cybersoc.comhttp://www.cybersoc.com/at the collision point of journalism, the social web, online community management, citizen journalism and internet lawenThu, 12 Nov 2009 08:06:34 PSTTypePad http://www.typepad.com/citizen,journalism,robin,hamman,cybersoc,cybersoc,com,sociology,online,community,virtual,communityTechnologyrobin@cybersoc.comRobin Hamman at cybersoc.comRobin Hamman at cybersoc.comnocitizen,journalism,robin,hamman,cybersoc,cybersoc,com,sociology,online,community,virtual,communitycybersoc.com by Robin Hamman: online community, internet law, social impact of techology and citizen journalismcybersoc.com by Robin Hamman: online community, internet law, social impact of techology and citizen journalismThis is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site, subject to copyright and fair use.links for 2009-11-12http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/3mdIxjYvnp8/links-for-2009-11-12.htmlrobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:06:34 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20128758914e8970c


]]>Digital Influencer mapping: Who do you need to know online? Some great graphs and info in here... (tags: influence publicrelations journalisttraining journalism visualisation strategy brands marketing) What IF We Redefined Influence? The New Influence Factor in Social Media | Brian...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/links-for-2009-11-12.htmllinks for 2009-11-11http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/W-Vxjj1mCJY/links-for-2009-11-11.htmlrobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:06:26 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20128757aefe1970c


]]>The Pacific Garbage Patch: Published | Spot Us - "Community Funded Reporting" "Today in the New York Times science section you’ll find a piece written by Lindsey Hoshaw about the Pacific Garbage patch and an accompanying photo slide show. This...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/links-for-2009-11-11.htmllinks for 2009-11-10http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/USRDEZbhgc8/links-for-2009-11-10.htmlrobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:10:38 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20128756ff9d3970c


]]>Libel Reform Campaign - Free Speech Is Not For Sale (tags: libel freedomofspeech journalism internetlibel) cybersoc.com: [Robin Hamman's] interview about internet libel on 5 Live | Martin Stabe I didn't realise this audio existed... nice to stumble upon it (tags:...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/links-for-2009-11-10.htmlpresentation on meaningful playfulnesshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/XQC3ay3_W3I/presentation-on-meaningful-playfulness.htmljournalismlocation based servicesmobilesocial softwarerobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:57:09 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20120a66db2c9970b

My Headshift colleague Eliot (@eliotf) pointed me towards an interesting presentation, Hiding Data, Content and Technology in Real World Games, shared by Chris Thorpe recently.

I love how Chris describes layering a highly useful interface on top of play around social objects, utilising ambient data collection and injecting aspects of the real world such as physical places and objects into his message. Well worth a look:

Hiding data, content and technology in real world games
View more documents from Chris Thorpe.


]]>My Headshift colleague Eliot (@eliotf) pointed me towards an interesting presentation, Hiding Data, Content and Technology in Real World Games, shared by Chris Thorpe recently. I love how Chris describes layering a highly useful interface on top of play around...noMy Headshift colleague Eliot (@eliotf) pointed me towards an interesting presentation, Hiding Data, Content and Technology in Real World Games, shared by Chris Thorpe recently. I love how Chris describes layering a highly useful interface on top of play aRobin Hamman at cybersoc.comMy Headshift colleague Eliot (@eliotf) pointed me towards an interesting presentation, Hiding Data, Content and Technology in Real World Games, shared by Chris Thorpe recently. I love how Chris describes layering a highly useful interface on top of play around...citizen,journalism,robin,hamman,cybersoc,cybersoc,com,sociology,online,community,virtual,communityhttp://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/presentation-on-meaningful-playfulness.htmlbbc radio and music social media jobshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/tVrVfex1oao/bbc-radio-and-music-social-media-jobs.htmlrobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:19:43 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20128756ec19b970cJust a quick note because I reckon this is a dream opportunity for at least a handful of regular readers of this blog...

BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 & 6 Music are recruiting for Social Media Producers.

