using my head

Last week I popped along to see a screening of Ivo Gormley’s documentary Us Now, presented by my old colleagues at NESTA. Not only was I curious to see the film, but I was also curious to see what was happening in the whole ’social networking’ strand of NESTA’s Connect programme, as some potentially cool stuff seemed to be brewing just as I was leaving my job there.

Although I didn’t get much of an insight into the programme’s projects and output, I did enjoy Rohan Gunatillake’s intro into the film, especially the tag clouds he had made based on the first names and employers of who had registered for tickets (no surprise that ‘Miko’ was a tiny speck in the cloud, dwarfed by ‘Paul’ and ‘Sarah’!). Rohan is the new member of NESTA Connect who is looking after the Web Connect side of things. I look forward to finding out more about what Rohan has in mind for NESTA.

The film itself was an hour-long series of interviews and case studies on various social media projects, based mainly in the UK. The intention of the film was to demonstrate how social media is not just a side activity people use to waste time and gab with their mates, but that the very nature of exposing connections and allowing for easier connection and collaboration between individuals could have a profound impact on society as a whole. Ivo Gormley introduced the film by stating:

more people can say more things to more people than ever before

- and there’s no way something as big as that can’t have an impact. I agree – there’s no denying this has had huge impact on the way business, governments and individuals now communicate. Transparency is now more critical than being ‘on message’; timeliness is now more important than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. This was touched on in the film, but the core messages of the film were about connectivity, participation and trust.

I was glad to see some case studies I hadn’t already heard of, and I particularly liked the inclusion of an offline case study: that of Morecambe Council, who decided to let the town citizens choose how to spend £20,000 of taxpayer money on a project of their choosing. The projects ranged from improving playground facilities, to cleaning up the churchyard, to building new track for the model railway. Each project had a live 5-minute pitch, and the audience (town citizens) could vote on who got the money – a real return to town hall meetings of not-so-long ago.

It would be interesting to see if Gormley would have made a different film today, knowing what we now know about the Obama campaign and his commitment to returning power to the people. I think an interesting parallel could be drawn between the Morecambe case study and Obama’s decision to empower his constituency to canvas for votes using their own language in their own time. I think examples such as these set a precedent in which people expect to be involved, and once that’s set, it’s hard to go back to the old top-down ways. It’s this increasing expectation of participation that will create lasting, real change. The more we can collaborate, edit, re-write, comment on, vote, rate, review, participate, upload, remix, mash-up, link up and create content online, the more we will come to expect it as a baseline part of the deal, whether online or off.

It’s hard to convey the sense of hope and positivity the film embued, so I suggest you check it out for yourself. There’s loads of clips and info over here on the Us Now site if you can’t make it to a screening. And if you fancy seeing what impact the film had on the audience, Rohan has put together a Slideshare deck made up of people’s written response to the film on the night. Warm feelings just in time for Christmas!

At this year’s ad:tech there were a few decent seminars, but one speaker’s comments in particular has stuck in my mind long after the event. Umair Haque was part of the Chinwag panel discussion called ‘Micro Media Maze’ and he drew parallels between the current financial crisis and the state of the online landscape. Now that’s something you don’t usually hear at these types of conferences, so I was intrigued.

Haque explained that the reason for the huge crash in the financial markets was that Wall Street had sliced, diced and rebundled securities and sold them on, to the point where it was no longer sustainable. What made them fall is that they were doing this ‘remixing’ within an old paradigm. He drew a parallel between this scenario and the new online trend for widgets: after all, most widgets simply take existing content, and slice it up, mix it up, chunk it up and then spit it out for consumption. According to Haque (and I’m in pretty close agreement), most widgets today are just glorified redistribution methods for the same old junk, just streams of ads no one wants, repackaged with the shiny badge of being ‘widgetised’.

Haque went on to say that the media needs to shift out of its old paradigm if it is to survive; the old paradigm being the practice of shoving ads down customers’ throats. In an age where consumers don’t have to watch ads anymore, using widgets as ads just doesn’t fly. Tomorrow’s ads need to give value to consumers, tomorrow’s communication needs to improve or enhance the customer’s skills, not dull them with ’stupid passive zombified entertainment’. That’s a shift indeed, but I do have (perhaps naive) faith. I’m just not sure how long it will take for media to catch on to the idea.

