For a start they’ve put 620 photos of the find on Flickr ranging from professional studio photos suitable for print (taken by local photographer David Rowan) to the photographic records used by archivists.

They all have downloading and embedded enabled (like most photos on Flickr) but are also licensed under a pretty liberal Creative Commons license which allows anyone to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and to “make derivative works” as long as the creator is credited.

Considering these photos came from a wide variety of sources from academia to local government that’s quite remarkable as it means anyone can do pretty much anything with these photos. You could even take the high-resolution photos and make a book to sell if you wanted to. They’re free for the taking.

I then had a look at the official Staffordshire Hoard website (which is currently a little slow to load due to all the attention) and noticed another Creative Commons license on the sidebar of every page.

This one is an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license which is a little more restrictive but not by much. It simply says that if you use their content it can’t be for commercial gain and what you produce must be released under the same license. Personally I think they should have put the photos under this license but the fact that they’re using Creative Commons and encouraging sharing at all is remarkable.

Or is it?

Archaeology is a niche activity with a lot of amateur enthusiasts. I suspect the academic and amateur worlds blur and cross over a lot, indicated by the chap who found this gold being an unemployed 55 year old man from the Bloxwich Metal Detecting Club who was able to liase with the authorities, presumably through Duncan Slarke at Birmingham Museum, in such a way that everything was kept secret for two months. The authorities understand the community and the community understands the authorities. While I’m sure there are tensions and I have absolutely no personal knowledge, I suspect this sort of interaction between Them and Us is normal.

In short, they’re all a bunch of nerds. Which means Internet rules of sharing and co-operation for the greater good apply.

If I’m right, then this is a lovely example of the sort of culture that fuels Open Source software development and projects like Wikipedia operating in a pretty low-tech environment. And as such when Daniel Pett was building the website in a day (using free software and documenting how he did it) and the photos were being put online I suspect the question of whether they should make everything available in a way that allowed people to share and use it in interesting ways never occurred to them. It’s just what you do.

On the Flickr set they say:

The images contained in this set invite comment. We accept there may be some errors with labelling as this was done in a very short space of time.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme, for whom Duncan Slarke works, states at the top of the front page that it’s…

a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales.

This hasn’t been heralded as an innovative crowdsourcing project like, say, the Guardian’s MP Expenses project because it’s not innovative. This is how this community has always operated both online and off. It’s second nature to them. Everyone else is just playing catch-up.

And if you’re thinking, well, that’s all well and good but my organisation could never get away with something like this, take a look at the logo-itis at the bottom of every page on the Hoard site:

That’s pretty damn establishment, indicating it’s not about what’s possible, it’s about what the culture of your organisation allows to be possible.

What does your culture allow to be possible?

Lord Carter is unveiling his Digital Britain report thingy today. There’s been a lot of talk about this though it’s sometimes hard to get your head around exactly what it’s about since the scope is huge. But one key thing struck me today while I was trying to read something online.

UK needs industrial policy for a digital age is an article written by Lord Carter for the Financial Times. If you’d gone through the ft.com front page you wouldn’t have been able to read it without registering and then you’d only have free access a limited number of articles before having to pay. This is their business model and it’s fine. But you should be able to click on that link and read the article without registering. Why? Because I hacked the URL.

How did I know to do this? Two things:

1) Someone in the know spotted my retweeted request for someone to copy and post it elsewhere and told me. Yes, I’m lucky part of a network that includes people who know stuff I need to know but I’ve been building that network for years now. The point is the information is about there and I immediately shared it (while protecting my source).

2) More importantly, I knew what to do with this information. I can look at a complicated URL and figure out how to edit it. It’s not hard but I’d imgine most people wouldn’t know where to start.

This is digital literacy. Not using Word or Excel. Not uploading photos to Facebook or Flickr. And certainly not leaving comments on newspaper sites. Digital literacy means being able to take digital stuff make new things with it, just as literacy means taking words and making new sentences with them. Literacy is about understanding the rules of a thing so that they can be worked within or broken as applicable. It’s about making the world our own. This is why we teach reading and writing to children, not so that they can fill out forms or write tedious reports, but that they might question and understand the world in which they live in.

The same applies to online. Lord Carter wants to give every house in Britain a broadband internet connection. This is laudable. But unless they know what to do with it you might as well leave them with a TV aerial.

