If your video camera operator (thanks to Linda) has turned their apparatus sideways, the resulting portrait styled video works better uploaded to facebook and embedded than it does on youTube.

As discovered over on http://andyroberts.me/havering-folk-club/the-rowan-tree-song-at-haverfolk-for-cloudstreet-guest-night

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Embedding Videos from Facebook

Here’s a snapshot of my Instagram stats.

You’re on your iPhone right now?
- Save the image in your library
- Open your Instagram app and share your snapshot with your community
(You can even give it your favorite filtering option! )

See you soon on Statigr.am

via posterous

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My Snapshot Statigr.am

I know the venue from the Tuttle club, which I have attended once or twice there. The Open Day was due to kick off at 09.50 with a presentation by Frankie Roberto about “How We Got To Where We Are” which I didn’t want to miss. Well, I did manage to get there in time, despite the fact there were no trains at all on the Circle, Hammersmith and City, and District Lines in that direction. (Weekends are a bad time to get about in London, midweek breaks are better).

So Frankie talked a bit about how he sent out a tweet once wondering if there was a database somewhere of Blue Plaques, and how the answers came in suggesting things, none of which were at all adequate. The best resource available was a single page on one of the plaque erecting organisation  sites. So he scraped the list into a database and started trying to parse it into meaningful data, using his linguistics abilities.

Lenin by Simon Harriyott - Plaque #2210

Another useful source of information would be the pictures on Flickr, and these could be geotagged which then provided a link into the new Open Plaques database. Once the people at Flickr had made a blog post about the Open Plaques group and integrated the special tag

ging into Flickr itself, then there was no turning back. Open Plaques could not be switched off, it was now more than just an experiment. The provision of an api to send the data out again meant that satellite applications could be built by creative people

and these would find new and unthought of uses for the growing system. There was also a graph which showed the steady growth in numbers of plaques added during the lifetime of the project. This graph could be expected to turn dramatically upwards once there is an easy way to add new plaques, which at present requires somebody from the “core team” to do it!

Morning Agenda

09:50 – 10:05 – Frankie Roberto, ‘The Story So Far’
10:05 – 10:20 – Ian Ozsvald, ‘The OCR Challenge’
10:20 – 10:35 – Richard Vahrman, ‘Games based on Open Plaques data’
10:35 – 10:50 – Emily Toop, ‘Open Plaques the iPhone app’

Next up we had Ian Ozsvald using a subset of the pictures of plaques as an AI research project to see how well they could get OCR software to recognise the writing in the plaques. This makes a nice real world example dataset which can help to advance the science of artificial intelligence and character recognition in the real world. The vision is that one day soon you will be able to simply wave your phone camera about in a room and it will automatically detect any faces present, take a picture of each of them and store it with their names and the geolocation of the place on a map, as well as read any text that is being displayed in the room, on the walls or from a projector for example, and store that as well with the date, time, place and list of attendees etc. It can’t be done yet, but this will be mainstream in just a few years, he said. Is that scary? Then an iPhone app which is being built to show all the plaques nearby as pins on a map which you can get information about. The future is mobile, and anybody who isn’t intending to get a smart phone within the next twelve months might as well just go and live in a cave somewhere, cut off from all of technical society. And a mobile app that turns it into a game, which has gone through some transitions. Based on a treasure trail type model, the app ended up giving out directions for how to get to the next plaque, so that was just too easy and not fun. The clever idea was to take a picture with your back to the plaque, of the view from the plaque as it were, which can then be used in a “Guess where Plaque” game, with the numbers on the plaques adding up to link references which tells you where the pub is. Some of the people just wanted to take a short cut to the pub though, which is fair enough.

