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“The Guardian’s Facebook app” - Martin Belam at news:rewired

2012-02-03T13:27:43Z

In September last year the Guardian launched our Facebook app as one of the media partners working on new features announced at the company’s f8 conference. The app uses the Open Graph to implement “frictionless sharing”, where the act of reading an article automatically pushes it as an action into Facebook’s database.

The Guardian Facebook app

Several of us at the Guardian - including colleagues Meg Pickard and Dan Catt - had thought for some time about what a “social news experience” might be like, but when we came to build the app we concentrated on shifting one particular metric. We knew that 77% of visits to the Guardian from facebook.com only lasted for one page. A good hypothesis for this was that leaving the confines of Facebook to visit another site was an interruption to a Facebook session, rather than a decision to go off and browse another site. We began to wonder what it would be like if you could visit the Guardian whilst still within Facebook, signed in, chatting and sharing with your friends. Within that environment could we show users a selection of other content that would appeal to them, and tempt them to stay with our content a little bit longer, even if they weren’t on our domain.

When we launched the app, some people were quizzical about the approach.

Christine Burns said in two tweets: “The Guardian are going the right way to kill off normal social exchange of references to their articles. Almost as bad as Times paywall. The Guardian has been pretty sure footed with social media until now, but their Facebook integration is a fundamentally illiberal mistake”

Jason Cartwright tweeted: “The whole thing is weird - why would you cede control of the distribution to FB? Feels like old AOL walled garden model”

And @Playwert got straight to the point...

“WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A GUARDIAN APP ON FACEBOOK WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OWN FUCKING WEBSITE” - @Playwert

A new audience for our journalism

One of the reasons we did the app was the relative audience sizes. The Guardian reaches 60m people digitally, and Facebook reaches 800m people. Which means there are at least 740m on there who could be reading our journalism but aren’t. That is a massive opportunity.

So far nearly 6 million people have signed up and installed the app, and one of the most exciting things is the demographic profile of those users. Over 54% of them are 24 and under, and 15% of them are between the ages of 13 and 17.

Demographic make-up of users of the Guardian’s Facebook app

This is a demographic that it is incredibly difficult for news organisations to reach. The app is putting our reporting and features in front of the grown-up audience of the future. Ken Doctor described Facebook as “a potential hothouse of new, younger customers.”

The younger demographic means that content that appeals to them become popular in the app. Some of the most read stories have been about the X-Factor, and I’ve seen some tweets suggesting that represents a “dumbing down” of the Guardian. To my mind, if we are producing that content anyway - which we do - then why wouldn’t we want it to reach as wide an audience as possible. We’ve also noted that stories about students or stories about Facebook prove to be very popular amongst students using Facebook.

How does the app work?

Our Facebook app is an opt-in alternative way to read our content. We don’t specifically edit it or choose which articles appear. It is entirely driven by user actions, and we were able to build it because of the Guardian’s Open Platform API. Any article, video, photo gallery, podcast or audio clip available in the API can appear in the app. Any link to the Guardian that appears within Facebook is a gateway into the app, whether posted on one of our on Facebook pages, or organically shared by someone pressing the Facebook share button on our site.

When a user clicks on a link to guardian.co.uk, we offer them the chance to try the app. This is in much the same way as when we detect the referral has come from a mobile device we redirect the user to m.guardian.co.uk. If the user declines the app, we take them through to guardian.co.uk as normal, and set a cookie so as to try not to ask them again. If they say yes, they read the article in the app environment, and that action is shared with their friends.

This has proved to be a divisive, and there has been some strong criticism of the social reading apps from people like Molly Wood - “How Facebook is ruining sharing” - and Kevin Anderson, who wrote “Why Facebook’s new reading apps are so darned annoying.”

We knew that this was going to be the case, as my colleague Karen Loasby user tested a prototype in advance. Half of those tested recoiled in horror at the very idea, and said that basically they never installed any apps on Facebook. The other half seemed completely unfazed, and even sometimes a little perplexed when she was suggesting to them that just maybe they should be a little more concerned about their privacy settings on Facebook.

Archive content lives again

One effect of this has been that old content has resurfaced by the app, and gained a whole new lease of life. Someone shares an old article with their friends, some of their friends either already use or install the app, and the viral effect begins to take hold. A piece from 2009 headlined “Too fat to be a model? The picture that caused a storm in the fashion world” about reaction to a picture of Lizzie Miller in an edition of Glamour has been viewed over 650,000 times in the app. It has generated over 1,000 new comments on Facebook, and some of those comments themselves have generated nearly 1,500 “Likes”.

This article has been a phenomenal success in the app

I’m comfortable with stories like that getting audience attention. The story itself might be from 2009, but it isn’t as if the debate about the size of the models used by the fashion industry was done and dusted a couple of years ago. Our archive content, presented in a social environment, has sparked a contemporary conversation. And if you’ve got a brilliant feature about the Rolling Stones discussing fifty years of their career, it will always be a brilliant feature about them at this stage of their lives, whether you read it in two weeks, two months, or twenty years time.

We’ve got over 1.3 million articles live on the website, so that is a lot of content to be discovered, and the app means that suddenly any page, languishing unloved in our database, can become a new landing page. When an article becomes popular in the app, we sometimes package it with content. Because we know the attention has come at a specific time from a specific place, we can add related links that are appropriate to the audience rather than to the original content.

For example, a piece about Derren Brown spread virally because of the headline just around Halloween. We packaged it with other spooky and paranormal pieces that had been popular in the app around that time. It looks a little incongruous now, this 400 word 2003 piece that everybody had forgotten we ever published, splashed with content about Halloween from 2011, but when you’ve got the audience there, you need to optimise for them.

