Following Downing Street's entry into Twitter, I see the Progressive Government Conference earlier this month was also given the social media treatment - with live blogging and video streams. They are making a real effort - would love to know how they measure impact.
On Twitter, I see Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media at AL Jazeera, asked them a mischievous question - and got an answer, although probably not quite the one he was seeking.....
While supporting the intention, am I the only one to think the plan to ban paedophiles from social networking sites through blocking their email address is futile? Anyone can get a new web email address under a pseudonym in moments. Apparently if they have unregistered email addresses they can go to jail. But in a world of internet cafes, free wifi, and multiple webmail services it seems to me unlikely to be effective.
And while I'm on today's UK news - am I the only one to be surprised at the level of detail on how to make a liquid bomb to have emerged in diagrams and explanation from the current terror trial?
[Update: BillT points me to this online discussion of viability of said bombs...]
A close look at my recent links would reveal a growing interest in the use of Flash to tell stories or support multimedia journalism. It can be incredibly powerful. Try these:
It's probably reasonable to ask if this is what the public wants. But whether it is or not, I'm going down the "teach yourself flash" route to see what happens...
Let me know of others you like.
Some other observations from the day:
Paul Steiger, former Managing Editor at the Wall St Journal, has launched ProRepublica - an online investigative journalism site.
Lisa Williams from PlaceBlogger had uploaded her slides to Flickr and played them off the site. Some great observations:
"Problems are distorted and global; Media is consolidated and local"
"News organisations take things that are free and add value; Web organsiations take things that cost and make them free"
"Community is shared, lived experience; News is a tiny fraction of that lived experience"
And "Don't wait for Google to invade your newsroom - launch a counter-invasion. Join Google!"
Solana Larsen predicted there would be no Foreign Correspondents by 2013 - international events reported by those who live there. I agree the model of Foreign Correspondent is becoming rapidly outdated and needs re-inventing, not least to have authenticity with the subject which is lacking from many blow-dried parachute journalists.
Jonathan Krim of the Washington Post called for an end to "He Said, She Said" journalism in favour of declarative journalism where reporters say what they really know rather than ascribe it to others. I suggested that as long as journalism was evidence-led and transparent, reporters could already say anything they wanted. It's called objectivity (based on evidence or fact) as distinct from impartiality (absence of bias).
A great demonstration of Helium from Mark Ranalli - very interesting CitJo site. Peer based rating leads to true meritocracy in articles offered. They have 100,000 writers, and amassed a million articles in 15 months. Effectively they outsource the editorial process and allow peer review to ensure quality rises to the top.
They are also working with the Pulitzer Centre on supporting a number of projects designed to engage those who are currently un-engaged in issues. The most impressive seemed to be a multimedia project: Hope (living and loving with HIV in Jamaica)
Doc Searls also walked us through his VRM project and the RelButton which could redefine our relationship with vendors....
A really stimulating 24 hours at the Berkman-Annenberg conference on Journalism and the net.
Also being blogged by Ethan Zuckerman, David Weinberger, Charlie Beckett, David Cohn, and Martin Moore among others. This was a campfire gathering of some of those most engaged in the challenges of serious journalism and participation/collaboration.
Headlines for me.
Manuel Castells:
The link between power, democracy, communication and the media.
Power is asserted through the construction of meaning in people's minds - it is a relationship and democracy is the set of rules by which it develops. Communication delivers meaning - emotions are fundamental in the construction of meaning. (Examples, "War on Terror" the Green agenda, the way women think about their social role) Media is the battleground where politics is played out.
The rise of social media (self communication) has become a decisive instrument in society - but paradoxically it is owned by corporate media (eg MySpace). Corporate media has to commodotise Freedom of Expression or face being subverted. Social Media has the ability to overthrow governments (cf: Spain 2004). The amount of content is so huge that even if the high value/quality material is a very small proportion, it's still significant.