So then we broke up into groups to try and further the project from different angles. One team discussed the future direction from from the developers point of view, one looked at design I think, and the group I joined discussed content. We brainstormed about “who are the different types of users” who may have an interest in Open Plaques, both current and potential, came out with some wistful ideas for addons and expansion, hammered out the concept of what a plaque is, looked at the different page types, the additional information that could be included within the database or on a specific page, and suggested new functions and concepts. If it came down to just one new facility that would make the biggest difference that would be the ability to Nominate a New Plaque which would then sit alongside the existing plaques as a ‘virtual plaque’. I chose this as the most important because it’s a disruptive move which takes the initiative out of the hands of the few organisations who very slowly make the decisions as to which locations or historical figures are worthy of a plaque, and puts it into the hands of the ordinary person, or the ordinary Open Plaques user. It was interesting to note that most of the small group of people present, some of whom admitted to being mildly obsessed with plaques, one who described herself as being a “plaques widow” and half of whom seemed to come from Brighton, all had a clear idea that somewhere out there would be the “ordinary Open plaques user” for whom the grand service is being refined and must be orientated. What the ordinary user, should such a group of people come into being at some point, will make out of of all this, of course has yet to be seen.

I found the whole topic a lot more interesting than I had originally anticipated to be honest, and far from feeling that I wouldn’t have anything to contribute, did my best to add in and highlight what I felt to be the most pertinent ideas. Using the theory of Social Objects it seems fairly clear that the principal page type and the url at which the casual visitor arrives should be the plaque itself rather than the person or place. The verbs then need to encourage contributions in order to help build out the community around plaques in general, and perhaps temporarily around individual plaques, probably asynchronously. “Add a Plaque”   “Edit this Page” or even “check in here” are contenders for prominent verbs on the page, but you have to remember that this is a small and in some ways unlikely project, that just happens to have gained enough momentum to become sustainable, but is unlikely to attract enormous resources for development and maintenance. Definitely something to keep an eye on though.

Open Plaques Open Day on other blogs:

• Clairey Ross : Open Plaques more than plaques on a wall, more than points in a map?

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Open Plaques Open Day

cider page on facebook as a social object

Facebook’s “pages” with “fans” have been around for a year or so, but were implemented as poor relations to personal profiles, not having the ability to push updates out into the newstream. Anybody can create a page for any purpose, so pages can become anchors for topic based conversations, a bit like friendfeed rooms or Flickr groups. On the micro social objects scale, pictures, videos, discussions and status updates added to the Facebook pages will be broadcast out into fans news streams, with the potential for remarkable topics at the pages level to gain traction a lot more quickly than before.   

Social Objects theory says that successful social networking sites work best when they enable easy relationships between people and social objects, not just between people and other people. Facebook pages have unique permanent URLs which are expose to search engines, so they are very different from the original college student private profile pages Facebook was founded upon. It’s likely though that much of Facebook’s huge existing userbase is going to be a little confused by this big departure from the longstanding culture of limited exposure to vetted human nodes in the network (friends). 

By the way, I’m using the term Social Objects here in it’s strictly European scientific sense, unlike the diluted idealist form that has muddied the theoretical waters somewhat in the past year or so.

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Facebook adds Social Objects

Categories and Tags on Document Sharing Websites

This post emerges from a conversation on twitter arising from a comment I made about categories after uploading a document to edocr.com

To get straight to the point, I usually hate being forced to choose a category from a drop down menu. It smacks of technocracy where the system designer is unnecessarily imposing, subtly or not, a narrow view of how data should be described. This clumsily reasserts the unequal relationship between the developer and user. Instead of being empowered to input your own stuff and personalise your profile, a poor uploading experience can leave you feeling like a patronised data entry clerk. I’m also convinced that it’s not the cleverest way to organise content

I happened to mention that I was writing about railways and ManojRanaweera tweeted me “we now have a whole category for railways”

I took this as encouragement to submit an upload in document format ( .pdf) to the excellent edocr.com service, of which I am an occasional but enthusiastic user. But why would the existence of a new category code make any difference? As if there were a whole load of content waiting around which cannot be submitted for want of more categories? Categories are only descriptions, they are not empty containers compelling somebody to fill them. If there isn’t a perfect category available, which is nearly all of the time, you just have to choose the nearest. It’s annoying, but common experience. Yes, but since we now live in the new twitter enabled webosphere, I don’t have to keep these thoughts to myself. The CEO, owner, promoter and whatnot of edocr.com is an active participant in the conversation and a long term twitter contact of mine so I can ask directly to Manoj:

@ManojRanaweera I’ll upload my post with far too much detail about Yorkshire railways, but do categories mean more than tags?

