Notes on Why Emma Loves Flickr
M’good ambient chum Emma, aka Editorialgirl, wrote a great post about how a lost camera was reunited with its owners thanks to the massed efforts of various communities on Flickr which she titled Why I Love Flickr: A Detective Story. It’s worth reading before you go on with my post as she covers all the bases and, let’s be frank, tells the story much more concisely that I could.
Now you’ve done that I thought I’d go through her account and add a few notes on what I think actually happened here and what it means.
Rhonda posted a note in the Flickr help forum. The Flickr community jumped on the idea. Yes, it was okay to share the photos in the name of investigation, so she posted the whole lot onto her photostream.
Note that she didn’t decide on the course of action and then approach the community. She asked the community how best to proceed. Each online space has its subtle rules on how things should be done, even if the members aren’t really aware of them, and getting them to set the terms of engagement, as it were, is key to getting them involved.
Someone from the help forum spotted a car number plate with a Birmingham prefix outside the house, so Rhonda joined the Birmingham Flickr group and started a new discussion topic. “Does anyone recognise the road, she asked, “or even the people?”
A breakthrough. A man on the Birmingham group, known as Capo2, recognised the house as being typical of the area where he’d spent the first few years of his life. Not Birmingham, though. Aberdeen.
I particularly like this part because it seems so random but illustrates an important point. We are more complex than the categories you find us in. Sure, people in the Birmingham Flickr group will have Birmingham in common but they also have other interests. So when you ask a question in the Birmingham group you’re actually asking a widely diverse bunch of people. Off the top of my head you’ll get historians, teachers, rockabilly fanatics, human rights campaigners, lawyers, computer programmers, artists, musicians, nurses, botanists and, my favourite, a scout leader. And that’s just the ones I know well enough to have asked. Not a bad pool to pop a question to.
That’s the thing about niche online groups. They bring together people who wouldn’t normally interact in “real world” social environments and that makes things really interesting on all manner of levels.
It was on the Scotland Flickr group that things got really interesting, really quickly. Flickr member Greg Kael recognised the road and, the next day, drove down it to make sure. Amazingly, he was able to pinpoint the house in the photograph and gave out the address in the thread. Another Flickrite, Andrew, googled the address and found a planning application for replacement windows on the local council’s website. (I know. Isn’t it mad?) It gave a phone number for the council member dealing with the application.
The obvious question here is “why?” What made Greg drive to a road to check it matches a photo for no personal reward? That’s for Greg to say for sure but I’d hazard a couple of guesses. Firstly this has become a game where the prize is being proven right. This is no longer really about getting the camera back to the owner - that’s just the excuse. What really matters is the game. This is important. People like games, especially team games where they can be useful.
(As an aside, when Flickr first came onto the scene one of the most interesting articles written about why it was different from every other photo hosting site was Flickr is a game which it was, and to a certain extent still is.)
The second guess, which applies more to Andrew and his web-fu, is that it was no biggie. He spent a few minutes chasing up an idea (which was probably planted in his head by something someone else said) and passed the results back to the group. While the organisation of all this is pretty chaotic it might help to put a bit of structure to it to illustrate what I mean here.
In the middle you’ve got Rhonda. She’s the uber-passionate one driving this game and spending a fair amount of time on it. Around her you’ll have a small group of people who are supporting her all the way giving leads and co-ordinating information. And then you’ve got everyone else, the thousands of individuals who take notice and, if they can help for five minutes in their lunch hour, chip in their collectively wide-ranging skills and knowledge. Rhonda is the only person who’s potentially being inconvenienced by all this (and she’s having a blast so doesn’t mind) - everyone else is predominantly on the sidelines but, thanks to the tools provided by Flickr, able to help out with the minimal of effort.
And that’s why I love Flickr.
And so the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing. Everyone involved with this, even if they just read the threads and followed the story, gets such a warm and fuzzy glow from the experience that the next time something like this comes along they’ll jump at the chance to help out.
And that’s what the Internet is all about.
How many links should a blog post have if a blog post must have links?
This question, in a roundabout way, was raised by Seb on Twitter this evening.
And the answer, somewhat inevitably, is “it depends”. And that’s where I come in.
