And then Flipboard came along.

Flipboard is a news reader for the iPad with an exquisite interface that’s just right for the touchscreen interface — it’s all page turning and large buttons. So far so Reeder (my favourite iPad RSS reader), but Flipboard does a couple of things that make it stand out, and doesn’t do a couple of things that make it on the way to being the sort of thing that will make RSS feeds as user technology scarcer:

• It presents curated bundles of feeds ‘FlipNews’ or ‘FlipStyle’ — editorially picking the major (ie mainstream, “just good enough”) feeds for  subject areas.
• It allows you to sign in with Twitter and Facebook, pulling in links and content linked to by people you’re in contact with.
• It doesn’t mention (or it seems actually use) RSS, it just grabs the content and shows it to you.
• It doesn’t let you add your own feeds.

There’s no attention profiling that I can see, but there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be an addition that the makers are working on. No, it won’t replace an RSS reader — but it’s not trying, and in many situations it’s better for that.

Some work to do to implement something similar that works on other sorts of devices (a conventional computer would need a very different interface), but for iPad it’s good enough.

Last Friday night Twitter, the only special media form I use often enough to have been checking on a weekend evening, was alive with comment on the Raoul Moat case and the rolling TV news coverage of it. Rolling news, particularly the Sky version, is an easy and oft used target amongst the (mostly liberal, mostly educated, mostly cynical) people that I come into contact with there. The repetitive nature of 24 hour news, the lack of actual happenings — it’s easy meat for the sort of “social satire” that Twitter does around major news events.

A difficult, horrific and scary, situation was made mundane by the coverage. That’s what rolling TV news does.

And then something really odd happened. Paul Gascoigne turned up.

It was sad, Gazza has had well publicised mental health and addiction problems for some years – but there is no denying that the event provided all the essential ingredients for comedy: juxtaposition, recognition, shared nervousness, mundanity (in his shopping list of things brought, and in his use of unimaginative nicknames).

It would be, and I’m sure will and should remain, unthinkable for mainstream comedians to do Gazza/Moat material — but in private most people would have been comfortable to share in the darkly comic aspects of the story. And laugh, because there’s nothing else you can possibly do in that moment to change anything.

Here lies the collision we’re about to see (or are seeing) between that with the media can show as acceptable reaction and what we now know about the actual reaction of huge numbers of people. We may have in the past heard ‘sick’ jokes at work or in the pub, in recent years my SMS inbox has filled with them from those a generation above me (and it has too this week) but it’s only now that the public sphere has communication tools that allow this to happen in ‘public’.

Cue media (and political, in politics’s role as a branch of media) outrage.

So we have a problem — there seems that there is no way that the media or those courting it for political purposes can take anything but the outraged position. If anyone in that sphere were to step out of line then they would swiftly become the story, and they have power, influence, and money to lose.

We saw this in the General Election campaign, potential candidates were hounded out after using the social web to express opinions that everyone would have expected them to hold in private. Maybe they should have known better (in fact, they of all people — in the game where leaping on signs of unconformity is to conform — should know most of all), but it’s a regimented and dull World we’re being forced to live in, one where no-one can make a mistake however small.

Imagine if Princess Diana died again tomorrow, how far would the media’s reaction (which would no doubt be the same as it was them) be from the public (or at least  public space online) reaction?  If I’ve read one think piece, years later, about how the “public outpouring of grief” wasn’t shared by anywhere near to all of the public I’ve read hundreds. Now people might well be brave enough to say so.

What happens in online social interaction isn’t, for most, a truly public space — it may be open to all but it is intended to be read by those who are connected to them. Hence we get a false dichotomy; all utterances on the social web are public, but some are more public than others. We have to move to a way where all media, social or otherwise can cope with that.

This isn’t an isolated incident. The rise of the flip camera or the mp3, even the cassette tapes are the triumph of “just good enough” (see Wired 17.09). Sure, audiophiles want lossless FLAC files, gold cables, valve speakers but it’s niche activity — better yes, but a better than most people neither need nor really care about enough to put in the extra time or money.

I’ve been thinking that RSS, at least direct use of RSS by people subscribing in readers might just be about to go the same way.