M replies:

@aroberts #edocr tags totally rely on publisher – that means no discipline. Categories force you 2 choose 1 category that is most relevant. helps structure the library of docs and make it easy to find within edocr.com

me:

@ManojRanaweera successful social object sites have used used folksonomy tagging only, eg flickr whereas fixed categories always problematic. On the other hand youTube insists on a broad category, but at least it’s not multi-level #edocr

Actually, that’s not even strictly true about flickr. They do have a top level categorisation but it is subtle and defaults sensibly so you might not even notice that all flickr pictures have to be designated either as

Safe, Moderate or Restricted AND as either a Photo, Screenshot or Art/Illus

so immediately I can think of an exceptional case. How should scanned documents fit within these three? I’d probably choose photo but only after hesitating.

YouTube categories are silly, mixing subject matter and genre indiscriminately:

But back to document sharing:

@aroberts – depends on who your audience is. I do not think we are too far off other players providing similar product

The only similar product I know of is scribd so I went through the uploading process there as well and soon discovered:

“Scribd forces you to choose from some odd categorisations too”

Twitter must be really catching on now because Jason at Scribd clearly had an alert set and replied

jasonatscribd @aroberts Categories are a work in progress, and welcome suggestions, but they’re largely to help people browsing Scribd. The real power is in tags. The more rich and descriptive your tags, the better your chances of being found on Google, etc.

which is probably closer to my own view than Manoj on this topic, but there’s more to come on this from him:

@aroberts #edocr – The importance of this level of categorisation will become clearer as we continue to build edocr functionality. Will blog my thinking.

Manoj correctly suggests taking the discussion further on the blogs so this is my contribution.

Web2.0 may be old hat by now, but that doesn’t mean we have to bring back the old printed matter, library and directory based metaphors of web 1.

Search and tags are the contemporary means by which content is discovered and browsed. Explore has some value, but is secondary and library classification, indexing and directories are hangovers from last century because they always come up against the top down design problem, ignoring the more powerful emergent patterns that come from bottom up self organisation and collaborative meta data.

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Categories and Tags on edocr

Flashmobs and unexpected performances in the mainstream

Simulated Flashmobs and unexpected performances are springing up all over the place. You can hardly venture out on a journey through any of London’s main transport hubs without being hijacked by a troupe of dancers, pillowfighters or Musical Theatre performers. The aim of most of these stunts is to generate buzz, particularly through youTube, which if done subtly and with a bit of luck can reach millions of consumers for a fraction the price of mainstream advertising. At least that was the theory, but T-mobile are currently running an expensive campaign on TV which shows full length video from the Liverpool Street Station event last Thursday. With clips of bystanders reactions mixed in with professional dancers emerging from the crowd, it’s very difficult to judge just much of it was precisely staged and how much is genuine spontaneity. I’m not going to embed the actual advertisement itself here, you can find it easily on youtube but here are some genuine punters interviewed after the event:

So now I’ve just been alerted by Hermione on Twitter to a smaller musical video made in Stansted Airport:

This one is for Lastminute.com and asks “When did you last go to the Theatre?” which is a question close to my heart as you may know already. I’m off to see Phantom of The Opera next week.

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Flashmobs Going Mainstream

I like the quirky design for being bold enough to champion household objects on a dish, for the seemingly impossible shape of one or two of the designs depicted, and above all for the cheerful optimism of 1960′s modernism. I didn’t even know it was designed by Enid Seeney before reading the Object Wiki entry, but this led me to explore the background to the plate on the C 20 th site which is also home to theatre memorabilia.

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The Homemaker Plate – for Object Wiki

Four more tips for getting to grips with FriendFeed

In this third video of the series I show four simple techniques for delving further into the productive use of Friendfeed as a social media tool.