This 2003 article has been repackaged now it is a landing page on guardian.co.uk

We’ve made continuous changes to the design. Some tweaks are small - for example pulling the dateline up above the headline to try and make it clearer for users when they are reading archive material. And in the last few weeks we have added photo galleries, video and audio into the app. We’ve just revamped the homepage to showcase these new types of content.

The article dateline is subtly more prominent in the app iteration on the right

And it isn’t all old stories or X-Factor gossip that is getting read and shared. A Jonathan Jones piece “The meaning of 9/11’s most controversial photo” has had more than three-quarter of a million views in the app, and other immensely popular pieces from the last few months have included Naomi Wolf writing about Occupy, a piece about twins with different skin colour and the arrest of a woman accused of a racist outburst on a South London tram.

One of the most popular articles in the Guardian’s Facebook app

Where’s the money?

The Guardian Facebook app is a canvas app. That means the bulk of the page is served by us within an iFrame on the Facebook domain. All the revenue from advertising served in that area of the page is ours, and for launch we engaged a sponsor to take the full inventory across the app. Facebook earn the revenue from advertising placed around the edges of the page. The app is growing us audience in a new space, and as those people use the app, they also promote our content to all of their friends, who, even if they decline to try the app, often still end up on our website.

And the future?

Facebook have invested heavily on the Open Graph and their new timeline feature. They see this as the future of their platform.

In effect, once we push an action into the Open Graph, we hand the responsibility for the UI and presence of our content within that environment over to them. One of the criticism’s of the new “frictionless sharing” has been that a few companies are dominating people’s news feeds. As more and more apps start to use the feature, this effect will diminish.

The “frictionless share” comes in at the bottom of a hierarchy of activity, where a “Like” and a “Comment” are still much stronger signals of activity. The Guardian actions of reading, watching and listening are pretty conservative - I’m sure that in time you will see that friends playing games will be frictionlessly sharing that they just harvested a crop, or assassinated a mugwump. For Facebook to succeed, they will need to keep their users happy that this level of information is manageable and interesting.

For the Guardian’s part, the app will continue to iterate. We are constantly looking at ways that we can improve the social side of the app. The key to success will be surfacing the right content for the right users.

Thank you

I’d like to thank the many people who have worked on this app, amongst them: Matt Andrews, Gideon Goldberg, Stephen Wells, Sheena Luu, Lynsey Smyth, Karen Loasby, Lisa Villani, Piers Jones, Joanne Ellis, Anthony Sullivan, Grant Klopper, Daithi Ó Crualaoich, Nathaniel Bennett, Sally Goble, Meg Pickard, Dan Catt, Hayley Dunlop, Andrew Lepki, Hannah Freeman, Charlene Prempeh and Nina Lovelace.

Frictionless or not, on Facebook or not, people love to share on the web

2012-01-30T19:23:42Z

The release of 60 new apps that employ Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” has sparked another round of internet debate about the value of the functionality, and the shift to getting users activated on the site’s new Timeline design.

A poll by Sophos suggests many users are unhappy with Timeline and Philip Landau posed the question on the Guardian’s work blog: What if Facebook Timeline was read instead of your CV?.

Nick Bradbury blogged about how actually more friction is added to the sharing process, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped 5 billion song plays being shared. Whatever that means.

Predictably, Charlie Brooker’s rant about “frictionless sharing” - “I’m all for sharing, but why the online obsession with revealing every detail of your life?” - has performed very well within the Guardian’s Facebook app (which I worked on), as his content always does. Any why wouldn’t it? The “frictionless sharing” effect amplifies articles that have become popular, driving even more users to read them, and share them.

Away from the app, in the space of 24 hours, over 1,000 people have voluntarily clicked the “Recommend” button on the article when viewed on guardian.co.uk, sharing Charlie’s woes about over-sharing with their friends. And nearly four hundred people have shared their feeling in the comments about it.

Frictionless or not, on Facebook or not, people love to share on the web.

Paul Sutton wrote on Future Comms that the system represents “the Gruesome death of choice” as Facebook introduce “60 new Timeline apps that work BY DEFAULT UNLESS WE TURN THEM OFF.” His Caps Lock, not mine.

My colleague, Meg Pickard, by contrast, has written a post explaining some of the clear options around “frictionless sharing”, not least of which being that installing them is an act of choice itself - “Meg Pickard just published a blog post about frictionless sharing and Facebook.”

One issue that keeps coming up is that the presence of “frictionless shares” diminishes the value of things that have been deliberately shared. These apps push an “action” into Facebook’s data centres, and the UI of presenting that back to users is up to them. You can see that Timeline displays the two very differently. I don’t think the aim is to replace the active share, but it is to add another set of actions into Facebook’s graph - of much less value than a comment, less value than a “Like”, but of interest nevertheless.

Different Facebook Timeline treatments of content that has been actively shared (left) and frictionlessly shared (right).

If you are interested in finding out more about the Guardian’s Facebook app, I’ll be talking about it on Friday at news:rewired, as part of a panel session on “Social Media Optimisation” alongside Wired’s Nate Lanxon, the BBC’s Chris Hamilton, Kevin Anderson and MSN’s Darren Waters. I’ll be publishing the notes from my talk on this website on Friday.

And, talking of Facebook, I’m experimenting with a page to bring together all of my writing output from sources like this site, FUMSI and TheMediaBriefing. You can find it - and hopefully “Like” it - at facebook.com/currybet.

This is Martin Belam’s personal blog. The views expressed are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former employers or clients. Read my blogging principles.

