online activity and what we can learn from looking at them together.

Thoughts?  Comments? Please annotate the flickr image as you see fit…