You'll find the ads here http://bit.ly/HArzc and here http://bit.ly/g9pXY.


]]>phonebox ad outside BBC broadcasting house Originally uploaded by robinhammanJust a quick note because I reckon this is a dream opportunity for at least a handful of regular readers of this blog... BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 &...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/bbc-radio-and-music-social-media-jobs.htmllinks for 2009-11-09http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/PvkxuReuAA0/links-for-2009-11-09.htmlrobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:06:13 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e201287566f989970c


]]>Participatory Budgeting - Google Maps "Participatory Budgeting (PB) can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of budget allocation and monitoring public spending. Participation may take various forms, from effective decision-making power in the allocation...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/links-for-2009-11-09.htmlcurating, not moderating, the flow of content and participationhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/p6IIBisgGNM/curating-not-moderating-the-flow-of-content-and-participation.htmlblogging techniquescitizen journalismheadshiftjournalismnewspaperssocial softwarerobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:37:48 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20120a6658566970b[I originally posted this on the Headshift Blog last week where it got a lot of attention and some useful comments. It was also re-blogged on Social Media Today where it has now been read nearly 2500 times.] User generated content is, for many media companies and other organisations, more of a problem than a solution. Vague calls to action lead to waves of irrelevant content submitted by audiences who have taken time, effort, and in some instances spent money to do so - only for that content to, in most instances, be ignored. Online communities require moderation to keep discussions on the right side of the law. Breaking stories of importance, or topics that capture the imagination, lead to floods of content that quickly overwhelm processes and technical platforms.

In all these situations, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at the social media collision point between audiences and organisations, very little of value is extracted from what can be a costly exercise, primarily because most "social platforms" have been built to pull in audiences and allow moderators to police user activity.

Whilst there is still a place for such propositions, particularly where calls to action can be closely aligned to the editorial or other content that is of value to the owners of that proposition, in many instances it makes sense to move away from moderation towards curation.

A simple enough idea, in practice curation of external and social content has been relatively difficult for media brands and other organisations to put themselves at the centre of the flow of information and content around them. That, at least, was my experience at the BBC where, for more than seven years, I (and others) tried to come up with a solution to this problem, culminating in the well received but ultimately unsustainable, at least within the (non)budgetary confines in which it existed, BBC Manchester Blog.

A few months ago, one of our technology partners, eVectors, introduced me to a tool they'd created which, with the right editorial strategy wrapped around it, can make the job of finding, curating, editorialising and socialising content far more efficient - and interesting - than I've seen before.

So, with our friends Paolo and Cristian at eVectors, Nick, myself and several others here at Headshift created a demonstration which we call ClimatePulse. As we say on the site:

"Climate Pulse tracks a wide range of source for information, comment and content about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15). It's different from mere aggregation services because there is an editorial layer and a social layer. The editorial layer allows curators to highlight specific pieces of content. The Social layer gets users involved in tagging and categorising content. In the near future, you'll even be able to take away a widget containing the flow from Climate Pulse - a widget that lets your friends, contacts or audience to not only consume but to contribute their own content, straight from your site, back into that flow."

In plain English, Climate Pulse basically monitors and aggregates blog posts, news websites, twitter tweets and a wide range of other sources we've configured in the backend. An editor can then curate this content and display it as they wish - for example letting the flow appear as a raw feed, tagging or geo-tagging content, featuring the best stuff, etc. Here's a diagramme showing the flow of content into the system, the editorial and tagging layer, and the social layer:

climatepulseflow.jpg
 

For the social layer, in this instance we've asked users to declare an interest based upon work based affiliation - energy business, business, government, environmental NGO or journalist. As can be seen in the screenshot below, users then determine whether pieces of content describe a problem or a solution, and add free tags to describe, in their own language, why:

climatepulsesocial.jpg

All content is tagged, either by the original author, the editor, users, or by the system scraping the content for key words. When visitors click on a tag, say "nuclear energy", they get a graph showing how each of the five categories of users voted. Using this example, it's likely that government and energy business will see nuclear energy as a solution and, because of they've tagged the content, we can see that they feel it's clean, brings jobs, is future proof, etc. Environmentalists, however, area likely to see nuclear energy as a problem because, again based on likely tags, disposal of spent fuel, mining, accidents, etc. Here's a few possible use cases:

  • If the UN, which is organising the Copenhagen Climate conference, or an environmental NGO was using Climate Pulse, they'd be able to see, at a glance, what issues people agree upon and why, and could push delegates to spend time negotiating on topics where it's necessary to do so.