So this being a Friday, you’re now all set for an exciting weekend experimenting and exploring the fast growing conversations in Friendfeed Rooms. Seeya there.

Note: due to a misunderstanding of Blip TV episodes you might have failed to view video 2 in this series which is here: Friendfeed and Social Objects

And if you can’t access video at all for some reason, there are some transcript notes included below and over on edocr.com at Friendfeed video transcript. Thanks to Allison Reynolds 100 eggs post for that idea.

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More Friendfeed tips – video 3

Warning: This screencast is hosted on Google video Blip.TV because I overshot the length limit of ten minutes for youTube – oops.

Social Object theory or Object Centred Sociality has been explained by Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku.

If you are trying out Friendfeed yourself, you might subscribe to mine here: Andy Roberts Friendfeed

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Friendfeed and Social Objects

In the next screencast video of this series, I’ll show how Friendfeed microblog entries can be social objects, and the use of “rooms”.

Meanwhile, I’d be interested to hear how you think the future will unfold in this area. Twitter has the best community at present but can it hold on to it? Friendfeed has some of the elements of Facebook but without the apps. Have you tried migrating to Jaiku or Pownce? Can’t understand what’s the point of microblogging is anyway?

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Friendfeed for microblogging – a screencast video

Twitter Story Contest

I was alerted to a twitter writing competition over on copyblogger and decided to have a go. The rules are that the story must be exactly 140 characters in length, and it’s only one entry per person with a deadline this Friday so I composed an entry right away. I could have waited to get the measure of all the other entries coming in, but it’s better to be quick and impulsive sometimes.

Twitter is the simple web and mobile application that allows for an exchange of public and private messages of up to 140 characters in length, and it’s the simplicity and brevity which make for the charm of the environment. That and the fact that twitter was the first micro-blogging tool to achieve critical mass, so it’s where everybody else is. The only Social Objects are the “tweets” (posts) and “twits” (twitterers) themselves.

Writing styes on twitter can vary from ugly txt speak (not gr8 !) through cut down sentences ( “need coffee. late for bus” ) to Haiku poetry, free expression and eloquent mini sagas. As with blog reading, the value is in following developments over time – days, weeks and months.

Here’s my 140 character twitter story:

I feel my neighbours make far too much fuss about their precious lawns and flower borders. So stealthily from my side, I grow weeds at them.

But you can do better than that! Of course you can.

This is a very strong entry by Smithereensblog

We all expected nuclear war, epidemics, melted ice caps. But poisoning by plastic? A childless world? We had no contingency plan for that.

There are 263 comments on the blog post where the competition is now, most of them simply links to the twitter status updates as entries to the contest, and I’m not sure if the stories themselves will ever need to be gathered together on a wiki page for example, or if they can just be linked to in situ. It’s not very fluid to work your way through at present, and with nearly three full days to go, it can only get more unweildy. Following on the apparent usefulness of the ABblogpack drop.io I tried setting up a twitter story drop.io to allow for anybody to add their own links but that doesn’t seem to offer much more than the original list of blog comments really, so I didn’t proceed with it. Or should I?

Waiting in Transit: Twitter Writing Contest on Copyblogger

Blogscapes: Twitter Writing Contest

The Golden Pencil : Write 140 Character Fiction for an IPod Nano

Noel Feria : Twitter Writing Contest: Win an iPod Nano For the Best 140 Character Story

The competition entry page again: twitter writing competition

twitter story drop.io

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Twitter writing competition – a story in 140 chars

Better than youTube?

Video uploading to Flickr went live earlier today so it’s a big topic of conversation, especially the inevitable comparison with youTube the leader in the field. So is Flickr video better than youTube or just different?

My first reaction was delight to discover that the flickr video upload and sharing is totally integrated into the photo sharing community aspect of flick that made it so successful. Videos appear in the photostream alongside stills, and can be community tagged, commented on, sent to sets and groups, and blogged using “blog this” which is fantastic. The quality of the video and audio is superior too, with up to 150MB file sizes acceptable for a 90 second video. Why the 90 second limit? Well this is to avoid the problem of being used as a file download service for copied music videos, TV clips and films etc and to encourage home made movie clips from digital cameras, phones etc. So Flickr can avoid the enormous copyright problem that google inherited when they bought youTube.

