One of the highlights of 2011 for me was the APA Content Summit 2011, which took place in London last November. As always it was a fascinating event (disclosure – I work as a consultant with the APA) that presented attendees with many interesting ideas to digest about the future of content and publishing, but one of the things that stayed with me the longest was a small part of Rory Sutherland’s opening keynote (paraphrased from the live blog):

‘We are [now] going to see a slowing of technological change. [We normally experience] moments of extraordinary progress followed by stasis. So the next five years, barring freak ideas, is a period of time for reflection.’

My first reaction was to reject this. I’ve come to believe that the current media and cultural revolution that we’re going through (and it surely is a revolution) is different from those previous expansive moments of history in two important respects (one an observation, the other an assumption):

1. The pace of the change itself is increasing
2. The condition of change is here to stay

In other words I have come to believe that this revolution will not be followed by stasis, but that we will now experience change as a constant, and at an ever increasing pace. My reasoning was that the collision of network effects, Moore’s Law and so on, make this revolution unique.

So my first intuition was to reject Rory’s remarks as a misunderstanding or a mistake, and lump it in with the many other ‘reactionary’ positions offered by those businesses that are being disrupted.

But once the idea took hold it wouldn’t let go. The possibility that my assumptions might be false came home to me. After all, who’s to say that everyone caught up in revolutions of the past didn’t feel the same way as I did, only to be proved wrong when the stasis arrived?

And then today, Robert Scoble, a highly respected commentator on new technologies, came out with this in a blog post about a pause in disruption:

‘OK, I’ve been talking with hundreds of geeks from around the world this year at three conferences, CES, DLD, and World Economic Forum. I’m seeing a trend that is worth talking about. What is it? We’re seeing the end of one of the most disruptive ages in human history. I believe that we’re seeing a pause in the disruption.’

And later:

‘So, it’s time to take a breather. This year we won’t see a wild new innovation spread like wildfire, but, rather, we’ll just see more people adopt the disruptions of the past eight years.’

Okay, so two people have said the disruption is over (albeit temporarily). This hardly constitutes proof of the position. But these are two people whose views I respect enormously, arriving at the same conclusion independently, from different backgrounds (media and technology). Could there be something in this?

Well I can’t deny that the ‘type’ of change we’re experiencing has changed. I would characterise this best as a shift from revolutionary to evolutionary change (which is perhaps just another way of saying what Scoble and Sutherland put forward). Again, this is hardly a scientific assessment, but a good example would be the iPhone app Path, which offers an example of the evolution of social media, emphasising personal (limited number of people), real-time (timeline), visual (photo-sharing) and mobile (it’s iPhone-only). It feels like the revolutionary technologies of the past few years have been mashed up into a new, more elegant form. Revolution to evolution.

So is this really the year we’ll see a pause in the disruption? Of course only time will tell, but I can’t help recalling that we’ve said this before: after the PC desktop revolution, the internet revolution, the Web 2.0 revolution and the mobile revolution, and each of those turned out to be just the launch pad for even greater change.

Siri, the iPhone’s killer app

Like millions of others, I queued for the iPhone 4S last week (I don’t usually queue for new products on the day of release, but this time I was keen as my 2-year-old iPhone 3GS has been regularly crashing on me).

There are many improvements (especially if you’re upgrading from two generations back like me), but the thing everyone’s talking about is Siri, the speech recognition ‘personal assistant’ that’s built right into the operating system.

Here’s some of my thoughts on this new development in the user experience.

It’s better than you think it will be

When it was announced people were naturally sceptical about how well Siri would work. But what’s delighted users is that once you get to understand its limitations this thing works really well. The range of ways that you can ask questions and still be understood is impressive and the types of information it provides are genuinely useful.

For some things it makes much more sense to use voice commands

The more you use Siri the more you realise that this is the best way to do certain tasks. Much like the touch-screen interface that Apple introduced to smartphones and tablets, this feels like the user interface you’ve been waiting for all along. Mundane but essential tasks like setting an alarm, scheduling an appointment or texting a friend already seems an unnecessary hassle using anything but voice activation.