HTML isn’t complicated. It just looks a bit like code so people’s brains switch off. Even programming is fundamentally pretty simple: If this then do that or else do something else. That’s programming. I can’t write a computer program but understanding the principles of how they work has helped me understand why WordPress works they way it does, for example.

Digital literacy, to the level I’m at anyway, is not hard. And yet even I shy away from explaining how an XML document is structured or how style sheets work. This stumbling block needs to be removed so that people are able to understand how this digital thing works and then hack the shit out of it. That way people will be able to innovate online whether it’s creating a world-changing online service or tweaking a forum for a neighbourhood so it works just right.

But more importantly we’ll help reduce the digital divide. After all, I’m able to read online news for free because I can hack a URL. Can you?

For some reason I’ll be at the bigwig’s Digital Britain event at the ICC tomorrow morning – watch my Twitter for reactions. Do be aware there’s an unconference fringe occurring in Digbeth at the same time to which anyone is welcome.

Addendum: By “hacking” I’m not talking about breaking into a secure computer system. I’m talking about this sort of thing: “the re-purposing or re-configuring of stuff to make it do something it wasn’t originally intended to do.”

I understand the basic point he’s making here, that a business like the Birmingham Post and Mail, faced with falling sales, falling advertising revenue and, until recently, years of chronic under-investment by the mother company (they’ve gotten better in the last 12 months), cannot compete on a level playing field with the BBC which does not need to do tricky things like turn a profit. I might not feel as passionately about it as Marc but I understand the point. And I could make the argument that the reason the BBC is doing rather well in the online news arena is because they invested heavily in it over the last decade, raising the bar while the mainstream newspaper industry (with the exception of The Guardian) buried their heads in the sand in the hope that this nasty Internet thing would go away. I could make that argument but it’s not that useful really.

So instead I’m going to offer a bit of advice and a different perspective. Stop trying to compete with the BBC. They’re doomed. If you think you newspaper people are in trouble how do you think a monolithic corporation with broadcast seared into its veins is going to cope in this new era? I predict rather badly.

BBC audiences are falling but I don’t think it’s because of the multi-channel environment. People are moving their viewing to YouTube, their listening to their iPods (other mp3 players are available) and are getting their news from the online social spaces they inhabit. The BBC is part of this media environment but in no way dominates it. You might be sent to a BBC news page from a blog or forum or watch something on the iPlayer at a time of your choosing, but you’re lightyears away from the days of watching a BBC television channel for 6 hours all evening.

The notion that the BBC is going to dominate the online space is ludicrous. No-one can dominate it. The reader/viewer/user curates the space themselves either proactively or by grazing. So when I hear Marc and others bitching about the BBC coming in and stealing their eyeballs a scenario evolves in my mind.

A new world has been created. Money has been abolished and the economy is based on sharing and other hippy-ish ideals. A couple of old bankers are walking the streets, their suits slightly tatty, their faces gaunt. They don’t understand this new world. Everyone else seems happy but they just can’t join in. It doesn’t make sense.

Suddenly a glint in the gutter catches their eye. It’s a gold coin that someone has discarded. They both make a dash for it and tumble into the filthy puddles, clawing and kicking each other for this reminder of what once was. Meanwhile the rest of the world carries on regardless.

A bit extreme maybe, and on reflection not at all accurate. I guess I got a bit carried away. But it does seem to me that the way the newspaper people are attacking the BBC on this issue is to rather miss the point. It’s a big internet. Another player entering isn’t going to reduce your audience. If anything it’s going to raise the game and make online local news a better place meaning more people read the news over watching YouTube or whatever. That can only be a good thing, right?

This use of Twitter as a news source is nothing new but what happened next was kinda interesting. 2.47pm I posted a speculation:

Wondering if Digbeth will become a trending topic on Twitter Search today…

Twitter Search picks up words that appear regularly and links to the top ten on the front page. As you might expect these are usually related to the US election and tech stuff with the occasional meme popping in there. Could a handful of users get a relatively obscure district in Birmingham up there?

The answer is yes. Within 45 minutes we’d done it, nicely positioned between “Joe” and “Plumber”

As I write (4.30pm) it’s fallen to the number 10 and will no doubt be off the list very soon. And, of course, the impact of this is very slight. I don’t think many people check the trending topics religiously (though Current.fm has built a service out of it – screengrab – and Twitter do use it for blog fodder occasionally) and a 2 hour blip doesn’t mean much. But the fact is we did it and that is was easy.