There are some great widgets out there – for example, the last.fm / Google Maps mashup that shows where the bands you listen to on last.fm are playing live. But widgets like this are usually created by the developer community, not the big media companies. And with services like Widgetbox allowing people to create widgets without the need for a developer or any understanding of code, the ratio of rubbish to brilliant widgets is only set to get greater.

What media owners need to do is take a leaf out of the book of Creative Commons and the blogging community, where people regularly give things away for the sheer joy of giving or being helpful to another human being. Take for example, the coolest thing since free wifi itself: Londonist’s free wifi map of London. It’s been created and made public for free, is constantly updated by the steady stream of reader comments in the original post, and is the sheer essence of sharing something useful: ‘giving back‘ without needing to be ‘given to’ first.

Whether or not this concept will fly with the business and revenue models of most media companies, is yet to be seen. I guess that’s what Umair Haque meant when he called for a paradigm shift. I only hope that it happens before the days when today’s young people, who have grown up living their lives online, take over. Because I will probably be too old by then to even remember what the hell a widget was in the first place.

Part 2 in the ad:tech London Follow-up posts

Last night I went along to Chinwag Live’s final event of 2007, and as usual it was chock full of interesting people and ideas. The event this time around was focused on the future, and those jolly Chinwag chaps & chapettes asked some of the UK’s leading marketing and digital media folks to tell us what they thought things would be like for marketing, PR and all things online in 2012.

I won’t post a full summary here, as I’m sure the podcast will be available soon (and I can smell my dinner in the oven calling me), but some of the choice nuggets for me were:

• Nikki Barton’s predictions for the way user interfaces will change, perhaps even leading to the death of the mouse. She said that in future we would need different UIs because we would be accessing the net primarily through mobile. I think she’s spot-on, especially after my recent trip to Japan where none of my relatives used their computers (if they even had one) to go online, they all used their mobiles. In fact they used their mobiles for lots of things other than phone/SMS, the most useful for us being the Japanese-English dictionary.
• Guy Phillipson’s predictions that as information becomes cheap and readily available, people would have more space and time in their lives for creativity. He predicted that in future (not by 2012, mind!) we would have in-brain search engines where all you would need to do was think about something and the answer came to you. Kind of like Neo’s learning in The Matrix, but without the need for a socket in your head or an ‘operator’ with data stored on discs – discs are sooo last century .
• The panel’s consensus that ‘digital’ is still a ‘ghetto’, a niche where specialist geeks reside and do their own thing; but a positive change for the marketing, PR & advertising industries in future would be that by 2012 digital natives would be reaching Board/Director level of these agencies, and so digital would inevitably become more integrated and taken more seriously.

After this came the Q&A, and I have to admit I must have done a pretty poor job of asking my question, because I think the panel got the wrong end of the stick. I made a comment on how no one had really talked about virtual worlds, and I also wanted to pick up on something Guy had commented on earlier in the talk about privacy issues in social networks, as I felt that in virtual worlds, most of the appeal is the privacy/anonymity factor. I personally think of Bebo, SecondLife, there.com and other true virtual worlds as simply another form of social network – which is why I place MMPORGs like World of Warcraft in another category (the core purpose of WoW is gaming, not just hanging out).

Unfortunately, the panel seemed to interpret this question as a question about the future of virtual worlds specifically in terms of platform (ie. who would ‘win’: SecondLife, there.com, etc), which is not what I meant at all – but it probably didn’t come out that way. To me, it’s pretty obvious that the future of virtual worlds is being able to move seamlessly from one world to another… but this is exactly where it starts to cross over into the troubled privacy waters social networks like Facebook are facing now. In order to port your data (or avatar) between systems, you will need to have something like Open ID, which will tell the system who you are and what data/inventory/avatar is associated with you. While I’m a big fan of Open ID, I’m also intensely aware of the fact that much of the appeal of virtual worlds is being anonymous, or keeping your FirstLife identity private and separate from your virtual life.

A lot of the backlash I’ve been hearing/reading about Facebook is tied to the fact that Facebook knows who you are, as a real person. And as they don’t seem to be uber-keen on keeping that data private, it also means that quite a lot of people can also find out who you are & what you’re up to: (potential) employers, retailers and of course some people whom you lost touch with over the years for a reason.