All web pages should, with a few exceptions, contain links. This is what makes them web pages and not just documents that have been put on the internet. The act of linking from one page to another via highlighted text is what makes the web a web. It adds value to your text by, in essence, embedding content from elsewhere into words. For example, I can type the word hyperlink and by linking it to a dictionary definition save myself the bother of explaining what it means, freeing me to get on with my writing. Another example might be a web page that described a load of cool videos on YouTube. I could describe and summarise each video or I could link to them allowing you to see them for yourself. This is like the difference between telling somebody about that great movie you saw last night and handing them a DVD you happened to have in your bag. Or something.
So yeah, linking is great. You should all do it all the time. But how much should you link?
The first question you should consider is how important are the things you’re linking to. As a rule the more important the less links. Here’s an example. Now, I like D’Log. He’s one of the best bloggers in the region for cultural subjects with a hint (only a hint) of academia and he really understands the medium well, so when over the summer he decided he didn’t have time to do proper blogging and would just post weekly digests, and when I saw the results in my feed reader, my heart sunk.
It’s all fascinating stuff, no doubt, but it would take me an hour to go through it at least. This is overkill. To much choice, not enough curating. Thankfully he appears to be back at work and normal service has resumed making his posts a great example again. Take this post, a text book example of good short-form blogging. Starts with a link, follows it with an illustration, a bit of commentary, a quote and, in the final description, a contextual link to a person mentioned, should you want to see more of her work. By only having two links he’s telling you those links are important and worth visiting. If he were to fill the post with explanatory links for everything their impact would be lessened.
Linking as a way of emphasising is an interesting one as it puts the act in the same arsenal as bold and italic. This is the thing that I want you to think about as you read on, it says. Similarly, when in the middle of your flow you mention something or someone that you think is important but not important enough to derail into an explanation, a link will show that it’s important, and this is the clever bit, even if they don’t follow the link.
Years ago I remember Diamond Geezer trying out a service that let him see how many clicks his links were getting and bemoaning that a significant number of them weren’t clicked on at all. (When DG tracks back to here perhaps he can inform us of the specific post as I’m having trouble finding it in his extensive archives!) He put so much effort into researching which sites to link to and we, his ungrateful audience, didn’t even bother to click on them. But I’d argue that even if hardly anyone clicks on the links they still have an importance. Here’s a good example of a DG post with loads of links. You know, if you’ve been reading him for a while, that they’re all good value so you might check out one or two but the main reason you’re there is for DG’s writing. His links are, I guess, more like traditional footnotes or a bibliography, adding value by their presence but not requiring you to actually click on them. Compare that to D’log’s weekly roundups. They both have the same number of links but one requires you to follow them while the other offers them as an optional extra.
I did say this was complicated, didn’t I…
If you read my personal blog at peteashton.com you’ll notice I split my blogging into two types. Posts, which have titles and tend to be long and rambling, and Links which are short and serve to send you somewhere else on the internet. There are overlaps and gray areas, obviously, but the distinction is hopefully useful. In the Posts any hyperlinks are there to add some optional value to my writing. In the Links my writing adds some value to the hyperlinks. I could scatter hundreds of links through one of my 2,000 word rambles and it wouldn’t matter one iota if you clicks on none of them but in order to get any value out of my Links you have to click and if I give you too many Links of a morning you’re possibly going to resent having to do that much work. Which I why, though I can come across loads and loads and loads of cool things online I’m quite selective about what I put on my blog.
So, in summary, you should link and link often, but in moderation, depending on the context of the post and the importance of the links, and whether you actually want people to follow them or not.
Make sense?
(And if you really have too much stuff to link to get a Tumblr blog. Works for me.)
Social Media Surgery moves to Thursday
Last Monday I made a half-hearted showing at my weekly Social Media Surgery. No-one was in Rootys but that didn’t bother me as I really wasn’t in the mood.
Last Thursday I was feeling a little more sparky and, thanks to a borrowed ethernet cable in the office I usually work in, found myself in Rootys again sucking the wifi. Also in the cafe were Mark Badger, Clare Edwards, Anthony Hughes and the shockingly blogless Lara Rantaraja. In other words a nice cross-section of people I learn from, help out and work with on various things. This told me something quite important.