The interesting question is why we did it and I think the answer is that is was fun. So what makes doing this sort of thing fun?

Firstly it’s a bit naughty. While there was a chance Digbeth might have made it into the top ten without any help we gave it a push and essentially hacked the system by posting lots of unnecessary messages with the word Digbeth in them. But we didn’t simply spam the system – the unwritten rule was it had to at the very least appear authentic or at least be funny. Funny to our little group anyway. So not that funny really.

Looking through the seach results for today it’s notable how much of it was useful information as well as being daft. We started disseminating news and then turned it into a game but the game actually fueled the news giving us an incentive to report what we knew to the community. You could say that by trying to hack the system we actually made the system better, which is interesting on a number of levels.

This notion that play fuels the internet is nothing new. Flickr succeeded because it grew out of a game. It wasn’t just somewhere to dump your photos – it was a service you could play around with and explore. Editing Wikipedia is also fun, at least for those who find editing Wikipedia fun. I found it fun for a while but got frustrated with the rules of the game that the community evolved so I stopped. And that’s fine – all games have rules and playing isn’t mandatory (unless you’re still at school and the game is football…)

So a game that started off as a prank (let’s hack Twitter!) turned into a useful service, and not just about the issue at hand. Having exhausted news about the suspect package people started posting links to interesting resources about Digbeth. Jon “Mr Birmingham” Bounds even found a whole new resource for B:INS in the process.

Meanwhile, nearly five hours after Alex informed us something was up in Digbeth there’s only one mainstream news article to be found via Google News – five sentences on the Birmingham Mail.

It’s wrong to hate on the journalists on this one. Yes, we scooped them big time with our ad-hoc online community but we in no way constituted a sustainable news gathering source. During the game Andy Mabbett blogged some news about Winterval which hit a nerve with those of fighting the idiots on this issue. It was mooted that we try and get “Winterval” into the Twitter Trending Topics but it didn’t happen. The game had been played, the novelty faded It was time to move on to the new game – how the hell people were going to get home tonight. Not so much fun that one.

Later: Nicky Getgood collects the facts found about Digbeth today which I guess counts as evidence to back up my argument, possibly.

First off, Boutin sees the blogosphere as a pyramid where the top bit is where everyone wants to be, as indicated in this handy diagram for those unfamiliar with pyramids or the concept of top bits. You never know.

This is a very old fashioned view of the media landscape. It assumes an objective value judgment and measure of “success” for individual blogs, one which I don’t recognise. I think it’s most useful to look at this map of the Internet (taken from here):

Here’s the thing. It’s not about numbers of readers. It’s about the quality of those readers and the relationship you have with them. 200 passionate, dedicated followers of your blog (who in turn have their own blogs with passionate dedicated readers) is so much more valuable that 200,000 grazing readers who you never connect with properly. And cultivating the former takes time and dedication, regardless of how well funded you are.

On to point two, that Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are killing blogs.

This one is easy. Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are blogs. A blog is a collection of pieces of content displayed in date order with an option for categorization where linking and conversation are encouraged and enabled. That sounds like Flickr to me. It definitely sounds like Twitter. Facebook, yes, to a certain extent if you ignore the walled garden. Hell, a YouTube account is essentially a blog.

Don’t mix the medium with the message. Blogging is a platform. That it’s evolving into new forms of discussion and distribution is a positive thing.

“Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times” say Boutin. Only if they want to. I know I don’t want to. I want to connect with people who I have something in common with and learn from and with them about the world. Blogging, like other social platforms from the bonfire to the pub, enables that.

My main motivation was a sense that surely someone out there had studied the things I’m talking about all the time and devised manageable theories and the like which I could use to ground my often spiraling thoughts. My peers, while wonderful people, don’t tend to be a lot of help in this arena as too get infected with ideas and when you put us together the end results, while fascinating and a lot of fun, aren’t necessarily that practical. So I need a friendly academic who gets this stuff. And, of course, there’s one out there. His name is Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. You’ll remember his The Machine Is Us/ing Us video that gave a potted introduction to Web 2.0 in five minutes and you might have stumbled across his Digital Ethnography course, specifically the YouTube project where students got involved with the YouTube community in order to understand it properly.