Attention profiling and algorithmic suggestion aren’t great, yet — but they’re getting better and combining with social search results (Google’s “results from your social circle” and packages of social links like Twitter Times are good) will soon produce a news feed that is good enough for most purposes.

I teach search and RSS skills a lot. I spent a good couple of hours with Multistory this morning helping the team get to grips with the technology, the ideas of search feeds, sharing RSS items with each other, using the technology to its best effect; we were looking at how to to a great job at being aware of everything they can be on the be to do with their work. But we professional connectors, the researchers, the obsessives in our fields will be niche — for the things we care about most we’ll work hard but for other stuff, “just good enough” will be good enough.

The new BBC news site layout makes the actual RSS feeds for the sections (as opposed to the explanation of what the technology is)  much harder to find,  it’s pushed into the browser detection removing it from being a piece of obvious or mainstream tech.

I no longer subscribe to any news feeds from the mainstream national press, already the combination of social links and search for the topics I know I care about is “good” enough for the things I’m interested in about to find me “just enough” of the time. Those talking about “the death of RSS” for the last couple of years, have meant that people were getting their timely links through social means, that’s not as good, but for the people who’ve stopped using RSS readers it’s “just good enough”.

I’m not sure of the format that this “just good enough” reader will take — design it this instant and perhaps it would look like one for the experimental layouts the New York Times has been working on, or perhaps the Guardian’s iPhone app. Make a personalised feed that measured your attention, factored in the news and added the best from your social graph (well enough )and pump it direct to you via Twitter or wherever else you spend your online life and it’d take off like a shot. It wouldn’t be enough for everyone, or provide enough on each of everyone’s interest — but “just good enough” for most, most if the time it’d be.

I saw Eli Pariser talk recently and he wowed the crowd by showing the difference between “your Google” and other peoples’ — even if you’re not signed in,  search results are personalised based on a ton of factors (location, cookies of previous searches etc). The worry that hits people is that this may mean that searchers aren’t exposed to opinions from outside of their social graphs. Our “just good enough” reader has the same problems — but there’s no reason that the algorithm for it shouldn’t be open, so at least you would have the opportunity to be aware of the bargain you were making.

Most may not care, “just good enough” will be good enough and the idea of RSS as a front-facing mainstream technology may well be gone.

That almost sums up what I think of the work of Clay Shirky, in his first book Here Comes Everybody and now in the new Cognitive Surplus he gives example after example of positive ways that the social web has altered the way people behave and organise, but while talking about revolution he is offering not too much more than the idea that the rules can be as simple as “be nice”. Like the first book it’s a great read, it’s enthusing and Shirky explains the ‘why’ better than almost anyone else — he even, surprisingly to me as it’s the first time I’ve read or heard him touch upon it,  has a belated go at the ‘how’.

The cognitive surplus of the title is the comeback to the question “how do people find the time?” often asked about people who are active on the social web — Shirky’s (rather glib, he admits himself) answer is “they stopped watching television”.  You can get the gist of this from some of his recent talks like this one in Bristol (thanks Pete), but to sum up and very much paraphrase: ‘economic circumstances since the 1940s have given people more free time and they now have tools to use that time on a wider collaborative scale’.

Where I was uncomfortable with Here Come Everybody where the examples where it seemed as if an educated, connected, class could use these tools to produce pressure even if that was exerted on a lower class. I’m unsure as to whether Shirky doesn’t see these issues, doesn’t see them as a problem, or, is merely pointing out facts without editorialising. It may be due to my own thoughts around class and digital inclusion, or it may be due to the American perspective on class issues being different. Where Cognitive Surplus falls down for me is not just this, although problems do seem to be on the radar,  but the way civic actions formed from this surplus are strictly divided from the merely communal.

I talk a lot about how the trivial sharing online forms a social glue that facilitates more civic action — how trust is built up from play or simply ambient sharing and that forms a base for constructive activism. I often use lolcats as an example of the play as they’re so widely understood. Clay Shirky however sees the play sharing as something entirely separate from the activism — it’s both something he says in his introductory chapter and then returns to as part of the conclusion as a worry. We’re never going to run out of lolcats he says, but there is a danger that we might run out of people willing to act civicly — quoting Gary Kamia who says “you can always get what you want, but you can’t always get what you need”.