Mondays suck. Thursdays are where it’s at.
From now on the Social Media Surgery will take place on Thursdays. Same time - 4-6pm, same location - Rooty’s in the Custard Factory, and same drill. If you want help with anything connected to blogging and social media in general, be it figuring out your blogging strategy, a problem with your WordPress installation or the perennial “what the hell is Twitter for anyway”, pop along and I’ll do my best.
And if you’re the sort of person who thinks you can help others negotiate this crazy new world and you happen to be free on a Thursday afternoon do feel free to come along. This isn’t an exclusive thing and my answer is never going to be the only right one.
See you on Thursday!
Links
- How To Launch Software - This guide is aimed at software developers, obviously, and outlines the steps used in launches for Gmail and other services where they started small with limited invites, learned from that manageable pool of users and gradually let in more and more, building a great product and a trusted marketing campaign at the same time. What interests me is how this could be applied to non-software launches, especially those that look to engage people on a community basis. Could the invite / testing paradigm be applied to, say, an arts festival? I'm not sure but I'd love to see it tried.
- The Bottom 1.5%, up from 0% - A detailed look by the VP of Tech at Warner Bros at the platforms people are using websites on, specifically the growth of non-traditional devices like games consoles (Wii, PSP) and phones (iPhone), and speculation on what this means for concepts like interactive TV given that people are checking websites during programs rather than pressing the "red button". Interesting from a mobile perspective too. via Torrez
- Video websites 'must vet content' - Culture, Media and Sport select committee display a shocking ignorance of how online social spaces operate. You wouldn't vet how someone uses a park - you deal with problems as they occur.
Syndicated from my del.icio.us account
Emergent Game - where art meets tech
You might be familiar with the Emergent Game, run by Nikki Pugh this summer as part of an arts festival in Birmingham. I was brought in in the early stages for some old fashioned brain storming about what might be possible using social technologies and I blogged about my initial chat with Nikki in February.
As it happened I didn’t have time to fully engage with the Emergent Game when it took place but I watched from a distance with interest. The basic principle was that people played through soft toys they bought in charity shops using Twitter as the core communication service with others added on as needed. Some took photos from their phones, some started blogs but everything was done from the point of view of the toy, or Luden in the terminology of the game. Nikki and her team then set missions which responded to how the game was evolving, which took place in the real world streets of Birmingham.
Within the limited resources and timescale the game was pretty much a success and Nikki is keen to develop it further. She’s taking it to Japan soon, which should be pretty insane given the cultural differences in mobile phone usage, but the really exciting development is an invited to apply to the Banff New Media Institute in Canada to take part in a residency during November. The only stumbling block is funding.
She needs at least £1500 to cover basic costs, asked me for ideas outside the usual arts funding sources and, after a nice chat on Sunday and a recommendation that she blog about her plans, I started thinking about it.
So far Nikki’s been approaching this as an artist, which is what she is, but I think she’s actually doing some fascinating R&D in mobile platforms and how people can and will engage with them. The stuff she’s talking about hooks in perfectly with research and theories about social media, the sort of things that power the “digital revolution” or whatever it’s being called these days. This has relevance to the digital economy which Birmingham is so keen to encourage as well as being of interest to businesses that are looking to move into mobile distribution for their content. Part of the changes to the Birmingham Post and Mail is the development of a mobile site which (in my view) needs to be much more than a simple rejigging of their web site. It would ideally be truly mobile, reacting to where people are and involving them on that level. This is the sort of thing Nikki is investigating with her game.
One of the things Nikki’s planning to develop at Banff is notions of Bridge Objects, “intermediaries between technologies typically found on most mobile phones and more complex functionality provided by web-based applications.” The idea is these objects act as “2-way conduits for the exchange of different media in real-time (i.e. immediate) and in real-space (i.e. related to a location in a physical landscape).” This has been developed by advertisers to a certain degree where people can download information (wallpapers, for example) via bluetooth from advertising boards but the 2-way system is a lot more radical when you plug in geographical data. The application of this sort of thing, both commercially and socially, is rather mindboggling. (Quotes extracted from the draft proposal she sent me.)