“Slow social media” - This is my jam

2012-01-30T08:55:52Z

At the Guardian, most days we have a five minute talk about something digital during morning conference. Often it is our own products and services we showcase, but sometimes we talk about something outside the building that has caught our eye digitally. Last week I was talking about This Is My Jam.

This Is My Jam is a social music sharing and discovery service. So what, you might think - we’ve got last.fm and Spotify, and the Ping thing in iTunes that nobody uses. But This Is My Jam is quite different. It invites you to share just one song at any given time, and that becomes your “jam” for up to seven days. When you visit the service, you see a list of your friends “jams”, and hitting play on one of them starts playing them in sequence.

It is like internet radio where the playlist is determined by your friends and their choice of “jam”.

(I should, at this point, apologise for being my age and saying things like “jam” in public in the context of music - if it helps, imagine I am saying “hey pop-pickers, that is a groovy 45” instead.)

If you don’t know the service, you can find out more about it and sign up for the beta here. Or find a friend on Twitter who is using it, and they can invite you in.

I think the service is interesting for three reasons.

Slow social media

This Is My Jam is the very opposite of Spotify’s Facebook integration or last.fm’s scrobbling. It isn’t about all the things you’ve listened to. It is about carefully choosing and curating one song at a time to represent you in a social digital space. Slow social media.

It also introduces an interesting phenomena - social media stage fright. It is like DJing slowly, one track at a time, and once you’ve posted something that has attracted likes and followers, you feel desperate to avoid clearing the virtual dancefloor by picking a clanger.

Lean build

If you think of the full scope of the service, you might consider building a registration system, a way of hosting lots of different music formats, and employing an army of music industry lawyers to clear the rights and sort out the royalty arrangements. Then you’d need to build the player, and the way of connecting together people.

Actually This Is My Jam dispenses with a lot of the hard work. Registration is handled by integration with Twitter and Facebook, and although there is scope to upload your own mp3s, the main way of sharing music is by embedding videos from YouTube. That shifts the burden of hosting and legal obligation onto Google, and allows This Is My Jam to concentrate on the bits of the service that are unique to them. It is a lean way to get up to a minimal viable product quickly.

Great use of notifications

The team have made great use of notifications. When you post your “jam”, you get regular emails telling you that people have “liked” it.

Assuming they do, of course.

It means even if you don’t revisit the service during the seven days your track is available, you get a background feeling about whether your track has gone down well. The service then sends you an email when your track is about to expire, reminding you to pick a new one. It is a gentle way of driving people back to the site to engage with it.

You can find me at thisismyjam.com/currybet. At the time of writing, my jam was “Witches” by Low.

Online newspaper metrics? The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks

2012-01-29T15:57:33Z

There’s been quite a fuss around the latest set of usage figures for news websites, with comScore suggesting that Mail Online has overtaken the New York Times as the world’s leading online newspaper. The Times has taken the odd step of both disputing the figures and the relevance - saying the inclusion of thisismoney distorted the number by adding an extra million or so. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy added

“a quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.”

The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks.

The Mail’s trajectory is such that I doubt whether the extra bit of traffic from their finance site will be the significant difference in a month’s time, and if you didn’t see them as a competitor, why comment at all?

Especially as I think we are beginning to see a fight over out-moded metrics.

ComScore are quite clear that their methodology, based on a panel and supplemented with their own tags, excludes mobile duplication. But I’m equally clear that during the course of any given month, I must register in the analytics tools of nearly every major news site in the world from a variety of mobile devices, laptops and desktop machines, as well as via some brand specific apps. And I’m not alone in being promiscuous with my use of news sources, and owning more than one device that can connect to the internet.

Predictions that mobile usage of the net would overtake fixed desktop usage have tended to suggest that 2014 or 2015 is the likely cross-over point. We are hurtling towards that faster than ever - back in February Google’s Eric Schmidt said of mobile growth “We look at the charts internally and it’s happening faster than all of our predictions.”

As news sites start saying that 30%, 35%, 40%, 50%, and 60% of their audience are connecting via mobile, it becomes untenable to sell to advertisers the idea that these people are mutually exclusive from the desktop users, and selling their eyeballs twice.

Just as “hits” died as a measure of web activity, I think “monthly unique users” is on its way out. I’m impressed with the Mail’s digital strategy and the audience growth it has brought - but they may have just won the game at the very point where the rules change.

Piling up “unique cookies” just isn’t going to be good enough to impress advertisers in a world of ubiquitous smartphone access to news.

Do you hunger for stories, or hunger for sales?

2012-01-27T09:35:51Z

If the question for this month’s Carnival of Journalism is “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?”, I’m immediately minded to ask instead “Should a good journalist also be a good capitalist?”

Michael Rosenblum asks why journalists can’t get themselves together and charge more for their work, or take on more of a business and entrepreneurial role. There is definitely something in what he says. For a long time I have argued that the big media companies are going to have to get used to being smaller, and becoming more like commissioning houses. Need coverage of an eco issue? Go to an eco-journalist who runs their own site. Building up niche audiences by specialising in a specific topic, and then cashing in when the commissions come around will be one way that journalists might scratch out a digital living. But it isn’t going to be a cash cow.

I’m also reminded of something I’ve seen Karen McGrane say about the UX world, where lots of people seem anxious to prove that they can be an IA and a UXer and an interaction designer and a visual designer and a developer. She says look at the end credits of movie. There are hundreds and hundreds of names with hundreds and hundreds of weird job titles. Hollywood studios know that it takes all of these people to make a film. Nobody goes into a big film production saying I’m going to be the sound engineer and the key grip and write the screenplay and sing the theme tune and plan the marketing.