You learn together

As you discover the boundaries of what Siri can and can’t do, it starts to learn more about you. For example, I asked it yesterday to phone my mother. Siri asked me who my mother was. Now it knows, I can refer to my mother for relevant commands and it knows what I mean.

Likewise it learns to understand your voice patterns and will respond to contextual commands. This mutual learning process creates a bond between the user and the interface that makes it more personal.

It’s fun

Apple likes to delight its users and Siri is packed with personality. The UK version comes across as an English butler with a warm and often witty character.

Okay it’s the 21st century version of the pathetic fallacy, but the programmers of Siri have clearly put lots of effort into ensuring that you feel something for this technology – from its constant use of your first name to the witty replies to more personal questions (the Tumblr blog Shit That Siri Says lists some of the most amusing answers). It’s deft touches like this that help you to fall in love with it.

It’s disruptive

For some search-orientated tasks, Siri performs better than Google. Not because you can search with voice commands – you can already do that via the Google app on iPhone and a lot more besides on Android phones. Rather it’s because of the results themselves.

A Google search offers you a results page that often requires further action (which link do I click on?), of variable quality (web spam is increasing) and surrounded by ads. Compare this to Siri where some results are delivered straight into your operating system from Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia.

With Siri we can see the potential for a better search system than Google’s. Naturally Google could emulate this functionality themselves, but the point is not that it’s beyond their capabilities (they have much of the technology already) but that it disrupts their business model.

Om Malik makes this point really well in the latest episode of This Week in Tech. As long as Google’s business is based on delivering text-based advertising around web and mobile searches, it’s not in the company’s interests to build Siri-like functionality. It’s these kind of disruptions that change the landscape in technology.

Mid-set in the Indie Chill/Acoustic room at Turntable.fm

Like many others around the web I’m captivated by Turntable.fm, the new online music sharing service. I’ve just been exploring for the past 24 hours, but here are some random observations on the user experience:

• It blends some of the key digital trends of today, social+gamification+music, and it’s a powerful combination. The Facebook integration is a great touch.
• It’s a reminder of how ‘social’ music is. Music is inherently something we want to share and discover, and the chat box offers the opportunity to talk with others and make new connections. This validates Mark Zuckerburg’s predictions that music, movies and TV going are primed to go social.
• The game mechanics really help to drive interaction. You’re encouraged to participate, share and provide good music, which makes the service for others even better.
• It’s sharing in real-time. Live interaction is turning out to be yet another killer app of digital media – I’m currently organising a digital breakfast for the APA on this very theme. Turntable.fm makes legacy platforms for social media sharing seem, well, slow.
• The tools and features aren’t obvious at first. I spent my first hour asking other users how things work. But once you get it, it’s easy to remember and that’s vital for usability. The controls are memorable because the service creates a good match between the system and the real world – which is one of Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics. The video below provides a good overview of how Turntable.fm works for newbies.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m just getting started with my students at Hult International Business School, where I’m the course tutor on the elective module on Digital Publishing. We have our first class tomorrow.

I’m already excited by the amount of energy, enthusiasm and insight generated by the students, as evinced by their work setting up blogs and writing posts on an assignment I set up for the first week. The topics of discussion are as follows:

• What have been the most profound disruptions to media incurred by the digital revolution?
• Is it possible to preserve old forms of media organisation when data is digital?
• What new user behaviours are the most significant in terms of the future of digital media consumption and delivery?
• Discuss John Battelle’s definition of publishing in a digital era. Is there anything you’d change in his definition?
• What are the key ways in which digital publishing differs from pre-digital legacy publishing practices?
• Write a case study analysis and report on an existing digital publication

Below are links to the blogs published so far. For a broad range of insights and perspectives on the world of digital publishing they’re well worth a read:

• http://katetheprofessional.wordpress.com/
• http://eduardohauck.wordpress.com/
  
• http://cristinadresch.wordpress.com/
• http://digital-megan.tumblr.com/
• http://blanctigre.wordpress.com/
• http://surajatreyadigital.wordpress.com/
• http://www.framelova.com/blog/
• http://robinray1002.wordpress.com/
• http://swisswiz.wordpress.com/
• http://masterbymartha.wordpress.com/
• http://andrewmarkets.wordpress.com/
• http://pvpitou.wordpress.com/

Instapaper 3.0 has a wide range of support from iPhone and iPad apps.