In June he gave an hour long talk at the Library of Congress which attempted to sumarise his research. (It came to me via Meg.) While it concentrates on YouTube most of what he’s describing can be applied to the social internet in general so it makes for fascinating and illuminating viewing. Here ’tis.

Of the many interesting points he raises one that really stuck out for me was “context collapse” , appearing around 22 mins in, which is expanded on in this post:

The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.

The would-be vlogger, now frozen in front of this black hole of contexts, faces a crisis of self-presentation. In Goffman’s terms, the would-be vlogger is “out of face” with no “line” to present, unable to size up the context and situation (1967, p.14). Like a building collapse, context collapse does not create a total void but a chaotic version of its once ordered self. The would-be vlogger sits stultified as his imagination races through the nearly infinite possible contexts he might be entering, all of which pile up as parts, pieces, and pieces of parts, a rubble that becomes the ground on which he must struggle to get his footing. The familiar walls that help limit and define the context are gone. He must address anybody, everybody, and maybe even nobody all at once.

Here he’s talking about the intense blast of self awareness that people have when they first record a video, or introduce a podcast or write a post on their blog. It’s something I come across again and again and have struggled to offer advice other than to just keep at it. Eventually you’ll find your voice, I say. But perhaps it’s less finding a voice and more becoming comfortable with a chaotic context?

This fear is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks people have when starting their blogging career. Since the medium is inherently personal you have to put something of yourself into a place where you have no control over how it’ll be perceived. Usually the fear is not justified and a balance is found but when it isn’t this notion of context collapse also helps to make sense of negative or aggressive feedback. Within some contexts you’re an erudite, sensitive person with interesting things to say but within other contexts you’re a self-obsessed idiot who’s missing the point, and both these interpretations are perfectly valid.

I wonder if there’s a psychological, or maybe psychiatric, explanation for this sort of fear one fees when the rules of engagement are not just changed by stripped away? I know from personal experience that engaging in an environment of context collapse is a fruitful and ultimately positive experience but explaining how to attain that confidence seems tricky. I wonder if lessons could be learned from sufferers of anxiety in the real world?

(It also occurs to me that maybe I’m more comfortable when there is no dominant context, where the rules are unknown. It creates a level playing field where we’re all equal. But that’s a tangent more suitable for my personal blog.)

First off, have a read of Mark’s research proposal. Done that? Good.

What immediately struck me was the disconnect between organisations that are supposed to be, for want of a better word, guardians of culture and the environments in which cultural activities are now taking place. There’s a big emphasis on initiatives that “take art to the people” (Birmingham Opera being a great example) but people are increasingly socializing and engaging with each other in online environments. How does a medium-to-large organisation with a long history and relatively inflexible systems adapt to this without losing what makes it special?

The RSC turns out to be a great example to play with, possibly too good as not every organisation is globally recognised as the modern-day agent of the father of English literature, but it’s nice to start with something tangible and see if the lessons can be applied elsewhere.

My first port of call was to fire up YouTube and see what was on there. YouTube is many things but I find it particularly useful for getting a sense of how people are connecting with culture both through their own performance and by mixing it up and making it their own. Here’s a small sample of what we found.

The King Is Dead – a student writes a rap based on the story of Hamlet to the tune of Nas’ Hip Hop Is Dead. He then took the Kenneth Branagh 1996 movie version and created a music video with Branagh lip-syncing the rap.

Sonnet #38 – Urgelt appears to be a poet and philosopher with a fantastic beard. Here he reads a sonnet “to cheer up a friend who was feeling down.”

As you’d expect there’s a lot of To Be Or Not To Be on t’Tube. This one I liked a lot, for obvious reasons:

Finding myself in a sea of TBONTB I figured I’d do an experiment. I’ve done a bit of video editing on my Mac but am by no means an expert. I probably have the same level of experience as anyone else out there. Could I do a mashup in an evening using all this stuff? Three hours later (most of which was spent waiting for the video to encode and upload after the edit) I had this:

From big budget Hollywood to fixed webcam to animation to musical adaptation and so on, this is a mere snapshot of how people are engaging with The Bard. And even the copyright infringing excerpts are engagement as they’re being shared by people who at the very least are saying “I like this and want to show you it in the context of my online life.” They’ve taken ownership of Shakespeare in the same way one might wear a t-shirt bought at the RSC shop.