There is a place for specialism, and journalism can be a specialism. Rewriting press releases doesn’t take much effort, but taking a complex series of events, synthesising them into a narrative and conveying them to an audience is a skill. Coaxing information out of people in an interview is a skill. Interrogating data to prove or disprove the arguments of a politician or elected official is a skill.

But no journalist worth their salt wouldn’t write about a plane falling out of the sky on their hometown because it happened on a Thursday, and Thursday is the day you’ve set aside to phone local businesses to drum up ad revenue.

I think you have to ask yourself, do you get out of bed in the morning with a burning hunger to find and uncover stories, or do you get out of bed in the morning hungry to make sales?

I’m unconvinced that you can do both.

This is my contribution to January’s Carnival of Journalism

Content strategy lightning talks night

2012-01-26T10:12:28Z

As part of his talk Michael Alves described content as “all the things that are fun in your application”, and there was no doubt that the lightning talks evening about content strategy arranged by Jonathan Kahn and Richard Ingram was fun. Limiting the talks to five minutes each and using the Ignite format meant the event ran like clockwork, and between 6:30 and 8:00 a parade of eleven different speakers had given a range of talks on topics like semantic mark-up, web governance, open source software, feeling gloomy and kicking things in the pants.

Peter Springett finished the night with a talk about putting value on content. He made two great points. Firstly, he thought that it was great that the job title “content strategist” suddenly seemed to have opened the doors for content people to have conversations with IAs, designers, developers and so on, in a way that didn’t happen a few years ago.

Secondly, he put an emphasis on speaking the language of the business - if you can’t convey the value of content to the CEO in terms that they understand, the business will fail to grasp the value of content strategy.

I couldn’t agree with this more. I always find it so odd in the UX world that we go to great lengths to empathise with the end user, and then give jargon-laden presentations inside the business which don’t empathise with the requirements and understanding of the financial director or marketing team.

Jonny Rose raised a laugh when he pointed out that being a CMS wasn’t good enough anymore. Publishing platforms like SiteCore have registered trademarks like “compelling web experiences”, although we all know the experience of using most CMS tools is a painful one.

Tom Bamford was talking about improving semantic mark-up, and giving a quick run-through of why you should be using mark-up like <abbr> and title="" on our pages. Standards-based semantic HTML has been the the thing to do for a good number of years now. I couldn’t help feel that the fact that Tom still feels the need to give a talk like this in 2012 shows how far behind web standards many CMS vendors - and the dreaded “HTML” output of Word - are.

Mags Hanley gave a lovely talk which was a small case study of a small business. Formums.net is aimed at mums in the Chiswick area, and Mags said “Kate does not have a proposition if she does not have a content strategy.” This means thinking hard about defining a manageable set of content to be producing, planning ahead for special events like Valentine’s Day, and having a genuine focus on the needs of the audience.

At the opposite end from a small-scale business, David Farbey explained why corporate content needs a kick in the pants. He talked about the common problem, that whilst your internet and marketing team can carefully hone the copy and micro-copy that greets visitors when they reach your website, the chances are the technical specifications document, brochure and help guide were not written with the end web user in mind. Corporations often can’t even force their staff to use the same PowerPoint template, let alone enforce a style guide.

(Incidentally, with his talk being about a kick in the pants, and an early promise that he was going to finish with a picture of a “wide open space”, I was quite concerned that the last slide was going to be goatse)

Magus were sponsoring the evening, and gave a talk about their software ActiveStandards which can monitor a large website to find breaches in standards, and identify bits of the operation that are going off-piste. Sadly, I think we are still some way off of being able to plug the Guardian Style Guide into an algorithm and then send it off looking for mistakes on websites like mine or the Guardian itself, which try to adhere to it.

Steve Parks pointed out an interesting study by Gartner about the composition of software used inside enterprises. Where the split between proprietary, open source and internal build software had been skewed heavily in favour of licensed proprietary software, the last few years had seen a massive growth in the implementation of both open source and internal builds. He conjectured that this was because these two forms of software were able to collaborate - some internally developed tools get outsourced, and open source libraries help speed the development of internal tools. He said collaboration was the key to making progress, and outlined some rather progressive Drupal sharing between Sony and Warners in a vertical not known for their forward-thinking about open source technologies.

There are another couple of more comprehensive sets of notes from the night from Gabriel Smy - “Struck by content strategy lightning talks” - and my self-styled “arch-event blogging rival” Adam Tinworth - “Content Strategy, Like Lightning...” The event was also filmed, so I expect the talks to be online in due course.

“Pulling the news from the social media noise” - Storyful’s Markham Nolan at #cmLDN

2012-01-26T08:55:55Z

Last night I went to the Community Managers meet-up in London which had been organised by my colleagues Laura Oliver and Hannah Waldram. Although I’ve never directly played a community manager role, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with people who are, acted as “host” on the BBC’s Points of View message board, and as resident “token techie” on Comment Is Free at the Guardian. I’ve also done my fair share of designing social interactions for apps and the web.

This was the second time the group has got together. Laura explained that community managers are quite a rare breed, and often find themselves either working in isolation in a business, or doing the job but not realising that there is a job title for what they do. The point of the meet-up, she said, was not to be a formal conference set-up, but a place where people working in community within different areas could meet and share tips, ideas and support. I met people who worked at other media companies, but also people working in charities, the games industry, and students. Crayon hosted, and Markham Nolan gave a talk about Storyful

Markham Nolan: Pulling the news from the social media noise

“We have a small core community of people who had value to the news.”