Since I last outlined my information workflow back in January 2010 things hadn’t changed much during the past 12 months.

But with the launch of Instapaper 3.0 I’ve finally been moved to ditch Read it Later and adopt Instapaper as my main tool for saving articles to read at a more convenient time.

Why? These reasons:

• You can now follow other users and see what other Instapaper readers are reading
• The sharing options have improved dramatically
• There’s a great deal of Instapaper support from iPhone and iPad apps
• The Instapaper iPad app is awesome

This also coincides with my recent switch from Delicious to Pinboard as my cloud bookmarking service of choice.

This was partly because of the news that Delicious might be closed down or sold, itself a result of woeful underinvestment by current owners Yahoo.

But once I discovered Pinboard as an alternative (thanks to @chrisphin) I found the slicker integration with other content sharing services and social platforms made it a no-brainer.

For example, you can set Pinboard to automatically bookmark links that you tweet, articles that you share on Google Reader, and posts you save on Read it Later and Instapaper, among others. This kind of integration between sharing and discovery services is a beautiful thing and makes organising the world’s information sooo much easier.

So two lessons learned:

• A ‘social layer’ always makes things better
• Opening up your platform and integrating with other apps and services around the web is a great strategy

I would love to hear about your information workflows online, with these services or any others, so please feel free to leave thoughts or observations in the comments.

Traditional digital publishing wisdom has it that content frequency and volume are the keys to success online. A recently leaked content strategy document from AOL is based on this strategy, which is principally aimed at capitalising on search engine traffic by flooding Google’s index with keyword-rich content.

But a study by Yuri Lifshit for Yahoo Labs (see video below) shows that the opposite is true if you want to engage an audience. By analysing Facebook ‘likes’ on stories across 45 top content sites, Yuri has shown that it is the top stories that attract the majority of user activity.

According to this data the Guardian, NPR and Yahoo News can get half of their total engagement (as measured by Facebook likes) by publishing just one story per day. Data across all the publishers shows that one big story can capture 70-80% of your audience reactions in various ways. That’s a remarkable statistic.

This would suggest that successful social media optimization is about producing fewer stories, but spending longer on those stories to ensure that they are genuinely engaging.

According to the study, the majority of articles that create the highest engagement are opinion-based pieces.

This is in contrast with search engine optimization which is about producing as much content as possible in ever shorter time frames.

Are these two strategies mutually exclusive, or is there a way of combining the best of both approaches?

Read more analysis here from Nieman Journalism Lab’s lessons of the Like Log.

See the video below for an overview of the study.

The Like Log Study from Yury Lifshits on Vimeo.

We’ve seen this coming for some time. The traditional search algorithms, based on keywords and hyperlinks, are finally feeling the strain. Users are complaining of more ‘junk’ content in their search results, and more and more of us are getting the feeling that, whisper it, search sucks.

Why?

Because the search system pioneered by Google to sort the good stuff from the bad is open to abuse and manipulation. Black hat SEOs are getting better at keeping pace with Google’s algorithm changes, leading to defensive moves like Google’s recent attack on content farms.

The search landscape is looking more and more like a game of whack-a-mole, as Jeff Jarvis puts it: Google furiously adapts its algorithm to catch out the bad guys, the bad guys adopt new ways to counter them, and so it goes on.

Social is the new search

Search was the easiest and best way to organise the world’s information during the entire decade of the noughties. But there’s fast approaching a new paradigm, and many believe that the time has come for social to become the new search.

