currybetdotnet

Nokia's near-real-time adverts on the Northern Line

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:40:48 +0000

Yesterday Kings Cross seemed to be the epicentre of a London Transport #fail that thwarted my every move, but it did mean that I got an enjoyable bit of serendipity. As I was forced to unexpectedly re-route my journey via the Northern Line platforms at Euston, I spotted this advert.

And then the delays meant I had time to film it.

In the last few days I've been in a debate about how news organisations have totally failed to sell the functionality of RSS to the consumer. It looks like Nokia are going to give the technology another push with the N97 - although they are wisely not badging it as RSS.

Their video adverts on the London Underground are promoting the idea that news headlines and social media update statuses can be delivered instantaneously on the phone. Although not strictly in real-time - I saw the video loop go round a couple of times as I was on the platform with the same info in it - the headlines from Reuters and status updates from Facebook were topical enough to have been made in the previous couple of hours.

Nokia real-time ads on the Northern Line from Martin Belam on Vimeo.

Michael Jackson and search at The Guardian

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:00:49 +0000

With the memorial service over, it looks like we'll now gradually see diminishing amounts of column inches devoted to Michael Jackson. I wanted thought to put down some of my thoughts about what the reaction to his death tells us about search on the Internet, and on news sites.

There were a lot of articles looking at the reaction of search engines to the news. This is always one of the cases that fascinates me about the whole problem of delivering search and journalism in a digital era. I saw one article that suggested Google had done a bad job of handling the news because there had been a delay of over three hours before "michael jackson heart attack" started appearing as an auto-suggestion in the search drop-down box.

Our expectations have changed significantly.

I can remember that after the September 11th terrorist attacks on the USA there was consternation that, even after the world had watched the twin towers collapse on television, a search on Google for 'world trade center' turned up links promising webcam views from the top of the building. That really was the impetus for all of the search engines to concentrate on injecting more real-time news into their results.

It is an edge case though.

I can think of only a handful of events over the last decade where breaking news has been so dramatic that our existing search methods appear to be producing the 'wrong' results.

I'm fairly certain, though, that if our search engines slavishly shoved every net rumour in our faces as part of our results set, we'd soon tire of Google telling us that 'the Internet has reported that Jeff Goldblum or Rick Astley might have died, and we thought we'd tell you immediately just in case it later turns out to be true'.

Here is how search for Michael Jackson played out at The Guardian.

On the Thursday night as I went to bed I mentioned to my wife that I'd seen some rumours flying around Twitter that Michael Jackson had been taken ill or had even had a heart attack. In the morning, despite being a hyper-connected kind of person, the confirmation of his death was broken to me in a delightfully old school fashion - my wife heard the news on the radio and came and told me.

I fired off a quick email to our web production desk, asking them to make sure that the editor's recommendations at the top of our search results were pointing to the Michael Jackson keyword page and our Michael Jackson obituary for a range of likely keyword phrases.

Two things were reassuring about that.

Firstly, without even checking, I was able to (rightly) assume that even if we hadn't had a 'Michael Jackson' keyword tag the night before, we would have already created one by early that Friday morning, and that we would already have published an obituary online. Secondly, the email I got back was to the effect that the team were already way ahead of me in sorting it out.

Matthew Cain wrote an interesting blog post speculating as to why none of Michael's tracks had reached #1 in the singles chart after his death. The Guardian's search logs were another chart Jackson didn't top. On Friday 26th June, Michael Jackson was unable to dislodge 'iran' as the news topic most searched for on the site.

One last thing that caught my eye - I was charmed to see that Bing has a back-end switch simply called 'news go big'.

Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 4

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:55:11 +0000

This time last week I was gearing up to attend The Guardian's first Activate summit at Kings Place. I've blogged about Gerry Jackson's heart-breaking mission to get independent news into Zimbabwe, Nick Bostrom's presentation about 'the end of the world', a politics panel featuring Tom Watson and Adam Afriyie, and the thread of data release and story-telling that ran through the day.

I wanted to conclude with a final set of observations about what had caught my eye, made me laugh, and given me pause for thought.

Digital disruption reaches education

Richard Baraniuk was talking about cnx.org, and the way that 'open source' education text books were making headway in the USA. It was full of facts and figures about niche long-tail educational publishing, and how the price of text books had out-stripped inflation by some margin. Most importantly for me, finally someone put some pictures of Lego up on the big screen.

It gave me another cause to think about our UK-centric regulatory framework. You'll recall that the Government approved the BBC's digital curriculum plans, waited until they'd spent a large chunk of the £400m earmarked for the project - a lot of which was going to independent producers - and then the BBC Trust canned BBC Jam because it was competing with the commercial educational resources market.

A couple of years down the line, and we find that the US Government is sponsoring open source text-books that look like they will decimate that market in any place.

On being gently scolded

During the politics session which I blogged about on Friday, I posted the rather facetious tweet:

"I think the easiest way anyone has found so far of releasing govmt data is to leave USB keys lying around"

After it was retweeted a few times, I subsequently found myself on the receiving end of a gentle scolding from William Heath. Appearing on a later panel, he was rightly making the important distinction that it has usually been personal data lost by civil servants, rather than the useful framework data that we are keen to see released into the wild.