Markham Nolan was talking about the social media curation service Storyful. They’d shifted their business model in a significant way since starting out - something I really admire when I see a company be flexible enough to change their mission when they spot an opportunity. The company was born out of a frustration of seeing journalists filming pieces to camera on a rooftop miles away from the action in a war zone, when you knew that at the heart of the battle many people were armed with cameraphones. The original plan of “bringing together a community of active citizen journalists” had become one of sourcing citizen journalism and packaging the content and contacts for mainstream network clients.

Their mission now is to “pull the news from the noise.” They have built up reliable communities in a range of countries, so that when news breaks, they have contacts they can call on to help verify locally-originated social media content. This was important, as Markham said “We don’t want to be first, we want to be the first to be accurate.”

They’ve also developed an expertise at surfacing this content, whether that means the ability to search in Arabic, or having developed knowledge of advanced search techniques. As Markham put it, their dashboard “distills a global community of people, who, with their cameraphones, are making the news, and they don’t even know it.”

Markham explained that for every news story, a community forms around it. Their trick is to identify those communities. When news breaks they go to their existing contacts, or build a new set by making and refining Twitter lists, and working out who the authoritative tweeters and original sources are. And, importantly, they keep a relationship with them. They have, for example, a panel of people in Syria who they have regular contact with, to help keep them informed about the situation there.

This wasn’t all new-fangled and revolutionary though. Markham said “All we’re doing is applying old journalism to new media.” He compared sizing up a source on social media to the way you might size up a new contact in real life - look them up and down, work out if they “feel” genuine, make a couple of calls to corroborate who they say they are.

It was an intriguing talk, which also touched a lot on the ethics of contacting the people providing the content. Questions were asked about the sensitivity of trying to contact people who have witnessed and filmed some kind of disaster in the immediate aftermath of it, the duty of care owed when contacting someone who might be at risk from retribution by an oppressive regime, and local resentment if someone got paid for their content and was thought to be exploiting the misery of others.

Another question from the audience asked how sustainable their business is, and whether they risk teaching people how to use social media more effectively in a way that means clients can dispense with their services. Markham admitted they were working in a “window of ignorance”, and said that any news business that wasn’t investing in data journalists and the ability to make deep and meaningful searches of the social web was missing a trick. He was also confident that however much news organisations learned, Storyful would always be six months ahead. I tend to agree with that view, not least because a smaller company is always likely to move more nimbly into new social and digital arenas before big media companies have even got them on their radar.

“Verbs. Zombies. UX.” - Mary Hamilton at London IA

2012-01-25T08:55:09Z

We don’t really do “headline” slots at London IA, but at January’s meet-up, we’d kind of figured that it would be hard for anybody to top the gun-wielding zombie antics of Mary Hamilton.

“Verbs. Zombies. UX.” was her tale of running Zombie LARP, which, for the uninitiated, involves paying for the privilege of running around a deserted shopping mall trying to survive a zombie attack. Or as they describe it: “You and your friends, armed with NERF guns, trapped in a zombie-infested building. It’s a live-action game of combat, suspense, black comedy, and high-speed occult fear.”

It is all quite a long way removed from “Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.”

Verbs

Zombie LARP effectively gives the player very few verbs. In fact, it basically gives them “shoot” as in “shoot the gun at the zombie” and “run”.

And “die horribly” Mary added.

One important digital UX parallel to draw here is that a limited set of verbs governs the user having a limited set of actions. When we say to users that they can only “Like” content, then “Like” doesn’t carry any nuance. When people use the “favourite” button to mark something as “read later”, “this is dreadful”, “that’s funny” and “I agree”, then forcing them to use one verb robs the action of semantic meaning.

But the trade off in giving a choice in some digital environments is tricky. I mean, who thinks that hacking Millie Dowler’s phone was “inspiring”, “funny”, “hot” or “crazy”? The UK Huffington Post gives you the chance.

Community

Mary explained how the community has taken the idea and done things that they would never have imagined when setting up the games. They have people turn up dressed as sexy zombie nurses. People argue with zombies that they cannot be harmed because they have absolute faith in science. And they have had one unexpectedly effective invasion of co-ordinated Morris Dancers, whose gentle brand of working as a troupe perplexed the zombies.

Which boils down to people being great - as you’ll have seen if you’ve ever been involved in any online or niche community. It doesn’t take long for in-jokes, shorthand references and improvisation to take hold amongst a bunch of people with similar interests who are trying to have fun. Which leads to...

Iteration

Another software development parallel was with iteration. Mary explained that they have people oversee the games as referees which allowed them to iterate. They sometimes have to run around and change the rules during the game. Which is, I think, how I feel when I am running around saying “Yes, I know that is what it said on the wireframes, but what I meant was...”

Joking aside, the point was that there is no point carrying on with a set of rules which are proving themselves not to work. Why wait for the whole game to play out, when you can see an improvement or stop a bad situation developing?

Rule zero

One of the most retweeted things we’ve had at London IA for ages was a snapshot of the Zombie LARP “Rule zero”:

“Don’t be a dick. Seriously. Don’t”

As Mary said, it makes you examine whether your behaviour is a bit dick-ish. And gives the players explicit permission to say to someone “Sir, you appear to be being a bit of a dick. Please desist forthwith.”

Or, as she explained it, made it OK for the zombies to relentlessly pursue someone being a bit of a dick in order to remove them from the game.

In (stick) pictures

Mary’s brilliant slides, drawn by Grant Howitt, are available online.

Next...

The next London IA will be Tuesday 7 February 2012. Jonty Sharples will be hosting, as I won’t be able to be there, which is somewhat crushing as it looks set to be a great evening if you have an interest in how agile and UX work together.

Jeff Gothelf will be presenting “Lean UX – Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” which will be followed by a Q&A about anything/everything agile with James O’Brien, Johanna Kollmann, Leisa Reichelt and Mark Plant.