Facebook is the clear challenger here, largely because it has huge scale (600 million users and counting) plus, crucially, it’s built on users’ real identity.

Users of Facebook interact on the web with their real names, provide the platform with their real interests, and form real social connections with other users. This means that in all online interactions they are heavily incentivised to be genuine, honest, civil and useful to their friends and peers.

So links to content and other forms of recommendation on Facebook are much more likely to be trusted by other Facebook users. Social filtering has a real opportunity to be the new way we find content that we trust. Like is the new link.

Compared to the impersonal hyperlink-driven search engines, the social linking system is built on a framework that makes it much more difficult to spam.

Not only that but it looks like the economics of social advertising could challenge Google too. Recent feedback suggests that Facebook ads are doing a better job of getting brands in front of their target market than Google ads.

Of course this change is still in its early stages. Google has seen this coming for some time and has been busy ramping up the social elements of its search algorithm. And we’ve yet to see the Google Me social initiative that the search giant is rumoured to be working on.

But changes in the digital landscape have a habit of happening faster than we can predict. 2011 could well be the year we look back on as the radical turning point in how we discover and find information.

I met up with a friend this week and we got chatting about what motivates us in our work. He’s a journalist, I’m a user experience designer, but that’s just what we do on a day-to-day basis – we decided to dig a bit deeper and try to discover what underpins this.

We challenged each other to identify our principal motivation, a defining principle for our working selves. You might call it a ‘personal mission statement’.

This may sound like one of those lame self-improvement agendas, but I believe that we all have core motivations that remain constant in our lives but are manifested in different ways as we change jobs, roles and even careers.

For example, I’ve been a writer, a magazine editor, a trainer, an information architect and a user experience consultant. But underneath all those various roles lies a personal goal that’s common to all of them.

Up until this week I didn’t know what this common factor was, but now I believe I’ve got it. So, here it is, my personal mission statement (drum roll):

To encourage and enable other people to be creative.

That’s it! Sounds simple, obvious even, but as I reflect on the most rewarding jobs in my life (editor of a guitar magazine, training people to write better, designing experiences that are rewarding for users), they all have that aspect in common – they are my attempts to enable creativity in others.

It also explains many other things I’m attracted to: Why I love Apple’s philosophy, why I’m buzzing about Instagram, why I find Leonard Bernstein’s work as an educator inspirational – all this makes much more sense to me now I’ve determined the source of my motivation.

So what about you – do you have a personal mission statement? I would love to hear about your own motivations in the comments below.

The past couple of months I  (like many others) have found two new social media services to play with: Quora, a social question-and-answer platform, and Instagram, a social photo-sharing application. It’s early days for both, but I’m already seeing some interesting lessons being learned from these two new entrants to the social space.

Okay, it’s unfair to pit Quora against Instagram, they’re two totally different services. But they are both social platforms, and they do both compete for our attention in a time when attention is becoming increasingly scarce.

So my view so far: Instagram is working, Quora isn’t. Here’s why.

It’s all about simplicity

In a recent blog post, Om Malik offers three things that a hit consumer internet service needs to be a success:

I agree, but if we really want to boil it down, success relies on just one of those things: simplicity.

With the abundance of information reaching unprecedented levels, any social offering will need to be increasingly simple. That means simplicity across the whole spectrum, from the proposition to the user interface; easy to understand, easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share and easy to fit into your life.

As a user experience designer I’ve adopted ‘simplicity’ as something of a mantra. Giles Colborne, Managing Director of cxparnters, has written an excellent book on interaction design called Simple and Usable, which provides many great examples of ‘compelling simplicity’.  (As an aside I’m looking forward to Giles bringing these thoughts to bear in his presentation on Publishing on the iPad at the next Digital Breakfast that I’ve been organising with the APA).

So it’s on the principle of simplicity that I judge new services like Quora and Instagram.

