Tom refers to Instapaper in his tweet but I think this tool is illustrative of a broader move toward web services that create value from an ecosystem.

Instapaper relies on:

• our desire to defer reading to a time when we’re not as connected, not as distracted.
• easily ‘bookmarking’ stuff we we come across

Without being plugged in to the stuff we read, where we read it, and also spitting out the stuff into the spaces where we want to read it it wouldn’t work.  This is not a destination service so much as a distributed service, which exists in different states in lots of places such as on my mobile as Insta Fetch, an app made by a third party.

The only way to achieve this sort of distributed service is to have it as an API, a coral reef that people can build on and that is trusted and used because of it’s underlying functionality, in this case taking URLs and making the text readable offline on a platform of your choice.  Your platform is the web (or the internet in many cases).

This gets interesting as it starts to allow micro-economies to develop around experiences. For example I have set up my Pinboard account (a barely social bookmarking service) to save as “Read Later” any URLs in the tweets that I favourite.  I tend the use the twitter ‘favourite’ functionality as a means to bookmark because it’s easier than resolving the URL to save in my time when I’m out and only have 3G connectivity. The pinboard read later items are then polled by Instapaper.

And every week I print out 24, 000 of those URL words to read over the weekend.  I get my own personal newspaper every week.

This ecosystem creates value.  And what would extend this ecosystem and this move to a paper, that has a bit more attention longevity than a screen, is if this newspaper could itself be a URL (or have a URI) which I could share (instapaper doesn’t provide the printout as a defined URL).  Stickybits allocates barcodes to things and so rather than the URL for the newspaper I could use stickybits barcode.  It’s a bit of a stretch, but then I have a means to share my newspaper, or even create a newspaper of shared favourites from my peers where any comments can be aggregated. This is essence is the automated newspaper for friends that I’d like to see Newspaperclub facilitate.

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. 

I’m tiring of social networking and social media in general, the Publicness of it, not the performing because that becomes second nature, but the very exposure makes me value the boundaries of Privacy and the personal all the more. Surely, any social network should build on relationships that pertain to the ‘service’ or the ‘proposition’ that your service supports and allows you to build up from there, exploring new contacts from what the service provides – travel, crafting, hacking, even GTD amongst project contacts etc. Not doing so reduces all relationships to a base exchange and conflates the qualities that make them relationships at all.

So, if you’ve received an invite from me, sorry.  Kick Quechup.

Broadcast:

Here:

• The value is intrinsic to the media itself e.g. a TV programme and there’s a simple general revenue model for it to work [subscription or ads - based on viewing figures proxied by time of day etc.]
• The rights framework is built with that in mind, the rights holders paid for their bit of the media etc. and if the distributor cannot control supply through the medium e.g. decoder then the media must be controlled e.g. DRM
• The primary constraint here is limited supply.  The legal and political framework only allow for a small number of ‘broadcasters’ and to get involved in that is expensive and risky and consequently the barriers to entry are high.
• Any ‘sociality’ around the media is defined by either ‘locally’ produced feedback loops around say the [cliched] water cooler or, more abstractly, as a feedback loop through the media, in say TV guides or reviews.

Networked:

Here the:

• Media value is increasingly defined through the ‘sociality’ of the media itself, that is the ‘links’ that serve to define it in the ecosystem, rather than in the asset itself.
• Consequently value is distributed with the media [which is the case in the broadcast model only in the broadcast model that was pretty much everyone or everyone divided by x]
• The feedback loops are key in defining the value of the media and these loops are not constrained by space or place but play out through them – so you get feedback in the form of recommendation systems that are very public.
• Nor are these feedback loops constrained by time and the physical limitations in the broadcast model.  The loops are ‘immediate’ and are on the whole very ‘transferable’, contained within URLs or even in chat histories via AIM etc.   
• Neither are the feedback loops defined by formal hierarchy – informal [digg] mixes with formal, organised feedback [metacritic] as defined by the status of the reviewer.
• Advertising is the main means through which to generate revenue but this revenue may not fall to the media creator / owner as the media is copied, distributed and published elsewhere.
• Policing this environment is virtually impossible although community driven ‘social  policing’  through  individual reporting can be highly effective.

Of course trhese are two polarised ideals and the reality [at present, before IPTV] is we live with a mix – with some media being bigger than others, or at least more social or popular.  But what I’m getting at is that value is driven by the ‘ghost-like’ relations of links, by the ‘communicative morass’ rather than the media itself.  Blogs, AIM have their own place in that mix that can be defined by speed and fixity.  Blog and link aggregators are the nodes, akin to the FTSE, there to be gamed and played once measured.   AIM, txt, the more intricate, ‘local’ and immediate narrative that is often ephermeral, disappearing as quickly as it came but no less important for that.  Services like Twitter and Dodgeball only serve to facilitate and play on this communicative need.  And as more metadata, links, and  narratives come into existence so media must adapt to play out with them in the form of feedback loops.