The first batch of tickets will be available on Eventbrite at 12pm on Friday 27 January 2012, the second at 12pm on Monday 30 January 2012, with a final chance at 6pm on Wednesday 1 February 2012.

“In Praise of Side Projects” - Alexander Baxevanis at London IA

2012-01-24T08:55:10Z

Alexander Baxevanis started his talk at January’s London IA with a confession - “I’m addicted to side projects.”

Now, I’ve got some sympathy with Alex’s problem here. What with the job, this blog, London IA, EuroIA, my writing role at FUMSI, editing ebooks for the Guardian, keeping my programming going, writing guest spots for places like TheMediaBriefing, making music, frequent conference appearances and running training days, I’ve got quite a lot of things that could be considered side projects myself. His involved lots of Arduinos and bikes and Arduinos in bikes, and Alex boasted that of all his projects, he’d even actually finished two of them ;-)

Alex set out five rules for running a side project:

Find something you want to learn
Find a partner
Shout about it
Keep track of where you are
Don’t get disappointed easily

Alex valued the idea of collaboration in a side project. Find someone with the opposing skills to you, he suggested, and you’ll end up with a better outcome, and both learn from each other. Sometimes people worry about sharing the credit for a project they are passionate about, but Alex suggested that sharing credit was better than getting no credit at all because nothing ever got finished. Having a partner spurs you on to meet deadlines and finish tasks you’ve promised. He also thought a physical space was useful for a project - whether that is the proverbial shed, or a collaborative environment like Hackspace.

Keeping a record and telling people about your projects were also important. By talking about them, you get the dread nagging reminder of people asking how you are getting along with such-and-such, but you also get the serendipity of people recalling you are interested in a topic and suggesting ideas, resources and events to you. I keep track of my projects with a whiteboard in the kitchen - which also means it is a very visible record of whether I am working on the things that pay me or make money, or whether my focus is elsewhere and I am getting behind with things I need to do.

A whiteboard in the kitchen helps keep my side projects on track

I laughed a lot at one part of Alex’s talk. He said one of the best things about side projects is that they are a great way to learn. If you want to learn HTML & CSS, he said, don’t get yourself something like a Sams Learn HTML in 21 days book, get started by trying to build something you want to build. That way you’ll focus your learning on what you need to know.

I laughed, because when I first started to learn how to make the interwebs work in the 1860s, I didn’t have a computer at home, and a Sams Learn HTML4 in 21 days was exactly what I used to get myself started - writing out example code on paper and then typing it into the work PC in my lunch hour to see if I’d got it right.

But I didn’t really get started until I had a project - to rebuild the Reckless website. Certainly today my efforts to scratch along with Python are based on learning what I need to get my prototypes working, not some great plan to become a Python expert.

The first dreadful website I ever built was a side-project at work

One of the questions Alex was asked at the end was whether his side projects actually helped with his work. He explained that as much as he loved his job, it was never going to be “100% of what I want to do” - an advantage that side projects have. And during the talk he’d given some examples of “side projects done good” - the World Wide Web you are reading this on evolved out of a Tim Berners-Lee side project called ENQUIRE which was exploring hypertext, and the 6502 chip which transformed home computing was the result of engineers tinkering around the edges when they thought they could do better than the specifications and ambitions of the company they were working for.

Alex has published his slides and text on Speaker Deck, and Richard Wand has also blogged about the talk.

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The final talk at January’s London IA was my amazing colleague Mary Hamilton, with her tale of “Verbs. Zombies. UX.” I’ll be publishing my notes from that next.

“Designing the design process: Rem Koolhaas and OMA” - Sjors Timmers at London IA

2012-01-23T10:55:39Z

Last week’s London IA was on the day of the SOPA protest Wikipedia blackout, but Sjors Timmer joked that fortunately he had already downloaded the page on Rem Koolhaas to get the biographical details he needed for his talk.

“Designing the design process” was Sjors’ attempt to understand how Koolhaas could have been at the top of his game as a writer and an architect and founding partner of OMA for over thirty years. Sjors identified five parts of the process. Observation in the field leading to work in the studio, which generated models, which lived in an archive and were documented by books.

The archive and book production loom large in a study of Koolhaas’ OMA. During the course of designing a building, many models are made. These are a physical way of storing ideas. Clients don’t have to consult a large document to see what is proposed, because the models capture materials and colours as well as shape. Nothing is meant to be thrown away. OMA maintain a vast archive of their models, and so can very quickly re-visit the ideas that were generated during any particular project.

Sjors was interested how the classic design process of creating lots of potential solutions, iterating the promising ones, and then narrowing them down to a final candidate, had been twisted by OMA. He saw loops where the research was both the beginning and the end of a project - for example a book might be made at the conclusion of a project, or some projects might be commissioned because Koolhaas had already written about the architectural landscape of the area.

In fact OMA’s documentation has itself been the subject of an art project - the “OMA book machine” - which bound and compressed all of the output into one super-massive display.

The “OMA book machine”

The OMA process seeks to avoid making decisions based on luck, randomness or who happens to have been longer in the business. A fresh approach is also valued. Partner Victor van der Chijs says:

“We want to refresh and renew our organisation on a permanent basis. We really want every year at least 25 percent of our people to be new. And we want them to be young, bright people. The idea [is] ... that we really need those people to feed in new ideas, make sure that OMA stays relevant and really understands what is going on.”

Ben Bashford asked if they took much account of feedback once the buildings were “lived in” - and Sjors pointed out a video he’d seen at the OMA/Progress at Barbican which interviews the housekeeper of a building the company designed. In in, she is bitterly complaining about the number of leaks in the house and that it is difficult to clean.