  • Businesses wanting to send the message, "we know you care about this issue, we're doing what we can understand your views, and we want to be part of the solution" could use a proposition like this to do exactly that.

  • A media organisation, wanting to provide coverage and analysis of a range of viewpoints, based upon content from a wide range of sources, could use a tool like this to create a compelling editorial proposition that feeds content to journalists.

One last feature, which would help exposure to the proposition spread virally, is that we can easily build widgets of the flow from the page, and enable site owners interested in a particular issue, for example deforestation, to create a widget that displays, on their own site, that content. Social features could then be made available, meaning that the audience on third party sites could participate on the sites they choose to visit, rather than visiting Climate Pulse itself, and that participation, likely to be ranking, voting or comments, could feed back into the general flow to be highlighted and editorialised by the site curator.

It's been, and I hope will continue to be, an interesting example of how Headshift, working with technology partners, can help implement exciting and useful propositions that extract real value from audience participation, wherever that participation takes place. It is, to me, a giant leap in the direction of resolving the issue many have grappled with in the past, which is how to find and reflect the content and opinions of a wide range of participants, without being overwhelmed, as is so often the case, by the flood of content and rising moderation costs.

The model here is a nice example of the social business archetypes that my colleague Lee Bryant described in this earlier post and it's easy to see how we could use the ideas here not just for climate change but any topic or event, such as an election, a popular television programme, a brand, or the research or strategic work being done by an organisation.

You can see the alpha release of Climate Pulse at http://www.climatepulse.org


]]>[I originally posted this on the Headshift Blog last week where it got a lot of attention and some useful comments. It was also re-blogged on Social Media Today where it has now been read nearly 2500 times.] User generated...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/curating-not-moderating-the-flow-of-content-and-participation.htmluser centred newshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/hdlmpRYnwGk/user-centred-news.htmlblogging techniquescitizen journalismheadshiftjournalismnewspaperssocial softwarerobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:33:27 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e2012875664c74970c[I originally posted this on the Headshift blog last Thursday] Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about finding, aggregating and curating content from third party sources, including blogs and social media services, comes word of the Twitter Times which finds and delivers news that's highly relevant to me - straight from twitter.

For the past couple of years, I've most often found out about breaking news stories and other information of interest to me through my friends or contacts online. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Why, afterall, should an editor's perception of what may or may not be of interest to me be any more accurate than that of the people I have deliberately chosen as friends, follow, or receive updates from?

The protests following the elections in Iran are a perfect example of this. The outcome of elections in Iran isn't something I'd usually follow, or even be aware of, but when I saw dozens, perhaps even hundreds of people tweeting and posting facebook updates about it, I was drawn in. It's something, I think, that happened to many people around the World. Likewise, when there was an earthquake in the UK in 2008 I was woken by the tremors and, a few moments later, as I fell back to sleep, had my suspicions that it was an earthquake confirmed when my phone, which at the time was set up to receive tweets from friends via SMS, started vibrating away with text messages. There have been dozens of stories in between, and since, where the same thing has happened - the metafilters that I've created bring me news faster than broadcast or print news ever could.

Also, it's fairly common sense that the news that is important to you is the news that affects, or interests, your friends and contacts. I used to use an RSS reader, populated with over 100 feeds, religiously for hours each day. I abandoned that more than six months ago when I realised that I could still get links to the very best of that same body of content by simply monitoring twitter.