I like Nikki. I consider her a friend and want to support what she’s doing, so I have a bias here. But I also think she’s got the right sort of brain to be exploring this stuff and that this is exactly the sort of thing our digital development agencies in the West Midlands should be supporting. I’ve given her contacts at Screen West Midlands (who now cover digital as well as film/TV) and Digital Birmingham and have offered advice on how to move her pitching from Art to Tech but I wouldn’t want to see this opportunity be missed by the region.
Oh, and she’s also a bit of a geek being quite happy to hack WordPress templates and do a bit of coding, a rare trait amongst contemporary artists!
If you can help either directly or just with some advice, please read her blog post and drop her a line. Or drop me a line and I’ll introduce you.
Links
- Why I love social bookmarking - Five extremely good reasons to use services like Delicious in your business. I particularly endorse point 5: "It generates content, all by itself"
- 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business - Chris Brogan runs through the obvious and not-so-obvious in this very useful list.
- Graphiquillan's tea break painting - "The journey from sketch to almost finished study for a future painting." This is the sort of thing I encourage artists to blog about - their process. A great example to show around.
Syndicated from my del.icio.us account
Flickr and YouTube, two lessons in community management
During a Community Blogging workshop the other week I was asked about dealing with unwanted comments on a blog, from the out and out illegal (hate speech, libel) to those that just poison the environment like a bad smell. I went through the usual moderation and editing tools and then struck on a rather dramatic example of how to preempt any problems by creating an environment in which, given the chance, people will behave in a nice way.
First example, comments left on a video about the Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum:
The second example is the comments following this photo on Flickr of a building in Washwood Heath:
When Flickr started they made herculean efforts to have the staff involved in the day to day running of the site, answering questions in the help forums, getting involved in groups and behaving like normal Flickr users in their own accounts. While they let Flickr evolve on it’s own terms their presence meant that when you got involved with Flickr you were aware that this place was more than just somewhere to dump your photos. There were rules of engagement that the community had put in place, namely be nice and helpful and share stuff. It might have been a bit sickly in places but it worked and even now Flickr is a nice place to go to. (Some, myself, might say too nice but that can’t be a terrible thing, can it?)
On the other hand when YouTube was launched it was a place to dump videos, most of which were taken from television shows and movies. There actually wasn’t a lot of user created content on YouTube in the beginning, probably because video camera usage hadn’t quite broken through to the mainstream, so there wasn’t this sense of sharing your own stuff. You were just sharing stuff you’d found and doing so anonymously in case you got in trouble for it. And while this was going on I don’t believe the YouTube staff were actively getting involved with the community that was evolving around the service. (I could be wrong here and am happy to be corrected but it’s not the impression I got.) YouTube didn’t even have groups where like-minded videographers could come together and share their films and discuss stuff. All you had was the, admittedly impressive, Related Videos widget hooking everything together and a system of following other users.
All this together is a recipe for disaster. And so it came to be. YouTube comments are possibly the worst in the history of the Internet and yet there’s nothing particularly unique about video sharing that encourages this.
The lesson should hopefully be obvious but I think it also helps to think of this in real world terms. A pub is, by definition, open to everyone. You can be barred but there’s nothing to stop you going in in the first place. But once you’re in there are rules, often unspoken, as to how you behave. These have been established by the landlord, the regulars and society in general and allow the environment to function. Another example might be a youth centre. Here there will be rules put in place by the youth workers which the youths agree to abide by. Theres a trade off - you don’t get the freedom you might have in a park but you get shelter and a space that isn’t home to be in.
A well functioning online community works on a similar tradeoff. People who use Flickr want it to be a nice place to hang out so they approach it as such. People who use YouTube do so because it’s the best way to distribute video, not because of the community features which are a drawback. If YouTube valued community they should have implemented a Flickr-style strategy from the outset but they didn’t and now it’s too late.
Online social spaces are like any other social space. They will manage themselves if the people in them have an investment in keeping them nice. Give them the reason and, more critically, the support to do so and you’ve won the first battle in community management.
Thanks to my Twitter chums for help sourcing the comments examples.