Need to focus on outcomes not Needs - does journalism have outcomes that make democracy better?
Journalism's social functions reflect time and place and evolve, affected by the way information is used, relations between journalism and government, journalism and the public. Should the goal be to produce highly informed elites or to move the masses? This has been a dilemma since the Founding Fathers (citing Hamilton v Jefferson) and is still reflected in bloggers denouncing media gatekeepers and the professional media citing the importance of their specialist skills.
Revolutionary fervour now in decline and we can recognise that social media and professional media can co-exist and support each other.
Many metaphors or frameworks for the web are too comfortable: "Ecosystem" suggests a natural balance where there is none, "Pro-Am" suggests money is key where really it's quality, "Info Flow" - news and journalism is about more than pure information.
He prefers "Abundance": We don;t know how to deal with an abundance of the good, control doesn't scale. "In an age of abundance of good the struggle is over metadata". We now have an abundance of metadata (where in old classification systems there was very little). This places more power in the hands of the reader, the public.
Metadata affects the mix of sugar and castor oil - how you tempt people to take the medecine, news that they might not choose but which an elite think is good for them. (Hammocking in TV) Those days have gone.
Showed his work in mapping blogs and their relationship to other media and the links between them all. It reveals unexpected concentrations and pockets of interest. His maps show a network structure around what people are doing and talking about online.
He's mapped a number of languages including the Iranian blogosphere - main clusters of interest: poetry, secular - expat reformists/ conservative-religious. Most Iranian blogs are visible in spite of the authorities blocking some.
Ethan took better notes:
His analysis shows that different types of media have different attention patterns: mainstream news stories tend to peak very quickly, while wikipedia articles are linked over very long periods of time. YouTube videos tend to peak as quickly as mainstream media, with a small exception for videos that truly go viral. Kelly believes it may be more common for videos to be put on YouTube by people attempting to set agendas in mainstream media - they seed YouTube, then point to it as a way of arguing that “the bloggers are talking about a story”, even though they’ve planted the story.
Everywhere I turn people are talking about video on the web. You Tube is about to take live feeds. What took the TV industry 40 years (to move from scheduled to live services) has taken them about 18 months. SImilarly, everyone is playing with Qik - which allows you to live stream from your mobile phone and your audience to chat and message as you do so. Disappointing content so far however. (Apart of course from Robin at Cybersoc who has been playing with it...)
The Guardian two weeks ago featured DiggNation and BoingBoing TV as examples of the boom in new online video programmes.
Then there are sites like NextNewNetworks which allows people to effectively produce and schedule their own content.
Or if you want to engage with the broadcasters, for £60 you can become an Executive Producer at HaveYouGotTheNerve TV and collaborate on new formats and - maybe - get them commissioned.
And of course blogging is going video - with Seesmic and YahooLive for example. ("Yes this is what my built in webcam from my laptop on my desk looks like!")
All on top of aggregators like Blinkx, LiveStation or Internet TV like Joost.
On the other side of the ledger, Doughty St TV seems to have stopped at the end of last year presumably as its funder decided not to go on paying the bills, and some commenters think very few people are watching.
(ALthough the FT disagrees...talking about "websites such as vidShadow, Veoh and Youku dominating the list of the fastest growing websites in the UK. )
Dangerous to generalise, but the success of the BBC's iPlayer with half a million streams a day, suggests the appetite for online video is growing.
It's early days: easy to predict that video would be part of the next wave, much harder to get it to work in a strong and economically viable way.
However, it will happen, and it contributes to making online conversations more compelling and faster.
Basically, assume we can soon all be on air, live, to the world all the time. Wasn't there a movie about that?
Any other good video experiments? Please post below...
[UPDATE: Here's some more to try - launch your own channel with Mogulus.com - Live and recorded video, or Blogtv.com - you bring the webcam they "bring the stage"...or ustream.com, live webcasts streamed. And Rory Cellan Jones reviews FLixwagon on the BBC Tech Blog, dot.life. Blogging has gone video - we just need to find the ones worth watching.]