The archive was one of most fascinating things to me. The Netherlands Architecture Institute apparently sent an archivist to OMA to catalogue their archive, with a view to purchasing it and preserving it - instead the company hired the archivist once he had completed his study. I asked Sjors how he thought we could replicate this digitally - to have all our ideas on permanent display to recall at a glance. One person I spoke to afterwards suggested “metadata” was the answer - but I don’t think that comes close to answering how we could almost effortlessly browse through decades of our preserved ideas.

Sjors has published his slides: “Rem Koolhaas – designing the design process”

“OMA/Progress” at the Barbican

Inspired by Sjors’ talk I went to Barbican to see the OMA exhibition at the weekend. For a subject matter that deals with something as large-scale as buildings, it has an immense amount of micro-detail in it. The most striking exhibit is a display of 3.4 million images harvested from the company servers, which are displayed in a constant blur. Even with the rapidly changing image, it takes 48 hours to loop around the lot of them.

My daughter mesmerised by the OMA photo archive exhibit

OMA/Progress is on at the Barbican Art Gallery until February 19th.

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The second talk at last week’s London IA night was from Alexander Baxevanis speaking “In praise of side projects”. I’ll have my notes from that soon.

Happy “Community Manager Appreciation Day” 2012

2012-01-23T10:04:03Z

Today is “Community Manager Appreciation Day”. If you’ve ever taken part in online community, used UGC for research or entertainment, or chased up story leads from comments left across the web, you probably owe it somewhere to an unsung community manager. I’m not normally a big fan of organised recognition, but I believe, especially in the news space, that community management is a dangerously under-valued skill.

We all know the moans about comments below the line on news articles having unleashed “the green ink brigade”, but a vibrant and active community on your site can be a valuable and amazing thing when you get it right. You only have to look at areas of the Guardian site like “Readers recommend” to see how community engagement can work well.

And, you know, sometimes the users even end up writing “fan” fiction about you...

“[...fzzzztt....] crawling along the ceiling was the dread techie Belam. Black was his clothing, dark-bladed the dagger twixt his teeth. ‘Trollslayer’ men called it, for he had pulled it from the throat of a particularly troublesome revenant with a floating IP address. As he pulled the spinal column from the still twitching body of [fzzzzzzt!!!], Martin arched his back and roared. Now, surely, the monster would come. [flik! flik! zzzzit!!!]”

Bless.

It isn’t just people with the title “community manager” though - why not go out of your way today to thank someone who works on the digital community side of your business, whether you call them hosts, moderators, community co-ordinators, social media outreach workers, or community managers.

And if you do work on the community side of a website, there is a meet-up for community managers in London later this week on Wednesday. It features Markham Nolan from Storyful talking, and more details can be found at the London Community Manager meetup group. I’ll see you there.

Ebook strategy article for TheMediaBriefing

2012-01-21T12:57:24Z

I’ve written a piece this week for TheMediaBriefing site about ebooks - “Why your news brand should take part in the ebook publishing revolution”

On Twitter Peter Kirwan summed it up as “Mini e-books = 7” singles & DIY tablet publishing = the new rock ‘n’ roll”

My point is that the new shortform ebook suddenly breathes new life into types of content that you might never have considered compiling into book form at all.

At the Guardian we’ve developed a series called Guardian Shorts - ebooks that are between 20,000 and 55,000 words long. They bring together previously published content from the Guardian and Observer, and turn them into a curated collection that can be consumed over a couple of commutes. There are over fifteen titles in the series now, which launched with an ebook about Phone Hacking back in August. I’ve edited two of the titles, “Who’s Who? The Resurrection of the Doctor” about my beloved Doctor Who, and “Facebook: The rise and rise of a social media giant”. I am currently working on a third title.

Of the other titles available, I’d particularly recommend Richard Nelsson’s “Jazz: From New Orleans to the new generation”. It is a fascinating insight into the coverage of the genre by the media during the 20th century - a style of music described in a 1927 article by former prime minister David Lloyd George as savage and animalistic, and dismissed in the 1910s by the Observer as essentially a bunch of n-words making noise.

You can read the full article - “Why your news brand should take part in the ebook publishing revolution” - on TheMediaBriefing site.

Low numbers + small change = BIG NEWS

2012-01-19T19:28:06Z

There is a great piece on the Guardian’s Data Blog today by James Ball about the statistics behind the apparent extravagance of the Met running up a bill of £35,000 on the speaking clock, but it is another set of police related data stories that have grabbed my attention today. Yes, the annual round of writing up crime statistics.

The Guardian went for “Murder rate rose 5% last year”, the Mail with “Knife-point robberies leap by 10% in just a year” and the BBC also lead with that figure. On a more local level, Wales Online went for the happier news that “Crime in Wales drops 7% in a year” and Kent Online reported “Crime falls in Kent”.

I went to a fascinating event last year about the reporting of crime statistics, which was eye-opening about the way crime is recorded and the ways in which the numbers can be unhelpfully reported.

Take the 5% rise in the murder rate for example, that 5% represents a shift from 608 to 636, and twelve of those were one shooting rampage. Effectively in England and Wales we saw a shift from 1.66 people being murdered a day, to 1.77 people. Not a massive change. And you’ll note that the three national news sources there all went with headlines that pull out an individual type of crime that has increased, whilst the Press Association opened reports with the line “The number of crimes recorded by police in England and Wales fell by 4%.”

At the event, which was put together by the Media Standards Trust, the BBC College of Journalism and the Royal Statistical Society, Andrew Trotter, the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police, described accurate reporting of crime statistics as “a hopeless quest.”