Social media and the civil service

There was an interesting debate about whether an incoming Conservative administration would allow civil servants access to social media in order to be more open about what they are doing. Adam Afriyie was clear that where the purpose of a civil servant role was to inform the public about services, then social media had a role to play, but he didn't think everybody in the civil service should be tweeting all day.

There was something deliciously ironic about the fact that just as a possible future Government minister was announcing that Facebook and Twitter did have a role to play in the running of the state, Johnston Press were apparently banning their journalists from using them.

Get the balance right

Ed Parsons is a geospatial technologist at Google, and he was talking about mapping applications. The UK has some peculiarities around map data, so, for example, it seems that annotating a map with the location of recycling centres breaches map-holder copyright, even though the original map doesn't actually show the recycling centres.

Ed also made one of the fundamental generational points of the day - introducing his 12 year old daughter on a slide and describing her as one of the 'not lost' generation. He believes that thanks to her (pink) mobile phone, GPS technology and ubiquitous data connectivity, she'll never know what it is like to feel lost.

Although I'd argue that if she ever tries to get a decent 3G signal on a train from London to Manchester in the next couple of years she'll soon rediscover that ancient mariner feeling.

One thing struck me about Ed's slide deck. It must be irksome talking about mobile device geo-location and having to pimp the prowess of Apple's iPhone all the time. I noted that every single shot of an Apple product was offset with a picture of either an Android handset or a Google app.

A/V fail and the Google mantra

Talking of Google, Bradley Horowitz closed the day with what could be described as a mantra for the future. He said that the internet will be faster and more ubiquitous, and in airplanes and in tunnels. Advertising will have to transform, as we will not have the patience to endure it. Every bit of data will be automatically tagged with geo-data or sensory data. We will be able to record every single moment of our lives, but we won't get a second one to play them back. The bottleneck in the future won't be bandwidth or technology, but the finite number of moments in our lives.

While he was saying all this, the day was experiencing the only major technical failure itself, as it wasn't possible to bring his slides up on the screen. Personally, I was rather relieved that the curse of the Kings Place A/V failure could strike people who'd put on a much bigger event than something like a London IA Mini.

And finally...

It was a very intense day that I found tremendously inspiring. As I blogged yesterday, there was a juxtaposition of 'amazing tech achievement' with 'amazing developing world need' that kept technophiles like myself more grounded about the jetpac future than I would usually be at a conference like that. The reality is that what we nowadays consider simple electronic and computational technology can assist developing societies in ways that we utterly take for granted.

Videos from Activate 09 will be up on The Guardian's site over the next few weeks, and at the end of the day Mike Bracken announced that The Guardian was intending to hold Activate 10. I hope be there.

links for 2009-07-07

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:02:44 +0000

Newspapers on Twitter - how the Guardian, FT and Times are winning » malcolm coles

"Out of 121 accounts, just 19 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 112 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc."

(tags: twitter newspapers malcolmcoles)
Over a third of Facebook users now 35+, use by seniors at record levels | News from the Herd

"And younger users? Use by 18-25 year olds went down 3% in the last month. Whether that's simply due to the summer break, or whether that's a tentative sign of younger users starting to tire of the service, this research is yet another stat to file away for when someone tells you that 'it's not for us, it's all about kids'".

(tags: facebook statistics newsfromtheherd)
Paying tribute to Murdoch: Cameron promises the end of Ofcom “as we know it” | Media Money

An amusing bit of mischief making from the Press Gazette's 'Media Money' column over Cameron's pledge to clip Ofcom's wings, and how one of the main companies to benefit might be BSykB.

(tags: ofcom conservatives politics quango regulation)
Solved: where the civil servant really wrote that message to Hazel Blears | Technology | guardian.co.uk

"Tom Steinberg, who's in charge of MySociety, has done some real journalism (programmers doing journalism? It'll never catch on) and actually spoken to Lisa Greenwood, the civil servant who was sacked from the DCSF after using her office systems to send an angry message to Hazel Blears over her use of the second homes allowance. He's written it up briefly on the MySociety mailing list, and it gives you one of those 'ahhh' moments which shows that the Telegraph indeed got it wrong, but understandably so".

(tags: mysociety theyworkforyou mps expenses hazelblears charlesarthur)
British businesses associated with 134 unelected quangos - Telegraph

"Research by The Daily Telegraph has found 134 unelected quangos, across a broad area of sectors, directly associated with British business. The study was conducted as Conservative leader David Cameron yesterday pledged to cut the number of quangos and make them more accountable". Firstly, that's a stroke of lucky co-incidence in the timing then, and secondly, the article might have been improved, dare I suggest, by even listing ten of the 134. Or indeed any more than Ofcom and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills which are the only two to get a name-check.

(tags: quangos telegraph politics ofcom)
Top 5 celebrity ghost sightings -five ghost stars who are haunting their fans | Metro.co.uk

This has got to be one of the best online photo captions I've seen for a long time - respect to the Metro subs: "The ghost of Elvis: we'll be honest, we've no idea what we're supposed to be looking at here"

(tags: metro elvis ghosts humour)
User Experience Sketches » Paper Sketch

Great set of resources to learn from, but, hey, way to make me feel nervous about showing people my pencil scratches guys...