Disposable Microblogs
Zero-cost publishing online has the potential to be revolutionary. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can now publish to the world for free and without seeking permission. The only thing blocking this revolution is people’s awareness of how easy it is and, once they know that, their ability to cast off preconceptions about what it means to publish so they can engage with the medium effectively. And that, in a nutshell, is what I do.
But enough about me. I came across a website today that pleased me immensely. The Margaret St MA Show would traditionally use flyers (either on paper or emailed as jpegs) and be listed on the BIAD website, both of which are perfectly valid forms of promotion but which have costs involved, be they financial, temporal or bureaucratic. What if the students themselves want to do something online that bypasses all three of these costs? Why not set up a blog?
They’ve using Tumblr here but any of the instant microblogging services would suffice and the posting strategy seems to be to throw as much stuff as possible at it in no discernible order. Here’s a photo, here’s an mp3, here a quote, here’s a link, here’s a bio, and so on. In the long term this would be a nightmare but for a website that, by definition, is redundant come Friday 29th August it’s perfect because it cost nothing, probably took about 20 minutes to set up and populate and really gives a sense of the scope of work on show.
As much as I like Tumblr and use it myself for my internet scrapbook I’d have gone for Posterous in this case because it’s even easier to post to and displays content in much more streamlined ways. Email 5 images to Posterous and it creates a mini-gallery. Send in an mp3 and you get a player and download link. And it’s all based around email so you can update it from anywhere. Tumblr can do all this too but is better for curating the web, in my view.
But tools aside it’s the attitude that excites me here. It shows an understanding that while websites can be beautifully crafted things they can also be disposable, and that that disposability doesn’t diminish their value. It seems like every week I hear about a website that cost tens of thousands of pounds to create before anyone’s even been employed to run the thing so its refreshing to see people, especially from the Art world which isn’t traditionally that internet-savvy, really get it.
Link came via Created in Birmingham. Did I mention CiB took an evening and cost £0.00 to set up?
A lesson in how not to approach bloggers
There’s a perceptible desire for companies looking for publicity to approach bloggers. It’s been there for a while but I’ve noticed a rise of late. Sometimes they get it right but quite often they get it wrong. Here’s a real world example from the last week.
Recently BRMB, a local radio station, has been emailing bloggers in the Birmingham area about their new motoring website. I know this not because they emailed me but because every so often someone I follow on Twitter would mention it. Chris got one, so did Jez and Nick and Anthony. Rich even went as far as to blog about it. Like I said, I hadn’t been graced with the attention so after I expressed my mock outrage at this snub Nick forwarded it to me. Here’s the document in question.
Hi,
Hope all is well,
After coming across your Birmingham based blog I was wondering if you would consider writing a piece for BRMB Radio. BRMB has just launched a new motoring classifieds site, an alternative to Auto Trader called brmbmotors.co.uk.
This is becoming hugely success within the West Midlands area as it really has a local feel.
We would really like your support with this new service.
www.brmbmotors.co.uk
I’ll look forward to your reply.
Kind Regards
Ben O’Brien
In itself a pretty innocuous email, the sort of polite but unsolicited thing we all get every day, so why did it spark a conversation across Twitter?
The first reason is bloggers tend not to have the same motivations as people who traditionally write copy for publication. The latter will see themselves as part of a process, gathering together information to fill specific sections of their magazine. Someone writing the motoring section of, say, the Metro newspaper would, if they were so inclined, welcome this approach from Ben and, I hasten to add, there’s nothing wrong with that. Bloggers, on the other hand, tend to write about stuff they want to write about. Or at least the bloggers Ben was approaching do. They might all be writing from and occasionally about Birmingham but they do so through their own personal filter. So when you approach them with something that is way out of their area of interest eyebrows will be raised.
But that’s not what’s interesting about this. People function like this all the time and the only reason it’s noteworthy is that these bloggers are publishing but don’t fit in with the process. Beyond that there’s something else going on, and in this case it happened on Twitter.