In my blog post about his talk I wrote:

“Politicians, journalists, and sometimes the police themselves abuse crime figures he said. Politicians use any movement in the numbers to prove that their policy works, or someone else’s doesn’t...And police officers are guilty of that too, Trotter said, for example claiming that some specific operation drove numbers down, without accounting for longer term factors. He recognised that there is no scientific rigour in isolating the factors that might be causing changes in crime figures.”

Also talking that day was Michael Blastland, who has spoken at London IA about “Designing for doubt”. At the statistics event he said that “society was ‘twitchy’ about crime figures, always looking for trends, and the media made stories out of what they saw to be trends, even if the movements in the figures were well within the margins of error or ‘confidence levels’ in any given set of statistics.”

If you are interested in the way that the media report crime data, then I’d recommend reading the blog posts from that day in full:

“Steam multiplied muscle, but computers multiply thought” - Sinclair digital literacy rallying cry from 1983

2012-01-18T10:55:49Z

Given that the Guardian has just been running a series about digital literacy and teaching our children to program in schools, I thought it might be worth digging this advert out of the archive.

It appeared in the Observer on Sunday 22 May 1983. Here is the text in full:

“Saturday’s child plays hard for its living.

Little girls muck out stables for pleasure. Manual workers spend long hours of leisure labouring in their gardens. Millionaires with no need to ‘work’ at all, feel deprived without a telephone at hand, and an office at the other end.

And children play with computers - archetypal symbols of bureaucratic routine.

Under the impact of technology, the concept of work is changing. It’s changed before, and sometimes dramatically, but this time the change is sensational. Steam multiplied muscle, but computers multiply thought.

Which is why computers affect not merely the quantity of work, but its quality. Much of the deadening drudgery we used to call work disappears. The more information we have, and the more sophisticated the use we make of it, the more exciting and effective our decisions and actions become.

Information technology has a long and benign history. The computer, the telephone, the telegraph, the printing press, the invention of writing itself - all of them multiplied the immediate availability of information. All of them led to increased prosperity and universal improvement in the standard of living.

Studies show, for example, that in country after country growth in telephones per capita is followed and matched by growth in GNP. The effect of computers will surely be even greater.

If it is, Britain will be grateful to Sinclair Research. Since 1980, Sinclair has been selling ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers. Over a million of them - so far. As a result, Britain has the highest number of computers per head in the world.

Saturday’s child in the picture is too young to grasp the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘play’.

For his children, the distinction may simply have disappeared.”

Digital literacy for all - still a long way to go...

2012-01-17T21:08:22Z

As you’d imagine, I’ve been following the Guardian’s digital literacy campaign and the debate around the provision of computer education in schools that went on last week with great interest. I’d particularly recommend reading:

“Computer science reboot” by Alan O’Donohoe
“Digital literacy - women in computing live Q&A”
“Careers in computing: how I worked my way into the industry” by Josh Cooke

I’m of the generation that grew up with BBC Micros in schools. I first started programming on one when I was about ten in infants school, and my senior school had a networked bunch of them. At home I had a ZX Spectrum.

When I was eleven and twelve a few of us used to write games, and put posters up in the school announcing their release and hoping somebody would buy them. I wrote one called “Risky!”, involving rescuing people from the tops of burning buildings in a helicopter. It was written in Sinclair BASIC, and based on a Nintendo Game & Watch, so it had limited scope for movement. The person could be in a small finite number of places, as could the helicopter, hence the game mechanics were pretty easy to calculate.

I remember now that there was quite a logical flaw in it - if you failed to save a person, you lost a life, and a message flashed up saying “You need to buy a new helicopter. You owe me £3,000.” I’m not really sure why failing to save someone meant your helicopter didn’t work anymore, or how I settled on £3,000 as the price of a helicopter, which seems incredibly cheap for the early eighties. But I was eleven or twelve.

Later on I did a City & Guilds certificate in computer programming. The task was to take a numerical input between 1 and 1,000 and have the computer render it in text i.e. you would enter 207 and the machine would render it as “Two hundred and seven”.

Of course, you are just learning, so I rushed headlong into programming without planning, and the approach I took was to render it in the simplest way possible, and then reverse engineer all the exceptions so it didn’t say things like “onety seven”. Not the most efficient bit of software ever written, and I only got a B. I also took Computer Studies as an additional GCSE subject, cramming a two year course into one year. Part of it involved studying and learning the database structure of the DVLA centre.

So, given all that, you can imagine how dismayed I am to hear things along the lines that “kids these days” get taught how to open a file in Excel and how to send an email.

Two points of caution though.

Firstly, programming isn’t everything. There will be plenty of kids for whom sending an email and filling in a web form is all they need to know about computers. And I feel a bit disheartened whenever I see the debate immediately veer into the “Well, they shouldn’t learn Word because it is proprietary software by evil Microsoft. If the human race is to survive at all, we must teach children to write their own word processing software with a GNU General Public License. But only v2 of the license because, frankly, I don’t agree with the changes in version 3, and no sane person would.”

OK, I exaggerate a bit, but we need to beware of language around teaching about technology that makes us all sound a little bit zealot-y. “Learn Latin, live longer!” is a slogan employed by proponents of state schools teaching the classics. I suspect that “Learn computers, in the future every single person on the planet needs to understand how to program!” sounds similarly specious.

Secondly, who is going to teach these kids?

You can get a contract ICT teacher role at “a charming independent boys’ school located in north west London” for £100 to £130 per day, plus the debt of having studied to be a teacher. Or a developer job with a daily average contract rate of £375. Which would you do if programming computers was your love?

A contract ICT teacher role

Average rates for programming contracting according to contractoruk.com