(tags: ux sketching drawing interfacedesign ui)
TheyWorkForYou nothing to do with this sacked civil servant story » mySociety

"You may have seen coverage on various websites saying that a civil servant was sacked after posting a comment on TheyWorkForYou. We’ve no idea what this story is about, but we’re pretty certain it has nothing whatsoever to do with TheyWorkForYou. No journalist bothered to contact us before running the story. There is no comment on TheyWorkForYou containing the text quoted in that article, nor anything like it, nor has there ever been. Nor in fact (as we’ve checked), on HearFromYourMP, WriteToThem, or WhatDoTheyKnow. Only one comment has been left on any contribution by Hazel Blears in 2009, and it’s definitely not related to this. 27 comments were left on 13th May, the date the comment was apparently posted; we’ve read them all and they’re all nothing to do with this. So frankly, we’ve no idea what’s going on."

(tags: theyworkforyou mysociety telegraph)

Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 3

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:33:44 +0000

Last week I was lucky enough to go to The Guardian's first Activate summit - a one day conference at Kings Place which brought together politicians, economists and technologists to discuss the future shape of the world.

Today I wanted to pick up another thread that ran through the day - data and story-telling. Arianna Huffington described story-telling as "mankind's greatest gift". Personally I reckon fire is probably up there as well, but let's not quibble. She was responding to a question from Conrad Wolfram about data-sets, about whether publishing the full data or publishing editorialised extracts was the best approach.

Now, swivel-eyed neophiles like myself get very excited about data and metadata and automagically drawing something out of it, but that sometimes downplays the significance of traditional story-telling. In fact the talks from the day that have most stayed with me were those that really told a story. I've already blogged about Gerry Jackson's emotion-provoking images of Zimbabwe in crisis, but Clare Lockhart and Sugata Mitra also told stories with lasting impact.

Clare Lockhart on how the UN fails states

Clare Lockhart was talking about attempts to get 'failed' states back on their feet. As she said, nobody can agree on the definition of a 'failed' state, but we can all recognise one when we see it. Her experience had been of Afghanistan.

The key, she felt, had been not to rely on top-down traditional solutions imposed by NGOs from the West, but to allow the Afghan people the space to find their own local solutions that played to their strengths and traditions. Thus, instead of an expensive programme to peg a new national currency to the dollar, which was estimated to take three years to come to fruition, the country's competing currencies were unified in four months at a fraction of the cost by giving the task to the informal national network of money-changers.

Clare was very critical of the UN. As a body it has something of a 'sacred cow' status about it in some circles, and so it was refreshing to hear it criticised for waste, inefficiency and for being patronising inside The Guardian building. Clare wasn't afraid to talk about specific UN failures either. When forming a plan to introduce telephony to the nation, the UN's proposal was to conclude an expensive deal with a multi-national that would give 100 phones to key diplomats and give them free phones for life. The team Clare worked with instead got into place a system of national spectrum franchises and regulations which flooded the market with cheap mobile phones for the use of the people.

Children + Computers = Learning

Sugata Mitra was also talking about the developing world, and specifically about his experiments with putting computers in 'holes-in-the-wall' in villages otherwise untouched by modern communications. He was an engaging speaker who wildly over-ran his timeslot, but nobody in the audience seemed to mind because he had such great video clips of the children using the computers.

He summed it up something like this. Children say "The computer was in English and I'd never worked one before so I learnt it", adults say "This computer wasn't in my language and I'd never worked one before so I couldn't use it". The entire traditional process of learning seems to be all about turning the 'can do' of children into the 'can't do' of adults.

You can find clips online of Sugatra presenting at Lift and at La Universitat Oberta de Catalunya which are well worth watching. As Steven Feldman said in one tweet that flittered by during the conference: "If you aren't humbled and inspired by these kids achievements you might as well go home".

Sugatra said he is not for a moment suggesting that children in the developing world should be left to teach themselves. But what he is suggesting is that where the alternative is nothing, they should at the very least be given that chance.

Getting the foundations right

I think what really set Activate apart from other tech conferences for me was the juxtaposition of talks saying "Look at this really cool thing we've done with the latest gizmo, just think how much cooler version 2.0 is gonna be" with talks saying "These people's lives have been transformed by technology we've already dismissed as the bare minimum requirements for modern life".

For example, our society is currently obsessed with legislating around peer-to-peer networking to stop the sharing of data, whilst some of these developing countries were being made more prosperous and efficient by the introduction of voice-to-voice telephony, something we have taken for granted in the West for well over 50 years now.

Next...

Tomorrow, in the last of my posts looking at my day at Activate 09, I'm going to round-up some of the other notable quotes and things that caught my eye or made me laugh.

links for 2009-07-06

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:02:16 +0000

With all these programmes online, why watch TV? | Media | The Guardian

"'As a UK broadcasting industry, we are at a crossroads - when the Competition Commission decided that Project Kangaroo was not going to be allowed, it basically opened the door for large American corporations to establish Project Kangaroo, but in US hands,' says Erik Huggers, the BBC's director of future media and technology". Did we score yet another domestic regulatory own goal in the face of a global digital economy?