Central to Flickr’s philosophy for introducing video, and something that youTube does not really have is the concept of the “long photo” which kind of fits in with the use of digital still cameras that have the capacity to take video clips. This service is for genuine user generated video, short clips about everyday life, surroundings, little art videos and so on. Not so much about long videos of talking heads recorded straight from webcams saying “um” and “ah” a lot either.

Flickr groups by default can accept both pictures and video but I thought it might be useful to have a group for London Video that focusses on video only, still linked to the London photo group, London Flickr meetups. I’ve invited some flickr contacts from London and from the social media cafe as well, but anybody interested in video is welcome to join and upload anything vaguely London related. All in all, it’s going to be very interesting to see how creative people use the opportunity that Flickr video is offering.

To give an idea, here’s Billy’s bacon video from Flickr, embedded on this wordPress blog.

I know, you can already do all that with youTube but I feel there are some significant advantages with the Flickr Video implementation, aren’t there?

Yes or no?

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Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube?

There are a few document sharing sites taking off at present and I like this one called edocr where I found this Google cheat sheet:

Above is a short document called the Google Cheat Sheet which contains a list of Google services, urls, international and some other at-a-glance stuff. It’s being presented here on my blog as an embedded object, much like is done with youTube videos. There are a few buttons which can help you view the document, including a zoom and text cursor so you can copy and paste from it. There’s probably a way of clicking back through to the page of the person who uploaded it onto edocr.com too.

Update:

There doesn’t seem to be a way to click through to the original document from the embedded widget thingy above so here’s another option for bloggers, a thumbnail with link to download the document:

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Google cheat sheet – embedded pdf viewer from edocr

Afterwards we had some wide ranging conceptual discussions which touched on ideas about public identity and personal security, activities or events as social objects, the natural development of some online communities into face-to-face meetups and much more. There’s still a fair amount of work to be done on the prototype service, both in explaining the concepts and making a winning user interface, but if anyone can do it then Luke, Benjie and Jof are in position to succeed with support from the vibrant and friendly London social media development community.

The Coach and Horses is also the venue for Social Media Café on Friday, and I was happily able to use the free wifi to update the cider wiki to mention the Westons Old Rosie currently on tap.

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London social media development

They (News International, Rupert Murdoch) call it “The London Knowledge” and the listings information is apparently supplied by Londonparties, one of the best Time-Out style online guides to London nightlife. The checkbox allows you to map any or all locations for categories Cinema, Theatre, Comedy, Art shows, Live music, Nightclubs and ‘Something different’

The Search box accepts street name , venue or postcode for 5,000 listings of cinema showings, music gigs, theatre shows, club nights and art events for any specific day, so you can find out what’s on at the London theatres for example.

The one fatal drawback at this stage though, is NO PERMALINKS !

It’s all done within Javascript, Ajax, Flash or whatever within the same initial page URL so no social objects, no ‘email a friend’ and no community reviews, community content. If this is engineered into the software design then Trusted Places have nothing to fear for a long time to come, except for the mobile phone aspect perhaps, which Londoners may take a liking to especially for finding out what’s on last minute nearby when you’re already out and about.

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London Google Maps mashup with what’s on listings

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

The details aren’t yet out so it’s possible that the Activities API allows for discussion around social objects but there’s also a chance that the common mistake of designing only for links between people and people has been built in to the framework.

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Open Social Objects?

from InmanBlog:

Social networking sites are all about “social objects.” The objects themselves — pictures people upload to Flickr, say — are unimportant. It’s the conversation that takes place around them. Social objects always consist of a noun, such as the photo, and a verb — the action they create, such as the urge to share. MacLeod didn’t dream all this stuff himself, he said. It goes back to research anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski did while living among Pacific Islanders nearly 100 years ago.