The danger in this, of course, is that, the breadth of news and other content I'm made aware of is likely to be somewhat more narrow than if I bought a newspaper and browsed through it. Each Saturday, when I buy the Guardian Weekend, I stumble across many stories - many of them interesting, some of them important - that I hadn't seen during the week.

So what does the Twitter Times do? It looks at the tweets from your friends, pulls out the links they've shared, and creates a "newspaper" from those links. Here's a screenshot of the newspaper generated for Rich (@dogwonder), one of my Headshift colleagues who pointed me to the service:

twittertimes.jpg


I've only had time for a brief look, but it appears that the service delivers content that's both interesting and highly relevant to the user. And that - user centred news - is exactly the sort of news I want.




]]>[I originally posted this on the Headshift blog last Thursday] Hot on the heels of my post yesterday about finding, aggregating and curating content from third party sources, including blogs and social media services, comes word of the Twitter Times...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/user-centred-news.htmlusing behavioural data to create compelling contenthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/13agqZVrBA8/using-behavioural-data-to-create-compelling-content.htmlBBCblogging techniquesheadshiftjournalismnewspaperspoliticssocial softwarerobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:30:06 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20120a6658354970b

[Originally posted to the Headshift blog last Friday]

Most owners of social software systems use the data generated through usage in their reporting of metrics. So, alongside the standard metrics such as unique users, page impressions, time spent, etc, social tools often enable actions which can also be counted and reported, such as registrations, content submissions, comments generated by that content, etc. The data generated by social activities can also be useful in identifying key gatekeepers within online communities, or relationships that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. Headshift does this sort of analysis for a growing number of clients, and one of our case studies describes a project we did with the BBC to better understand that people who comment on a BBC Blog is likely to also post comments on other BBC blogs.


Usage data can also make for compelling content. An example that many are likely to be familiar with are Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" and "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item" features, which use data on what users view and purchase to make better recommendation. Many news and media sites are also waking up to the value of exposing data generated by the behaviour and actions of users to, for example, highlight the "most read" and "most emailed" pieces of content.

Today I came across Facebook's Peace Project which turns user behaviour into genuinely interesting content. The project looks at user profile data on location, religion and political stance and ties it to data generated when users add each other as friends to provide in interesting glimpse at friendships that cross unlikely geographic, political or religious boundaries. So, for example, in the graph below we can see that, over the proceeding 24 hours, 5,085 friendships were confirmed by users in Israel and those in Palestine:

facebookpeace.jpg

The story this data tells is interesting in that it demonstrates that, despite geo-political barriers, people are still making connections - and this gives at least a glimmer of hope that, despite political events, people can and do continue to connect on the individual level. There's no reason why similar ideas couldn't be deployed in other sectors:

  • within enterprise systems, behavioural data can be used to better understand how organisations function, and how emergent practice is, or isn't, supported by existing bureaucratic structures
  • consumer and audience behaviour can be used, as seen above and as I wrote yesterday in my post about Twitter Times, to make user centred content recommendations or to gauge, as we're finding in a current Headshift project, customer inquiries about products or services so that resources can be better deployed in responding
  • public officials could use such data to pinpoint resources at emerging areas of interest or need - google has been doing interesting work on this, creating a swine flu map based on searches
We're only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making best use of the data that is generated by user participation using social tools but things are starting to get very interesting indeed.


]]>[Originally posted to the Headshift blog last Friday] Most owners of social software systems use the data generated through usage in their reporting of metrics. So, alongside the standard metrics such as unique users, page impressions, time spent, etc, social...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/using-behavioural-data-to-create-compelling-content.htmllinks for 2009-11-06http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cybersoc/~3/KJudVQ81afc/links-for-2009-11-06.htmlrobin@cybersoc.com (Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com)Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:05:41 PSTtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d834515f1669e20120a65c65ee970b


]]>Peace on Facebook "Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world...http://www.cybersoc.com/2009/11/links-for-2009-11-06.htmlRobin Hamman at cybersoc.comnonadult