(tags: hulu projectkangaroo mediaguardian regulation)
Read all about it: Oliver Luft on Wikileaks | Media | The Guardian

"Assange thinks the problem is a more fundamental failure of traditional journalism, citing the fact that 50 stories were written about Wikileaks putting the Chávez regime emails online, but none about the contents of the 6,700 messages".

(tags: wikileaks mediaguardian)
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera | NASA

There is something simply brilliant about the fact that landing on the moon was part of the Cold War Space Race, yet 40 years later I or anyone else can simply subscribe in an RSS reader to new photos of the moon as they are being beamed back to earth.

(tags: nasa moon space)
Why would I ever blog? | Gently Down The Stream

A rather robust introduction to the kind of comments you can attract as a BBC staffer who blogs for Row, who, as ever, deals with it delightfully.

(tags: rowan blogging bbc ugc)
Scottish Sunday Slammed by PCC Over Dunblane Story | allmediascotland

"A story about the now teenage survivors of the Dunblane Massacre, that appeared in the Scottish Sunday Express earlier this year, has been severely rebuked by the Press Complaints Commission. Yesterday, the paper carried, on most of page 12, the PCC adjudication which, among things, talked of 'a serious error of judgement on the part of the newspaper'".

(tags: scotland dunblane sundayexpress pcc teenagers socialmedia)
MPs' expenses: Civil servant sacked for calling Hazel Blears a 'disgrace' in anonymous internet post - Telegraph

On Twitter Ian Mansfield raised the point "If the details of the story are true, how did the civil service obtain the data from TheyWorkForYou.com?"

(tags: mps expenses telegraph theyworkforyou)
Why wasn’t Jacko number 1? « Matthew Cain’s blog

Matthew makes an interesting set of points here - but I'd add #6 No concentrated marketing around a single track from his label. Previously when we've seen the like of Elvis or John Lennon die, their record company would flood shops with stocks of *one* 7" single, and if you wanted to go to a shop to pay your tribute, you pretty much only had the *one* in stock 7" to choose from. If Sony had made all of Jackson's digital catalogue 'album only' except for one or two individual single tracks, I think they would have made the push for #1 easily.

(tags: michaeljackson matthewcain music)
Pop review: Steve Reich and Kraftwerk, Manchester Velodrome | Music | The Observer

So jealous of everyone who got to see this - Kraftwerk, 3D video show and real Team GB cyclists all in one evening.

(tags: music kraftwerk cycling 3d observer manchester)
Two mothers in three 'fear stares if they breastfeed' - Life and Style | The Independent UK

The comments underneath this article are one of the most depressing sets of UGC I've read in a long time.

(tags: independent ugc)
Under the Bonnet of Glastonbury Online Coverage | BBC - BBC Music Blog

Here is what Tim Clarke, one of the BBC Glasto 407, was up to. Makes some very interesting points along the way about rights issues restricting the coverage *even when you are the official broadcast partner*

(tags: glastonbury bbc)
Changes to international pages (4) | Steve Herrmann | BBC - The Editors

The fourth installment of this BBC blogs saga.

(tags: bbc bbcnews steveherrmann editorsblog internationalisation)
The £10m promo CD - Twitpic

Imogen Heap bidding £10m for her own promo CD, sealed, which it appears a journalist is selling directly on eBay. In my day they just sold them straight to me at Reckless.

(tags: imogenheap ebay piracy twitpic)

No SOS needed for newspaper RSS

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:38:16 +0000

Last week Malcolm Coles wrote a blog post entitled 'Newspapers: turn off your RSS feeds'. It was a provocative title, and it certainly gained a lot of attention. Whilst Malcolm was right to point out that subscriber numbers to many national newspaper RSS feeds are low, his interpretation that this made them worthless was wholly wrong.

At the time, Malcolm, myself, Ian Douglas from The Telegraph and Charles Arthur from The Guardian had a debate about newspaper RSS feeds on Twitter - although I think all that we managed to prove was that Twitter is a bad medium for a 4-way conversation.

After enduring a torrid time in the comments here, here and here, Malcolm has since recanted.

I did still particularly want to pick up on one point Malcolm made about The Guardian's range of RSS feeds:

"[W]hile the Guardian has a couple of RSS feeds with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK..."

Our feeds are simply generated as a function of publishing. If you take any 'front' like Sport or keyword page like Roger Federer on The Guardian site, and add /rss to the end of it - you will get the contents in RSS format.

Thus http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/michaeljackson will give you all the content on the site tagged 'Michael Jackson', and http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/michaeljackson/rss will give you that content in a machine readable way. As far as I can tell there are only 4 subscribers to that particular feed in Google Reader - but that isn't really the point.

The point is that as a publishing platform all these feeds come for free, but only when they are requested. Nobody at The Guardian sat up all night specifying a zillion different RSS feeds, and the R2 platform is only pumping out the ones that people actually request.

On The Guardian site you can also build 'combiner' URLs, that slice the content by keyword and content-type. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/michaeljackson+content/video will give you all of the video content on the site about Michael Jackson. Again, /rss added that to URL instantly makes it machine readable. Now, what that means is that there is an almost infinite number of ways to combine The Guardian's tags, to make pages or RSS feeds that are rendered on demand.

Direct consumer subscriber numbers might be low, but making content available in a machine readable format is all about being part of the platform of the web, rather than just being in browsers.