Simplifying the user experience

Let’s start with Quora. It’s s a straightforward proposition – ask questions and provide answers to people in your social graph. But the experience itself is more complicated. I find myself wondering: who should I be following? How can I be sure that the answers are valid? How can I filter out the noise? And how can I get real value from this service with minimum effort?

There are voting mechanisms and other pieces in place to ensure that Quora answers some of these issues, but for me it’s still not entirely ‘flowing’ and simplicity is compromised. And it’s not just me – even early advocate Robert Scoble is having his doubts.

Instagram on the other hand is a joyfully simple experience. Once you’ve loaded the app on your iPhone the rest becomes second nature. Take pictures, ‘treat’ them with easy to use filters, then share them with others. Ratings and comments are a bonus and they don’t add complexity.

Of course the photo sharing proposition is not a new one – we’ve been able to share pictures on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and many other social platforms for a long time now.

But there’s something about the distillation of the photo sharing experience on Instagram that makes it so compelling. It’s a classic case of ‘less is more’. The noise I’ve experienced on other social platforms here becomes not only bearable but inspirational. The more great pictures I see the more I’m inspired to create my own.

And that’s the point – Instagram is an inherently creative experience, arguably the best social creativity tool yet created.

What’s remarkable is that Instagram has been hugely successful despite shortfalls in other areas, such as its poor website and iPhone-only application (see ReadWriteWeb’s post 7 reasons why Instagram should not have hit 1 million users in 10 weeks). Or maybe that’s part of its strength – the creators have focused entirely on creating a compellingly simple user experience, and the rest is just gravy.

There are other lessons in the Instagram success too, principally around agile methodology and small team development – see Robert Scoble’s excellent post on Why Google can’t build Instagram.

Of course none of this guarantees it long term success. Many other factors come into play for that to be assured. But right now it provides a stark example of how, when designing for the user experience, simplicity wins.

Yesterday Amazon announced its latest quarterly financial results. One of the highlights was the news that ebooks for the Kindle are now outselling paperback books.

Since the beginning of the year Amazon has sold 115 ebooks for every 100 paperbacks sold. This is a remarkable turnaround, and one that has come a lot sooner than industry watchers expected.

Contrast this with the less than stellar performance of magazines in digital format. While iPad sales are soaring, iPad magazine sales are dropping dramatically.

So how come books are faring better on digital devices than magazines?

It’s too early to say for sure, but I have a theory that it’s all about simplicity.

Magazine interfaces on digital devices have mostly been far from intuitive. Compare magazine apps on the iPad and you’ll find a wide variety of different approaches. Each has different page and section layouts (some scroll vertically, some horizontally), broad variations in the user interface and often complex multimedia integration.

Usability specialist Jakob Nielsen concludes that iPad user experience problems are caused by an overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles. This will continue to be a problem until consistent interfaces emerge, as they did on the web.

While this works against magazines, it’s much less of a problem with ebooks. Books are linear, so navigation controls are much easier to learn. No instructions required, no complex user interface to grapple with.

Another reason could be the more obvious benefits of ebooks over their printed equivalents, including portability, social highlighting, instant dictionary definitions and digital notes.

The magazine experience, on the other hand, is a complex one, and porting this to a digital device is not as straightforward. As Editor at Large of Wired UK Ben Hammersley explains:

‘Print has its own grammar in striking photos, interesting design and typography, whereas for websites there’s video and flash-based content. Content for the iPad is completely different again and I don’t think many publishers have even begun to think about how to use its potential.’

Still, it’s early days for digital magazines and there are some interesting experiments that are sure to lead to better experiences.

I’m currently working with the APA and at our next digital breakfast we’ll be exploring the nature of content for the iPad with some excellent speakers, including Giles Colborne, Managing Director at CX Partners, and Mike Burgess, Head of Digital at Seven Squared, who will be talking about Virgin’s Project magazine on the iPad.

What do you think about magazines on the iPad? How could they be improved? I would love to hear your views in the comments below.