So my question was more about what impact the social networking privacy issues would have on virtual worlds in the future. Would a single identity system come into play within virtual world social networks, as well? And what would that mean to people like the members of Second Life’s umpteen support groups, who are only able to exist because they offer the comforting cloak of anonymity? These groups convene in the safety of virtual worlds to talk about rape, mental health, abuse and other very private issues that are very difficult to talk about in real life. In fact, I’ve found that general conversations with many of the people whom I’ve met in Second Life  or overheard in open chat are intensely personal, and disclose deep feelings and thoughts that would rarely be revealed to even the closest of real life friends.

Things are already changing in Second Life, when the introduction of voice chat inevitably changed the landscape massively. After all, it’s quite hard to keep up the facade that your female fairy avatar projects when you have a voice like James Earl Jones. So what next? I guess only the misty advance of time will tell.

My full notes from the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference are posted on the NESTA blog, but in summary the key themes were about making web-based tools more social, and the increasing need for interoperability – that is, the need for all these separate web-based tools to start talking to each other, and allowing users to port their information from one environment to another. Who wants to keep up with loads of different logins, profile pages and content in lots of different places?

You can read the full post here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

A few days ago I posted my own definition of the semantic web on the NESTA blog. I tried to explain what the next generation of the web will be like, in terms that even my mother could understand. I guess I did a pretty good job of it, because as of today it has been linked to several times, and translated into Italian and Portuguese. People seemed to particularly like this handy diagram I did:

If you’ve never understood what this term means, have a look at my definition and let me know if it makes sense to you. Because I predict you’re going to hear a lot more about it soon.

Following on from my earlier post about the death of internet radio as we know it, the UK has once again followed the US model and hiked the royalty fees paid by internet radio stations to levels that will make it nearly impossible for niche stations to exist (legally) anymore. What they’ve really done is killed off one of the cheapest marketing tools the music business has ever seen. More details are in my post for the NESTA blogs:

What stations like Pandora do is provide an excellent way of selling more records. Here’s how: you type in the name of a song or musician you like, and Pandora plays you music that is similar. You may never have heard of the artist or song that Pandora plays to you, but if you like it, you can buy it from iTunes or Amazon at a single click…

Read the full post here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Yesterday was a landmark low in the recently burgeoning world of internet radio. The US Copyright Royalty Board made a royal cock-up by deciding to hike the royalty fees that internet radio stations must pay, to ridiculous levels (up to 12 times the amount they currently pay). I had a lot to say about this on my work blog at NESTA:

To me, the tragic irony in this story is the fact that the proposed royalty fee model could never have existed without the online medium itself. The fees are per song, per listener – something which could never be accurately measured in the old broadcast model, but suddenly is possible for online stations due to the trackable nature of streaming media. Net radio campaigners say this is an unfair model, as it penalises online radio unjustly compared to satellite or standard broadcast radio fees…

… Looking at the bigger picture, this is a case in point of how something like regulation could seriously impact the growth of an innovative business model. What nascent markets like these need is not overbearing regulation, but forward-thinking…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Today I feel like getting out some placards, flying across the pond and picketing the streets of Washington, D.C. The US government could potentially lift the ban which currently prevents greedy ISPs from charging people for the amount of bandwidth they use, instead of a flat fee. Here’s my somewhat disgruntled post about it from the NESTA blog, which highlights the serious implications this could have on the way we live & work online:

Not only is this a backward step for consumers (remember dial-up?), this clearly has societal implications, allowing only the moneyed classes to readily access high-bandwidth content such as video, or to stay online for long periods in Second Life or MMORPGs. But there’s so much more at stake than missing out on YouTube or online games. The entire economy of the internet would change. Would you do your banking, grocery shopping or check-in for flights online if you had to pay extra to do so?

The rise of cheap broadband also opened the door to exponential growth in online social networks and collaborative tools such as Basecamp and Central Desktop, not to mention online meeting tools and VOIP. There are millions of people online every day, collaborating on projects and ideas, sharing knowledge in ways that weren’t possible before, and just plain getting things done… Taxation such as that being debated could kill these kinds of online collaboration.

Read the full post & comment here on the NESTA blog >>