And try just watching the live stream of any of hundreds of channels on LiveNewsCameras.com or ChooseandWatch.com - please note not all of them legally streamed.Neil Thurman of City University has sent me the headlines of a study he has just completed on User interaction with news websites. It will be published in New Media and Society and is available from his University page.
Headlines:
Major news websites are struggling to make the most of readers' contributions due to factors such as the costs of moderation and the varying quality of user-generated content (UGC), whilst in return readers are not fully engaging with the UGC initiatives.
Thurman found that 'popular' debates on the BBC News website's 'Have Your Say' attracted contributions from just 0.05 per cent of the site's daily unique audience, and one fifth the page views of 'popular' news stories.
The research showed that the slow uptake of UGC by some editors was due in part to worries over legal liabilities. Furthermore most publications insisted on moderation because of concerns over: spelling, grammar and decency; duplication; unbalanced views; and a lack of newsworthiness amongst contributions. These issues had caused some websites to drop UGC altogether.
Allf Hermida discusses the findings at Reportr.Net
I'm not surprised - interaction has always been a minority sport. Reading key news websites it's easy to see there is often a tight community of regular commenters who represent a fraction of the total readership.
But this doesn't undermine the value of news organisations being open and responsive.
Genevieve Bell, Anthropoligst at Intel, talks about the way we all lie and have secrets on the Web. talks like this are one reason I wish I was at the Lift08 conference....
For the first time in 7 years I'm not at the World Economic Forum in Davos (in spite of the Daily Mail reporting otherwise). I hear it's downbeat with concern about the economic outlook. There's a surprise.
However, they have pushed forward their reachout campaign via videoblogging in particular. It doesn't capture the real business of the conference, but it at least makes it feel more accessible.
Try You Tube
or Buzzmachine where Jeff Jarvis (and Robert Scoble) are busy using their mobiles to videoblog.
or Loic Lemeur on Seesmic
or David Brain's twitter round-up at SixtySecondView
(PS: Im delighted to read that Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, agrees with me about mobile..."it will be the platform for everything"...)
[Photo by Jean-Bernard Sieber via Flickr]
Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at Southampton University, came to talk to a group of senior editors this week. She's working with Tim Berners-Lee on the next iteration of the web - web 3.0, the Semantic Web or, as she prefers to call it, the data-web. There were three parts to her talk: the structure of the web and nature of web science; a warning we should not take it for granted and a glimpse of what the data web might mean.
On the structure of the web she described how Tim Berners-Lee came to build it, described the days when it existed on a single server and he could count the number of websites as they were added. Today the web is growing faster than we can look at it. She talked about the three layers of the internet - technology, content and regulation and policy - all vital to its existence. Web Science is developing as a mixture of disciplines: computer science, web engineering, maths, psychology, biology, sociology, ecology, artificial intelligence, economics, law, media and the socio-cultural.
She talked about the circle of development from an idea through design and technology to a micro-model which serves a social need. This is then expanded into a macro model through a period of unpredictable complexity - and it was hard to foretell the use to which any particular micro model might be put in a wider context. The Macro would then be analysed, issues identified and, with creativity, new ideas emerge.
Search was perhaps the obvious model.
Although optimistic about the future, she stressed it was important to raise awareness that the internet is vulnerable. "There is no guarantee the web will continue as it is or even at all in the future". She cited plans to develop a parallel business net as an example of what might change the way we currently understand and use the web fundamentally - suggesting those who supported the idea didn't understand the consequences. And the kinds of threats ( to access, openness, security) discussed at the UN's Internet Governance Forum. (Disclosure: Im on the advisory group for the IGF).
Finally she tried to describe the difference between the current web - a collection of interactive documents - and a data-driven web. I think it's fair to say many in the room didn't completely understand it, but there was a sense that a fundamental transformation of information technology is only two or three years away.
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