Plus, the average keyword page on The Guardian site renders at over something like 3.8m pixels. The webfeed logo takes up 910 of those. It seems churlish to suggest that is taking up too much real estate.

Malcolm Coles wasn't the only person debating news RSS feeds last week. Paul Bradshaw was promoting a campaign urging the BBC to provide full text feeds.

Now, there aren't many things you can do on in the digital media space as a news organisation where you aren't competing with the BBC. Video? The BBC does that. News-based podcasts? The BBC is in that space. Mobile phone site? The BBC is in that area too - and running advertising campaigns for their service on their rival's platforms. Compilation of funny clips from YouTube? The BBC even does that these days.

RSS is one area though, where the UK's commercial news operators can chose between offering 'full fat' and 'skinny' feeds, in the knowledge that providing 'full fat' means they are doing something where they have a distinctive offering over and above what the BBC provides. Of course, on the downside, full text feeds makes it easier for people to scrape content, but it also makes for a more attractive feed for application developers, a more satisfying experience in a feed reader, and it gives advertising engines more context to serve adverts.

So, speaking personally, at the moment I'm more than happy for the BBC to only offer a cut-down and unsatisfactory headlines and snippet service over RSS, leaving at least one new media field open for other news organisations to experiment and innovate.

links for 2009-07-03

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:02:35 +0000

Guardian Activate 09 - Roo Reynolds

A definitive set of notes from the #activate09 day

(tags: #activate09 guardian conference events)
We hold the journalists to account | Paul Staines | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Journalist or politician, Paul Staines wishes a plague on both our houses...

(tags: paulstaines guardian cif politics)
Guido's internet delusions | Michael White | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

...and Michael White's withering response. One of the comments in the previous piece likens Paul Staines to Ben Elton. Whilst the opposite tribe are in power, he is an effective attack dog, but one who'll find himself muzzled once 'his side' gets in.

(tags: michaelwhite politics paulstaines guardian)
Sheffield Star: Who should be held accountable? « The press, the media and regulation policy

"This case shows some of the strengths of self-regulation: a successfully resolved complaint, a complaint submitted by a third party, a prominent correction offline and a free service for the complainants. However, it also shows the unresolved difficulties of correcting articles sufficiently quickly, making corrections to stories online, and the problems associated with making sure the right people are held to account."

(tags: pressreviewblog pcc regulation immigration racism)
The Case of the Missing Journalists | Martin Moore Blog

"When I first read this allegation in Private Eye I admit, in my naïve way, I was unconvinced. I’m aware that news organisations have, for a very long time, published articles that bear a remarkable similiarity to agency copy with a byline from one of their own journalists. But inventing non-existent journalists is a step on from this. Would the Telegraph, the newspaper that was so – rightly – aghast at the improprieties of MPs create fictional correspondents? Wouldn’t that be potentially pretty embarrassing?"

(tags: martinmoore telegraph)

Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 2

martin.belam@currybet.net — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:02:30 +0000

Wednesday was The Guardian's first Activate summit - a one day conference at Kings Place bring together people to discuss how technology, politics and social sciences could come together to forge the future. Yesterday I published some thoughts about the presentations by Gerry Jackson and Nick Bostrom.

One panel, chaired by Emily Bell, focused specifically on politics, featuring former minister Tom Watson, shadow minister for science and innovation Adam Afriyie, and Thomas Gensener from Blue State Digital.

Adam Afriyie's presentation style was a marked contrast to what had gone before - it felt like suddenly being at a scripted press conference rather than a tech & media conference. In truth, I was a bit concerned that the Twitterfall going on behind him was going to kick into life with lots of criticism of his delivery.

However, he turned out to be pretty 'on message' for the crowd, backing the release of more Government and Local Government data in open formats. This was significant, as I guess most British people in the room expect that at some point in the next 12 months Afriyie will get to drop the 'shadow' bit of his job title.

I think one of the most telling points about the upcoming British election was made by Gensemer though. When asked if we would see a similar level of online activism in the UK to that shown in the US for the Obama election campaign, he doubted it. Although there would be more than before, he didn't think that the Labour Party in particular had done the groundwork in the previous two years necessary to build up their online activist base.

He stressed that the Democrats had been at rock bottom after John Kerry's defeat - "we lost worse in 2004 than we had 'won' in 2000" he said - and so had re-built their campaigning base from the ground up. I couldn't help thinking that the fixed timetable of American election must help campaign planning, on the technical side at the very least.

Tom Watson did think numbers could be mobilised quickly - citing the anti-BNP campaign involving Searchlight run for the recent European Election. In the space of six weeks they had recruited nearly half the number of members that the national Labour Party has. However, I suspect that 'stopping the BNP' is a rather more appealing cross-political-spectrum rallying cry than "Save Gordon Brown".

As is often the case in these debates, going back to your first principle questions is instructive. Gensemer pointed out that you can use all of the technological tools in the world, but if you have 100 of your supporters in a room, and you don't know exactly what you would ask them to do to help that very day, then you are not campaigning effectively, online or offline.

During his talk Tom Watson cracked a few jokes, but you still got the sense that he had left Government feeling frustrated at what hadn't been achieved rather than jubilant about what had been. He left me with the wonderful 'Yes, Minister' image of civil servants enthusiastically championing open Government and technological innovation, but gently suggesting that maybe it would be better if another department tried it out first.