However, many people I speak to who are involved in media production are still fixated on the media itself, which of course has to be brilliant but  is just part of the ‘design’ for creating successful genuinely ‘new media’ that pays.  The audience are now more integral than ever to the proposition and how it plays out.  Steven B Johnson sums this up in Emergence from 1991:

"The most significant thing for the web.. is not its capacity to stream high-quality video images or booming surround sound; indeed, it’s quite possible that the actual content of the convergence will arrive via some other transmission platform.  Instead, the web will contribute the metadata that enables these clusters to self-organize. it will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behaviour, and instead of those patterns being restricted to the invisible gaze of Madison Avenue and TRW, consumers will be able to tap into that pool themselves to create communal maps of all the entertainment and data available online." [Steven Berlin Johnson 1991 Emergence p220].

All pretty basic stuff now but quiet prescient all the same and ahead of its time.  In talking through the implications of this nascent ecosystem to indies etc. they inevitably want to know how they can evolve to remain relevant to audiences that are increasingly getting recommendations and media itself [youtube, torrent files etc] from the web.  The basic question for such companies is: "how can we retain or maintain revenue from media when it’s massively distributed?". I’m not sure that anyone who owns IP in the digital age knows the answer to this.  But I’m not sure that there is an answer.  Media that is IP protected will struggle to be social in a networked
ecosystem.  And if it ain’t social then you’re going to have problems
getting it noticed and making money from it.  No, you have to move from a model whereby the media itself is intrinsically of value to a model where you use the social to develop new business models.  Easy stuf, for example:

• Translate. Get people to pay for transferring one media into another.  Just like printing has become a winner for static media e.g. moo for flickr and blurb for blogs, so ring-tones and paid for podcasts etc. have worked for exploiting traditional media.
• Relate. Start to create metadata around the media which can be used to drive discovery [e.g. delicious] and consequently ad revenue.  Then own that data.

Works within the existing framework, exploiting essentially dead media, like any artefact or product.  Packaged dead media in the form of formats like Wife Swap and Super Nanny are still the most lucrative [because they are 'transportable' and 'transferable' assets] but it is precisely their ‘dead’ nature that limits their potential in the networked digital world of the future. Going forward networked digital distribution allows is to give media life – to make it  inherently social by developing feedback loops or ‘ripples’ and therefore creating more opportunities to spin off into other [older] media [translation], or initiate subscription for extra functionality around a service and of course drive advertising into new areas.  To produce more social media, you need to get people [both end consumers and developers / producers] involved in creating or augmenting media in the first place and to play with the variety of things that influence the media such as links, metadata and narrative.

Enough waffle, I’m going to try and knock this into something meaningful soon.

Link: Twitter.

Tom pointed me at twitter. It’s another one of those social networking things which is the dull bit.  The interesting bit is essentially it’s playing with time.  You input what you’re doing NOW.  Others do and from that you get a picture, a messy picture of the social world of people with nothing better to do.  A bit like couch potatoes looking at a screen; these people aren’t doing a lot.  Not great content. But it’s strangely compelling banality all the same. And aside from the realisation that i’m perhaps not as dull as I’d led myself to believe I was, OK I am but at least I’m busy dull , is the more philosophical [and here I'm just undermining previous thought] point that time is essential a social construct, made from what we do.  Do a lot and it speeds up. Do little and it barely shifts.  This is a lot of very little which is fucking with the very constructs of time itself.  But it doesn’t matter does it coz it’s just a website?  Yes, but this is MSN/IM in broadcast mode, a symbol of where reality TV and ubquitous connectivity connect: granular, self-obsessed nowness.  We’ve reached some end-point for ‘culture’.  Maybe not, there’s a fightback.  Slowness, craft.  Doing stuff and  making time is here… the counter revolution has begun and it’s going to be made really slowly and it’s going to be ill-fitting and not at all like the pattern promised.

Addendum:

Of course now I’m horribly hooked.  And it’s made me think of IM less as a lower order form of communications – and less of comms within a hierachy at all – but rather as the glue with which we are able to pull together social exoeriences in what passes for the nodal points in social software – the MySpace pages, the twitter home pages, the delicious page etc.  IM [rather than email etc.]   is actually the glue through which such services often cohere and aggregate value.  And twitter is genuinely innovative in its use of IM and txt to manage the feedback loops of a group.  It’s a world away from the sort of thinking that produced the "chat around content" ideas that were floating around a few years ago where it was thought that there was sufficient interest around specific subjects in the form of web pages to have proprietory chat apps for people to meet and discuss the subject synchronously, in real time.  And of course any elementary understanding of the way in which people communicate could tell you [especially with hindsight ] that most comms is about sharing dissimiliar information, things the other person doesn’t know [which could be contextual stuff - i'm doing x - or emotive stuff - i'm feeling y - or knowledge - i believe z] or things they do where they play with the subleties of what others are thinking or doing, especially within a pre-existing group dynamic. 

So that’s what twitter does well, it builds on existing social and technical relations to allow for the comms to take place, it doesn’t seek to add value in any other way than in facilitating.  And that’s quite cool.  It still doesn’t get us away from the fact that its mostly utter shite, but the sort of necessary background shite with which we already engage in anyway – twittter just exposes it further.

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…

Oily Bird, originally uploaded by olivander.