For me the artificial separation of different types of sharing and communication makes the book a little light — there are plenty of examples in the book where just such a thing happens: the formation of a charity from fans of a mainstream (p-)opera star in the US, or protests in Korea in-part fuelled by communications on fan websites for a boy band, but the idea that communities can operate at different levels of sharing and organisation, or move from one to another, doesn’t seem to be addressed. The trivial communication is seen as a danger to the civic. There’s no room in the book for the power of satire, for example, which can be both trivial and civic concurrently.

It’s perhaps a function of writing a book that the examples used are all closed off, a community is formed from an interest group (in almost all examples) which then is motivated to action — little time is given to the way that communities co-exist and overlap on the social web (in the manner of what I’ve called bounded groups) and that service users (despite having no formal direct connections) are loosely linked and can act together if the circumstances are right. Witness how interconnected but mostly separate communities on Twitter are quickly (almost too quickly some would say) motivated to campaign collectively.

There is also again the implication that this sort of collective activity did not happen at all before the advent of the social web — that it was simply too difficult. I’d suggest that there are parallels, there are amateur organisations that acted more than locally and affected big change. The labour movement of the early 20th Century, or the way that the Football Association was formed — all from unpaid (strictly defined amateurs in the case of the FA or the cricket fraternity also) volunteers using existing networks organising together from scratch over a wide geographical area. They did indeed affect social change — and in the case of sport from supposedly trivial starting points.

The reasons for not covering this historical amateur organising is odd as it does support the cognitive surplus argument. The founders of the Football Association had spare time — as they were of a upper class — and money gave them the communication opportunities (though slower and different of course) that has now become wider due to social change and the social web. The ‘marginal cost’ of the formation of the Football Association was low to the original members, just as the formation of a Facebook group is now to the digitally engaged.

In what almost is a postscript, Shirky for the first time I have encountered talks about how one might start a work of social web civic activism — in a very useful and well thought out list of ‘things to think about’. These are great thoughts that anyone thinking about attempting any form of online organisation would do well to read. And he’s honest in saying that you can’t guarantee success, but you can design for defaults and anticipate the need to develop around problems.

It’s great to read Clay Shirky — who is rightly considered one of the big thinkers on the social web — talk about the problems that can be encountered when organisations expect one thing to happen but forget that people don’t always act with the rationality you expect. ( A couple of the examples are part of his ‘Rethinking Representation’ talk a this year’s Personal Democracy Forum (archived video/tweets), I was there and it’s very much worth the twenty minutes of your time.) The book is also a fine list of fascinating resources that I may well go on to read further — particularly some of the group sociology research.

What disappoints is that lack of discussion solutions to those problems, it might be that there aren’t any obvious ones but I’d love to see what Clay has to say on the matter — he says how early in his web career he made a mistake in assuming something about people’s behaviour (he didn’t see how people would want poor self-made Geocitites sites after seeing professionally designed sites), perhaps it’s a decision never to predict again.

There is talk of the problem of the introduction of new technology and how it alters the status-quo, Shirky defines three approaches to “manage a revolution”: “as much chaos as we can stand” (just let new tech go), “negotiated transition” (balance between the advocates or change or no change)  or “traditional approval” (eg giving the Post Office the decision about how email could have been used). It’s not with relish that the chaos option — the revolution — is concluded to the be the only one.

Shirky is not a revolutionary writer, but he is one of the best at covering them.

QR codes were invented in Japan and have seen very heavy use there over the last ten or so years: a friend has been over and brought back some odd mushroom-chocolate sweets and even they had a code prominently on the box:

I wouldn’t have been able to use it though, as I was in a pub with no wifi or mobile reception. Even if I had that I’d still need to: know what a QR code is, have a mobile device that can use them (common in Japan, not quite so common in the UK — for example even iPhones don’t come with an app built in, older ones don’t have a camera hi-res enough to take the shots), be able to take a good enough photo (i.e. not see the code from too great a distance, in low light, on the move etc). Try and often as not you get something like this:

QR Codes were invented to solve a problem, the problem was that it wasn’t easy to display URLs in a usable way — in Japan the display of URLs was complicated by the use of western characters in web addresses (steps are being taken to even this out), but in countries using western characters the URL has to be pretty long before it isn’t quicker and easier to type the address into your browser. As someone interested in technology I was excited to see one on a pop bottle last year, took a while to find an app, and take a photo that worked — only to be directed to pespi.com.