There were some dissenting voices amongst those clamouring for data to be released. In a later session it was pointed out from the audience that the desire to see this data seems to come from a mainstream media attempt to find negative facts in there, rather than from a positive desire to use the data to improve services. There was also a feeling that the scrutiny that had been applied to MPs Expenses rather missed out explaining to the public that this was an absolute drop in the ocean compared to the overall public spending budget.

It was pleasing to hear Afriyie call for a 'TheyWorkForYou.com' for local government, given the frosty reception the site initially received in most of Westminster and Whitehall. My own personal reservation is that one vested interest in keeping data secret at a local level is because it will transpire that the quality of the data held by our local councils on their own services will turn out to be pretty poor.

Another related point during the day - and I apologise, I forget who made it, maybe Will Perrin? - was that it used to be only a select band of people who knew how difficult it was to find things out. Researchers and journalists knew that getting accurate information was like pulling teeth, but the rest of us got newspapers that were full of information, so didn't see the struggle to produce it. Now, thanks to Google, we can all use the Internet to try to find out what time our local post office or council swimming pool is open, wrestle with poorly designed websites and badly formatted data, and perceive a gap between how easy it is to find information and how easy it should be.

Next...

Roo Reynolds has produced such a fantastically comprehensive set of notes from the Activate 09 conference that I feel genuinely relieved that I don't have to. I do hope to return to the theme next week though, with a couple more blog posts about my reflections from the day.

Activate 09 at The Guardian: Notes and take-away quotes - Part 1

martin.belam@currybet.net — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:26:02 +0000

On Wednesday I spent a brilliant day at Kings Place at The Guardian's Activate 09 event. It was a packed programme, which I'd like to blog about at length. To be honest though, by the time I left my brain was absolutely fizzing, and the day had covered so much ground that it was hard to know where to start.

Gerry Jackson and SWRadio Africa

So, I thought I'd start with what was by far the most emotionally moving talk of the day, given by Gerry Jackson. Her talk was about her attempts to get independent news into Zimbabwe as director of SWRadio Africa. She'd previously worked at the state broadcaster, and knew the unspoken limits of what could be reported there.

Her attempts to provide an independent voice had been campaigned against by Mugabe's Government, who were happy to see SWRadio portrayed as something sowing 'ethnic hatred', and who had actively blocked their shortwave signal. SMS and podcasts have been more effective ways to get the message across, but they are limited in the number of messages they can send due to lack of funds - you can help by donating here.

There was something uplifting about the presentation as well.

Whilst there were pictures of terrible human rights abuses, and people gripped by utter despair, there were also images of those employing gallows humour to get through their situation. The work of the SWRadio crew was also a testament to the spirit of wanting to change things for the better, whatever the obstacles. Working at a large news organisation it is all too easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day intricacies of 'producing new media', and to forget about the real and profound impact that the content we produce can have on the ground in places where there is no free media.

I was struck by something else though.

The images of abuse Gerry showed will stay with the audience for a long time. I sometimes think that when we debate some of the major geo-political fault-lines in our world, we forget the power of those sorts of images. Western television generally shows us a much more 'acceptable' and bloodless version of global conflict than the images that people in the areas of conflict themselves see. To sanitise them on the grounds of our own tastes and sensibilities makes it harder to tell the story of the human suffering behind those battles.

The end of...well...everything

In a different sense, Nick Bostrom's talk was also profoundly depressing and yet uplifting at the same time. Statistically he pointed out that not one terminal extinction level event had ever happened to the human race. However, he added the caveat that whilst we have spent hundreds of thousands of years dodging fire, famine, flood and pestilence, we don't really have an established track record of dodging nuclear armageddon or nanotechnology accidents, so it has hard to judge how threatening they might be. And we do know that something like 99.9% of all species who have ever lived on the earth have ended up extinct - and I don't like the look of those odds.

The slide that most filled me with fear in the end was the concept that, in our rush to make the Internet and technology faster and more intelligent, we are unwittingly trapped in some headlong stampede towards some kind of 'ultimate machine'. This would be more intelligent than humans, and in turn rapidly beget machines that were more intelligent than it, which might then accidentally wipe out the universe in the blink of an eye.

And all because in the early 2000s we thought it was a good idea that people could watch Susan Boyle on YouTube...

Links to explore...

There are some more sessions and themes from the day that I'd like to blog about further, but for now I'll just limit myself to a list of some of the sites and projects I noted to check out:

Omnifocus - a geo-spatial aware 'to do' list for the iPhone that prioritises the things you can do from your current location.
Fusecal - an app for screenscraping events from websites and putting them into machine-readable calendar formats (although that site is just producing a bad_httpd_conf error at the moment).
Shownar.com - a new Schulze & Webb production for the BBC which aggregates conversation around programmes.
Stackoverflow.com - looked like Slashdot ported over to a parallel universe where people were helpful instead of sarcastic.
World Digital Library - collection of scanned 'unique' book artifacts from around the world that would have utterly transformed my history degree had it been available at the time.

links for 2009-07-01

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:02:16 +0000

The Guardian Activate Summit 09 | Activate 09 | guardian.co.uk

Today I'm mostly downstairs at Kings Place enjoying The Guardian's Activate Summit

(tags: guardian conference #activate09)
TweetTabs : Activate 09

Track today's Activate Summit via Twitter using TweetTabs.