Blogging is a community activity. While each blogger is an autonomous agent acting on his or her own they do tend to cluster into groups, sometimes formally but often ambiently through association. And they don’t just do so though their blogs. When you start using social media tools like Twitter, Delicious and others you tap into networks and information starts coming to you, information that is often surprisingly relevant. And so because I’m interested in uses of social media tools I tend to see interesting examples of that emerging on my networks (along with other things I’m interested in, before you think I eat, sleep and dream this stuff). I didn’t go out of my way to find people who would give me this stuff - I just started following people I knew or thought looked interesting and let the conversational serendipity engine do its work.
So Ben fires off his emails to what he presumably assumes are a bunch of individual people, little knowing that we’re all talking to each other just as you would in a pub about something mildly amusing that happened at work. Somebody feels the need to share that they got a badly targeted email from BRMB and a bunch of others chime in saying they got the same email and Ben becomes the but of a joke. Look at the silly PR guy. He just doesn’t get it, does he.
Is this unfair? Are we being childish? Well, yes. But then we’re a community of human beings and when you get a bunch of people who have bonded over something, no matter how innocuous, they will occasionally behave like arseholes, ganging up on the outsider who wants to join the party but just doesn’t know the rules. It’s not a good thing and I wish it didn’t have to be this way but I’ve seen it happen so many times that I’ve come to accept it as a fact of life. This is social media. It reflects society and while that makes it exciting and vibrant and real it’s not always pretty.
So what should Ben have done if he wants to get bloggers blogging about his shiny new thing? Well, for a start he could tell the truth. I was curious as to how this brand new site had managed to get 4,268 cars within 20 miles of my house. Checking the BRMB Motors Terms and Conditions page reveals it to be “owned and managed by adflyer.co.uk. All information supplied on the Website is managed by adflyer.co.uk.” Adflyer is a national online classifieds site whose submissions system is remarkably similar to the BRMB one, leading me to suspect that they’ve just done a deal with BRMB to use their branding in return for some advertising space on the radio. While a sensible move and one I’d approve of this does not mean the site “has a local feel” and it certainly doesn’t differentiate it from AutoTrader (who, I note, have 25,046 cars for sale within 20 miles of my house, if we’re counting.)
But truth aside, and I grant you that’s not really a big lie, what Ben should really have done is research exactly who he was emailing. Has the blogger ever written about second hand cars before? Do they, for example, document their activities in the garage? Have the done tutorials about finding spare parts online? Do they even care about cars? I’m not being facetious here. For all I know there is a massive network of bloggers who write about second hand cars. I have no idea who they are as I have no interest in that stuff whatsoever, but I’ll give you a clue. You won’t find them by looking for those who blog about Birmingham because they’ll be blogging about cars.
And then lets say Ben did find a rich seam of second hand car bloggers. How should he approach them without becoming a laughing stock on whatever medium they’re conversing through? I’ve given this a bit of thought and, as it stands, I don’t have any advice for him because BRMB Motors is a vastly uninteresting site. Sure, it does the job if you’re looking for a second hand car but so does AutoTrader. What could I, the second hand car obsessed blogger, find to write about it? “It’s a classifieds site that’s a bit like AutoTrader only with less cars and a link to a radio station.”
And that’s the big lesson here. If you’re going to approach people who publish in the social media realm, be they bloggers or whatever, you’ve got to give them something to talk about. If you don’t then they’ll find something else to talk about. Maybe they’ll talk about how you contacted them but didn’t give them anything to talk about. Or that you contacted their friends. Maybe they’ll blog about that on their blog, like I just did.
Well, at least they got a link out of it. That’s got to be good for something.
Extra Community Blogging Session
Last month I ran a couple of sessions on Community Blogging for Digital Birmingham. They were somewhat oversubscribed so I was asked to do another one which is taking place on the afternoon of August 1st at 3.30pm. It hasn’t been widely advertised as they’ve already got a decent number of people coming but there will probably be a couple of spaces if you’re interested.
Here’s the Digital Birmingham event page and my blog post from last time to give you some idea of where I’m coming from. You’ll notice I’m not referring to this a “workshop” as it didn’t really pan out that way. It turned into more of a 90 minute Q&A with poor Pete being bombarded with some pretty tricky questions. Not that I mind - it was a damn good experience, if a little draining, and feedback was very positive.
Like I said, spaces are limited but if you email digital@servicebirmingham.co.uk they’ll put you on the list.
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