The codes are even now starting to fade out in Japan — it’s becoming more usual now is for adverts/packaging to say “search for A COUPLE OF KEYWORDS” rather than use a QR or a URL. This has been the case in South Korea for a while, and is starting to catch on in the UK too (if you see a trailer for the new Leonardo DiCaprio film you’ll see that after tiny references to  its website URL and it’s Facebook page you get a full screen caption asking you to ‘Search for Inception movie’). In my mind this is because we’re skipping QR Codes in the UK — not because they were bad technology but because other pressures have combined to overtake them before they have become mainstream. In this case it’s a combination of the lack of a direct problem to solve and the realisation that vast numbers of people will search even when given a URL (yes, they type the URL into Google). The ‘search us’ method is becoming even more common as it’s easier to own a search term than to buy a memorable and usable URL.

If you were trying mass communication you’d have wasted any time invested in QR Codes (luckily they’re cheap/free, educating people as to what they were might not have been) — they’re “skip-tech”: technology that is overtaken too quickly to gain a foothold.

The more you look, the more you can see it — skip-tech isn’t failed technology like Betamax or HD-DVD that had direct competition and lost out in a format war (although both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray look like becoming skip-tech to cloud or hard drive storage), it’s tech that while it does its job doesn’t fit in with the way people use technology.

MiniDiscs are the ultimate skip-tech: the first consumer digital recording format, they offered the sound quality and convenience of a CD, with the record-ability of tape. Despite working well and finding favour amongst radio people, the advent of recordable CDs (that could be played on the same systems even if recorded elsewhere) soon afterwards killed it as a format.

It’s not always so direct as a format change, but a change in behaviour. DVD recorders to use with your TV were quickly overtaken by easier-to-understand (what was all that “finalizing” about?) PVRs and online catch-up services, not to underestimate the sheer number of ‘opportunities to see’ (er, repeats) most programmes and the trend to watching whole series in box-set size gulps.

Online there’s more chance for this to happen more quickly, as with most things. The proliferation of photo sharing services backed by camera companies, processing companies and even printer firms was quickly overtaken by Facebook becoming the place to share photos. Facebook has millions more members than much better photo-specific services such as Flickr, as the sharing of photos has become something that you do within your social graph much more than with the “whole web”. The sharing of photos has become both more communal (i.e. people mostly do it in the same space) and less open (generally) than people were expecting — the branded photo-upload site is skip-tech.

If the technology is quick and cheap enough to be treated as disposable it needn’t matter if you back a piece of skip-tech — nor will it if your aims are to reach the early adopters or for a short time — but it’s dangerous to base longer term strategy on technology where the use or the community hasn’t started to form a little.

Be quick, be agile, look out for new things — but always back the social use over the flash new tech.

I would be very interested to see Twitter Search stats — to see how many people actually look at collections hashtagged content rather than just pump them out because it seems part of etiquette. This hypothesis brewed when I saw how hashtag use breaks down of  during real big events (World Cup, election) — as people already know the context, I am thinking that they are used more as a shorthand for context than searched or monitored.

Without much hope of getting that valuable data, I have created a very short questionnaire to get some feeling for use of hashtags. Due to the responses being self-selecting I am assuming that the results will be biased towards experienced Twitter users, but we’ll see. That this may be compounded due to my network containing a lot of social media profesionals is also a worry, so I would appreciate if you would spread it as far as you can.

As I see it we (web developers and social web types) work on the same platform in the same way as TV transmission or electronic genius and a programme maker, or a printer and a graphic designer or perhaps even more pertinently a car designer and a road designer.

A good social web person will understand how websites work (although like me perhaps, with neither the drive or the skill to build large scale ones oneself), but more importantly how they enable people to communicate with each other.

You get people, very rarely, who can do both — but they’re two big jobs on any more than the simplest level — you’re better off with close collaboration between the two. Get them both right and you can leave out the SEO part.