(tags: twitter #activate09)
Essential journalism links for students | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog

"Martin Belam’s links are canny, and provocative and break down the division between tech and journalism". Provocative? Moi?

(tags: martinbelam currybetdotnet journalismcouk)
Text 100 Global Blogger Survey Report FINAL | Scribed

Interestingly they suggest RSS, far from being dead, is vital to reach bloggers. [via @KristineLowe]

(tags: blogging pr survey)
On the Outside it Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box | BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes

Gah! Missed 7 day window. Would have paid somewhere between 79p and £1.99 to BBC Worldwide to listen on the eighth day to a thirty minute radio show, even time-boxed with DRM. Not able to. You know what happened next...and so nobody got paid.

(tags: bbc iplayer rights doctorwho markgatiss)
Labour party members have de-selected 5 Cllrs according to a source | Waltham Forest Guardian

Civil war seems to have broken out in the Waltham Forest Labour Party, with 5 councillors, including the current Mayor, deselected according to this report.

(tags: walthamforestguardian walthamforest labour)

How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 6

martin.belam@currybet.net — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:32 +0000

This is the final post of a series based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare.

What about when it all goes wrong?

A lot of brands can be very cautious about potential negative brand damage from social media. And it is true - you might make mistakes, and you will definitely be criticised online.

In a recent presentation I saw from Econsultancy.com's Ashley Friedlein, he cited the example of Aviva. In the middle of a costly re-brand campaign, they were promising that their new corporate identity was all about listening to the voice of their consumer. Then they announced huge job losses, and had nobody in the social media space to demonstrate that they were listening to criticism.

Still, we are back to Bobbie Johnson's argument about the 'social drinking phenomena'. Your brand used to be criticised in the pub, in the office, and in the school playground - you just never got to hear it. Now, at least you can listen to what your customers are saying about you, and join in.

This is not going to go away...

There is no turning back the clock on social media and Web 2.0. The next wave of your audience and potential consumers will have grown up with social media as the background radiation to their tween years. They don't see this as any more special as someone my age views colour television or CEEFAX. It already existed by the time that they first noticed and used it.

And it is a big social shift.

When I was at school, when I finished for the day, unless someone phoned the fixed telephone line in my parent's house or physically turned up at my door, I didn't see my school mates until the start of the next day. Nowadays, I bet there isn't a 13 year old who doesn't take it for granted that they can always be in touch 24/7 with their peer group via IM, SMS, MySpace, Bebo, or LiveJournal. All of the tweenage flirting and bickering that our generation used to have to cram into the times we were physically together has expanded into cyberspace.

This set of logos put together by Stabilo Boss illustrated just a fraction of the Web 2.0 brands out there.

My colleague at The Guardian Meg Pickard recently updated the image to show the start-ups that had folded.

It might look like a high rate of attrition, but there are plenty more logos that have developed in the last couple of years to fill the gaps. For example, the original diagram included neither Twitter nor AudioBoo. There is no doubt that if you want people to be able to carry your content around with them on the web, then you need to embrace social media.

And finally...

This set of posts was based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can view the original presentation slides on SlideShare, and download a print version of this article, which brings all 6 parts together.

links for 2009-06-30

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:03:26 +0000

Designing search for The Guardian site | Inside guardian.co.uk blog | Martin Belam

From the comments: "I'd love to see the full size version of the wireframe you lead with here. Transparency in the process of iterating on the site is one of the things I greatly admire about the Guardian."

(tags: search ugc martinbelam informationarchitecture wireframes guardian)
Can You Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps? | Graywolf SEO

"I’m a big advocate of using sitemaps, and I think this demonstrates their effectiveness. Unless you have a really small site or really good site architecture, chances are some parts of your website aren’t as exposed, or well linked as others, and this helps you spoon feed the search engines your content insuring better crawling."

(tags: seo sitemap graywolf)
The Circle Line Split | diamond geezer

I normally find Diamond Geezer spot on, but I think this is overly pessimistic. Of course if you try it out for a weekend with no new signage or publicity campaign tourists are going to be confused. But then Camden Town cross-over has been the same for years and people are still confused about the different branches of the Northern Line...

(tags: tfl diamondgeezer circleline londonunderground)
The weekend's TV: Tim Dowling on The Madoff Hustle | Culture | The Guardian

It appears that TV producer Roger Corke has finally been pushed over the edge by this TV review: "This is schoolboy error stuff - and it just doesn't happen in reviews of art, dance and architecture. You don't get letters of complaint that the wrong painting was reviewed, or the name of the wrong architect was featured. Why do we have to put up with it with TV reviews? Perhaps because mainly posh, educated people go to the theatre, ballet and art galleries, so they need to be given a reviewer who knows what they're talking about. TV, on the other hand, is that box in everyone's living room and so the assumption is made that anyone can review its contents. As a result, you end up with someone who can't even give his readers an accurate summary of the programme they are reviewing"

(tags: guardian television ugc review)
Have you a 20p worth £50 in your pocket? Royal Mint error results in undated coins | Mail Online

I love these stories - and not particularly having a go at the Mail here. Just read the comments and see how many people can't follow the simple instructions to see if they have the "rare" coin. When I worked at Reckless every time a newspaper ran one of these 'there is a very rare record variation worth lots of money' (usually a Beatles title) we would get swamped with people who had the ordinary unrare version of it, indignant that I wouldn't give them £2,000+ for it. I'd hate to be working in a coin dealers shop this week...

