technogoggles

Bad karma

I got a Quechup invite yesterday from someone I know vaguely and thought I'd go and take a look.  Amongst the plethora of social networking sites springing up this might have something I could learn from or indeed have a proposition of some worth, beyond collating the detritus of my "going-about-the-world" as  some added value.  It doesn't.  It's merely a geographical layer on that detritus and moreover it's demanding of you to add value rather than collating it for you.  So imagine my disappointment when upon opening my inbox this morning I find that I've invited all of my Gmail contacts to his charlatan's service. Of course "I" didn't, but Quechup did even though I "skipped" the step to invite others.  This is a cardinal sin.  My Gmail contacts range far and wide, some I know some I don't but have been in contact with for work or well, other social network things :o But the etiquette of social networking is so acute that I feel annoyed some service has slighted my own identity, my relationship with others.  Shame.  I'll never use it again.

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.

Sketching revenue generation for distributed media

Not the snappiest of titles and this isn't the most lucid of posts, it's more a half-baked brain dump. Never-mind.  So, of late I've been trying to articulate what the new media landscape looks like and how it 'works', to a largely lay audience.  It's hard to convey complex things simply which is perhaps why I've found it a useful experience - it's forced me to think.  I often use drawings to get a point across and below are two [god-awful] and polarised examples from a recent chat I had which will look very familiar.

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.

Life in fragments

... lots of bits.  messy. 

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 :-D, 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.

Gaming the event

The 'life beyond the broadcast' for BBC Weekenders seems quite healthy.

Moylesy taken from kc_mcfen's on flickr.  See the pool which with 222 members and over 2300 pics as of today is up there with the Japanology pool!  Woohoo.  See also the weekender tags and a rather wonderful set of from ruu as well as Radio 1's own polished yet somehow dull set [perhaps because it feels more 'produced' amidst the more edgy images from the audience].

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. 

<75 years of metaBBC>

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...

Friction

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?

Defining social blah

I've just read The Guardian blog post of their Media Summit event in which the great and the not-so-great speak:

"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].
 

Against community; for control - a fucked up community strategy that works?

Most [music] bands seek to nurture a community and see it as part of a core fan base that provide them with food and a roof over their head.   Not ME Smith.  The Fall forums, the 'official' Fall forums which have been a lively and spirited place to lurk, have been stopped and stripped of their 'officialness' [it now says the 'unofficial Fall site'] because ME Smith objected to something someone said.  You'll have to dig around to find what, and I'm not 100% clear I know exactly why myself.  But the thrust of his action seems to be about control, or the lack of it.  Smith doesn't want to divest himself of any form of control over what is communicated; he's a bit of a fruitpot about this sort of stuff and giving a voice to the 'people', the fans to say what they want, just ain't right and proper.  [And it's consistent with Smith's previous radical thoughts about the future of distributed media and the internet.]  The new 'official' site doesn't allow forums.  It's a bit of brochurewear and info and consequently will not usurp the newly unofficial site as the main space for discussionand 'real' news. 

But it got me thinking about the nature of a community.  Smith's antagonism has only served to restruture the group dynamic, give it a bit of fizz, stir up the 'constitution' slightly and generally make the whole thing more interesting... in my opinion.  Perhaps there's a strategy there... it's a screwy one that clearly works particularly well with people who like to be subjugated and generally abused, and for whom this is perhaps a form of therapy.  Rock. On.

Mapping group activity or, 'community'

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...

The social life of information

the social life of information, originally uploaded by JamesB.

I'm digging digg at the moment particularly seeing news 'move' in real time.  It's quite compelling - not particularly radical, in the sense that there are so many ways to see information now - search by tags; search by popular tag or post etc etc that the very life of information seems laid bare, ready for forensic examination.  In this information 'ecosystem' to what extent is the message actually the metadata, the context that we're reading?