I’m struggling with the mantra of digital strategists like Seth Godin who argues that we need to make things as simple as possible for people:

We like things that are simple, not complex. Issues where we can take action without changing very much. If a marketer brings us a new idea, it’s either ignored or it’s a problem. A problem because we have to do something with the idea. Buy the new suit, trade in for the new car, install a new IT solution or change the way we feel about an issue.

The best problems, as far as a consumer is concerned, are those that can be solved quickly and easily, with few side effects.

In other words you keep things lubricated, you reduce the friction of the ‘social’, you make things easy and value the ease with which you can engender a relationship.  Compare this to the "ethics of inconvenience" put forward by Will Davies, who argues the need for an understanding of friction as social value…

I spoke at this conference earlier this year, discussing what digital technology offered the voluntary sector. One of the things I raised as an anxiety was an advert in the paper from that morning, in which Oxfam were claiming that ‘One click. That’s the difference between life and death for millions of people’ (part of their current I’m In campaign). On the one hand this is a fairly transparent and innocent attempt to ride the wave of the Make Poverty History campaign which ended last year, but on the other, it’s just a pack of lies. My medicine is a bit shakey, but I’m fairly convinced that One click is not the difference between life and death for even one person, let alone millions. The dilemma these charities face is how much to see the internet as a way of lowering barriers to entry, and how much to see it as a potential dilution of the issues at stake. And the problem is that barriers to entry tend to be constitutive of the value of action. The fact that it is a pain in the arse to write a letter, attend a meeting, dress up as batman and climb a monument, run for parliament or wage a decades long campaign for recognition, is why these actions are both admirable and effective.

I find both arguments persuasive.  My gripe is not just with the ethics of saving-the-world endeavour being promoted as easy and simplistic but the glut of things that stem from it being easy to join making the attention economy such an issue in the process.  Take Flickr.  Every day I’m offered the opportunity to join a new flickr group – I’ve already got more groups than I possibly know and rarely use any of them – and am told I’m a new contact for blah blah, who it transpires has 3457 contacts.  And of course it’s not just flickr, it’s the whole of social media where quantity equates with value. So much so that it undermines the social ‘media / ‘software’ it is predicated on.  In an online world the ease of being social undermines the value of relationships and consequently, over time, you put less effort in and you value the experience / contact / object less.  Consequently, diminishing, if not negative, returns set in [and probably lower than the Dunbar number of 150 which has been identified for a community to be cohesive as you and your contacts do not constitute a community in this sense, more a cohort or sub-set within the community].   

So if it is time we started appreciating quality rather than quality of relationships, friction rather than ease, how do we sell that into people?  How do we make ‘social media’ that values less rather than more? What does a strategy for ‘marketing friction’ to create lasting value between people and brands / issues look like? It’s clearly not what Oxfam are doing, so who is?

"Tom Coates, tech developer at Yahoo!
is asked to explain exactly what social media is, and struggles. He
concludes that social media sites have a sum of parts much more
valuable as a resource than thier constituent parts. There is a lack of
clarity in this area, he concedes, and not a little confusion. Even the
terminology of social media is changing fast. "Online community’ is
redundant, ‘social network’ is becoming so and ‘no-one really knows
what ‘social media’ means. Hmmm. But, says Coates, they all have one
thing in common – they tend to be viral."

And not being able to ‘define’ it is a problem of sorts.  If you can’t translate a phenomenon for others to understand then well you can’t influence it as you may want.  So this got me thinking about how to define ‘social media’ and even if
we *should* define it…surely the very fact that the semantics of the
phenomonon are ‘slipping’, the signifier itself grappling for ground
shows that digital media is changing and unstable… that in essence
it’s like a world speeded up; a social world speeded up. 

Has the distinction between digital and non-digital lost it’s meaning?  Can we not describe digital phenomenon by analogy to
existing ‘non-digital’ phenomenon, for example as MySpace being in it’s
‘form’ as similar to the ‘yearbook’ in high school?  People never
struggled to define the yearbook did they, sure there were politics around its form [how its constructed etc] but what it represented was quite ‘solid’?  They never said ‘how do we
monetise the yearbook’?  It was just inherently social, part of the
fabric of institutional life.  Yet, because social media is somehow
still couched within ‘technological’ discourses we somehow view it
differently; it’s tainted, a reified social distinct from our ‘real’
social and I think that’s the rub – we’re stuck thinking of the medium and not the practice, not the relationships.  And the medium is seen as a ‘pure’ entity with ‘natural’ strengths and weaknesses rather than constituted from its parts and its ‘context’. 

I think the more we come to talk about the specifics of how we
use different media for different communications and relationships and
develop a language around that specificity – as ‘kids’ [agh!] already
do – the more the distinction between the ‘solid’ ‘real’ modern world
and the ‘liquid’ modernity of the web will meld.  And it shouldn’t be just "let’s look what the kids are doing", because many kids are not prescient in any meaningful way and also because edges of society can be more telling in  other ‘non-youthful’ areas as Alice riffs with reference to Grandma’s taking up Freecell [Solitaire].

[ addendum: apparently The Guardian post misrepresented Tom.  Another sign of slippage].