Whether these ideas which can be applied to online networks and social websites have their origins in ethnographic anthropology or in soviet psychology (Activity Theory), probably both, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the recognition that theory has an important and very practical role to play.

That conversations take place around objects rather than around nothing is an important principle. The objects themselves may indeed be unimportant compared to the conversation, but that doesn’t mean you can do away with objects. In the absence of any object, I would venture that a surrogate object tends to be contructed, often out of elements from the conversation itself. Then people start talking about the conversation, about the meaning of words and other such distractions. If you’ve ever taken part in threaded online discussions where there is no clear topic or purpose then you know what I’m talking about. It may well be that it’s the absence of social objects which causes people-to-people-only networks to fixate upon the meta-levels of conversation about the tools or about the processes.

So get yourself some objects, preferably made out of concrete

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Social objects again

I’m trying to synthesise this situation facing musical artists with the ideas from Jyri Engestrom back in June. He noticed a change in successful website businesses towards charging the publishers, not the spectators. Photos on Flickr for example, are consumed free of charge by a readership far wider than the photographers. The photographers themselves pay a small premium in order to be allowed to upload a larger number of pictures and organise them. Back to music, last.fm currently charges consumers for full access to their own personalised radio station but in some sense they are also publishing their playlists. The movement there is towards encouraging artists and labels to provide free downloads and then perhaps pay to gain higher exposure on the system. Applied to the digital music industry then, the model would appear to be to “charge the uploaders, not the downloaders”.

So life would appear to be tough for the artists. Perhaps there is a surfeit of aspiring musicians and it is audience attention which is in short supply? All a bit like the vanity publishing industry for amateur novel writers. Or is it?

By coincidence, news has just broken that the artist now known again as Prince has struck a deal whereby his new album is given away with a newspaper. This is said to be an arrangement more lucrative than his previous album sold conventionally through the record shops. That doesn’t seem very repeatable, but it’s seen by the music publishing industry as a betrayal. They managed to convince most celebrity artists that defending intellectual property rights is the only way to ensure they can get paid for being creative. In truth, it’s the only way to ensure the intermediates get a disproportionate slice of it, and that is what’s being lamented.

Nearly all musical artists who work solo call themselves singer-songwriters these days, and nearly all bands perform their own material. This is probably a distortion caused by the writers royalties being a major factor when choosing material to perform. Probably there are a lot of great singers, many potential songwriters and a few who are great singer songwriters. There could be opportunities for musicians who have mastered the art of digital studio recording to offer to turn songwriters’ material into published tracks for them. Alternatively singers may commission writers to provide materal especially for their performance style. The opportunities for cross covers, remote collaboration, duets and derivative mixes are bursting out of the old model, and who knows where it may lead in the long tail of diverse taste and the needs of so many people to find an outlet for their creativity.

A spokesman for the singer told The Mail on Sunday: “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those who want to hear it.

“Prince feels that charts are just music industry constructions and have little or no relevance to fans or even artists today.”

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Music business models for internet artists

I spoke on ‘the importance of theory’ briefly relating Communities of Practice and Social Objects theories to the online landscape and wikis. No slides or pitches, just conversation really.

Steve Coast put on a great presentation explaining the rationale behind wiki.openstreetmap.org

“OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.”

PS regarding the date, I was amazed to see that a group on Facebook called

“Petition to revoke the independence of the United States of America”

has 88,057 members!

WikiWednesday

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July 4th Wiki Wednesday

Just as I pondered after listening to Jyri Engeström, the business model for a sucessful website these days often needs to change. “Charge the publishers, not the spectators”. I’m not sure that we will ever have ‘spectators’ as such, but there will be people who are occasional browsers, searching the microjobs exchange just in case they spot something they fancy doing at that particular time. So searching, browsing, registering and placing ‘bids’, quotes or tenders will be completely free (as in beer). Pajamaworkers are also encouraged to consider creating microjobs of their own to place onto the exchange for others to bid on, to become micropreneurs, and there is no charge for this either.

So that’s the announcement over. What are you waiting for?

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PajamaNation is now FREE