(tags: coins rarity ugc dailymail)

How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 5

martin.belam@currybet.net — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:43:30 +0000

This is the fifth of a series of posts based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare.

Blogging

With the rise of social bookmarking and the media championing Twitter, blogging has begun to seem distinctly old hat. It does look, however, to have survived the early predictions of it being CB Radio for the 2000s, and has now become an established style of communication over the ether.

There are two chief ways that mainstream publishers have been utilising blogging. One is to publish blogs themselves, and another is to encourage bloggers to link to and write about their marketing priorities.

For the BBC, for example, Robert Peston has become the face of the credit crunch. This is not just because of his on screen reporting, but because of what he was publishing on his blog - and the accusations that they led to fluctuations in the stock market. The blog has become a way to drive traffic to economic stories that seldom grip the nation.

You can't force people to blog

One mistake a lot of publishers made early on was to force people to blog who weren't interested in it or had no flair. This led to lots of really staid content, irregular publishing, and a complete failure to join in the conversations sparked in the comments to their blog posts - if there were any.

Approaching bloggers with PR initiatives can be difficult too. It is hard in advance to measure the exact ROI you are going to get, and personal bloggers can be notoriously unreliable mouthpieces. On many an occasion an inappropriate pitch to a blogger, including this one, can result in a negative blog post about a brand or event - entirely the opposite of what the campaign desired.

It is for that reason that I always recommend that PR people and companies take the time to build a direct relationship with the leading bloggers in their field. I wouldn't dream of opening a crisp packet in London without inviting Diamond Geezer and Ian Visits along - and I'd concentrate on trying to get (hopefully) positive reviews from those two, rather than just mass-emailing any blogger who had ever mentioned the word 'London' on their blog. [In the comments below, Diamond Geezer points out that an approach to him would prove to be fruitless]

If you are going to approach bloggers to try and drive traffic, then make sure you are giving them some content to use on their blog. Sending the same press release that you would send to a national newspaper won't cut it. Bloggers don't have access to newswires and picture libraries, they need URLs to link to, and images that they can use without worrying about running into copyright problems. And sending out information and asking for it to remain 'embargoed' is a risky business with bloggers. They have no formal relationship with you, so why would you expect them to stick to the established etiquette of the cosy media club?

Next...

Using social media has been a big shift for publishers who were used to dispensing wisdom from on high. And interacting so directly with the audience has risks. In the final part of this series, I'll be looking at when it all goes wrong...

links for 2009-06-29

martin.belam@currybet.net — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:02:24 +0000

Tournoi de France 1997 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Don't forget, tonight's Under 21 Final between England and Germany could be the first time we've seen an England football captain lift a major international trophey since we won the Tournoi de France 1997. What do you mean, you don't remember Le Tournoi? Or that I wouldn't care less about the Under 21 European Championship unless England stood a chance of winning it?

(tags: england uefa football)
HenningWehn.de | Home

"I'm still in two minds about whether tonight's U-21 Euro Championship final between England and Germany is the most important event of the footballing year or a total irrelevance. I will be able to tell you after the final whistle depending on the scoreline". That makes two of us!

(tags: henningwehn football humour england germany)
Delia Online relaunch goes sour » malcolm coles

"Yes, in a world's first, they've turned keywords in the breadcrumb trail into clickable adverts. Words almost fail me. I know I said I couldn't conceive of something earlier. But really. Linking words in your breadcrumb trail to an advert ..." O. M. G.

(tags: web malcolmcoles deliasmith advertising navigation)
Afternoon Play, Torchwood - Asylum | BBC - BBC Radio 4

The first of three Radio 4 Torchwood dramas starts 2:15 Wednesday this week, leading up to the TV mini-series starting the following week.

(tags: torchwood radio4 bbc)
Michael Jackson's Death: An Inside Look At How Google, Yahoo, & Bing Handled An Extraordinary Day In Search | SearchEngineLand

"An extraordinary day of breaking news on Thursday led to record-breaking traffic spikes as people searched online for information about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and, especially, Michael Jackson. And just like their counterparts in traditional media, the news divisions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing responded with sometimes extraordinary measures to ensure they were giving searchers the most accurate and current news available."

(tags: search bing google yahoo michaeljackson searchengineland)
Michael Jackson dominates the UK chart | News | NME.COM

'Ben' at #58? "BEN"? Are you sure?

(tags: nme michaeljackson music charts)
Bruce Springsteen refuses to play Born in the USA for Glastonbury - Times Online

Check out the comments - the journalist misinterprets fans cries of "Broooooooce" for boos, gets the release date of 'Born To Run' wrong, and fails to note that Springsteen very rarely plays 'Born In The USA' anymore because of the widespread jingoistic misinterpretation of the lyrics. But apart from that, it is a really good article.

(tags: brucespringsteen glastonbury timesonline music)