So how can the RSC connect with this rich sea of activity around their brand? The personal performances are fine – the source material is way out of copyright – but what about our rapping Hamlet? Should the RSC be acknowledging his “theft” of Colombia Picture’s intellectual property?

That’s up for the RSC to decide, of course, but I think there are a few ways they can deal with this productively. The first is to simply be aware of it by tracking Shakespeare related activity on the web. Simple strategies like tracking the Shakespeare tag on YouTube and spreading the best ones around the company along with things like Google Blog Search, though as they stand these are blunt tools for the enormity of material out there and their use would need a bit of refining. The point, though, is how this awareness of the ways people are engaging with the works can affect the way the RSC thinks about its audience. Large organisations tend to operate in a bubble of excellence, which is not necessarily a bad thing but it does make bringing new ideas and ways of thinking into the mix rather tricky. Making this, to coin a phrase, audience generated content part of the process of understanding the audience could be interesting.

Another strategy would be to acknowledge the work out there, either directly or by creating a “firewall” between the official RSC stance and the online producers. For example, set up blog run by RSC staff members from across the spectrum (producers, directors, actors, educators, etc) that highlights the best of the web as they see it. This doesn’t have to be part of the RSC website or even be branded as an RSC project but the people running it would have a tacit authority. I wouldn’t like to speculate on the effects of this but if an RSC director were to give a constructive critical review of a reading found on YouTube that would certainly be interesting and might help raise the game.

The natural progression of this would be to actively engage with the community out there. So far I’ve mainly been talking about videos but I’m sure there are loads of forums and mailing lists out there full of Shakespeare fanatics. This post where blogger Nicky Getgood stumbled across a Yeats discussion group is quite illuminating. There are people out there who might not be Shakespeare professionals but whose knowledge, especially when approached collectively, is enormous. The RSC could benefit enormously from engaging with them I’m sure.

I’ll no doubt blog more about this as there are many ideas buzzing around my head and I’ve already rambled too long but Mark and I would seriously value your input, either in the comments here or directly by email.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

While I know this to be true from personal experience it’s surprisingly hard to explain it. Concepts like augmenting reality can be useful to a certain point as can historical examples of emerging communications technologies like letter writing and the telephone but they create an impression that communication other than face to face is secondary in importance. I have some sympathy with this view and will, on the whole, want to meet someone in the flesh before really trusting them, but I think when you bring communities into play it gets a lot more complicated. A self organising online community of autonomous agents working towards loosely defined and overlapping goals can be much more productive than a group who meet in a pub once a week. Convincing people of this, even those who have participated in such activities, can be really tricky though because it doesn’t fit into the traditional model of how stuff is done and, more importantly, there’s a shocking ignorance of what online activity actually is.

Take this quote from an otherwise excellent rabble-rousing article by James Yarker of the Stan’s Cafe theatre group:

Electronic handshakes lack flesh and blood warmth. The fabled “interactivity” of our digital realm rarely stretches beyond banal, push-button, Prozac primate stimulation. Even absorbed in multi-million dollar console games we are mere lab rats, willing prisoners thrashing around inside a painted algorithm. It’s time to escape.

I’m not sure where to start here. This “digital realm” James is describing does certainly exist and there are certainly many people who are trapped in it. But it’s not the digital realm I operate in. I don’t play computer games for a start for the same reason I don’t take heroin – I know I’ll get hooked and never get any work done. Nor do I watch digital television with the fabled “interactive” Red Button. What James is describing here is a passive use of digital technologies, no different to the passive consumption of media he despairs of in a previous paragraph. And I would join him in decrying this. Digital is not the great panacea of our times. It will not by itself undo a century of media manipulation and make everything better. But it does allow us to fight back on our own terms.

I saw James talk at the Arts Council’s Art Of Ideas event in April, my notes from which are here. He was very inspiring and seemed to be thinking about things in a way I identified with but, along with the other panelists, Sam Jacob and Catherine O’Flynn, did not mention online communities at all. Which struck me as odd given the title of the talk was “Culture and Identity – The Role of Place in Shaping the Arts.” As I see it people define a place (or as Birmingham City Council is so fond of saying “You Are Your City”) and the best way for people to define their place is to talk about it. I think empowering people to communicate online in ways and about subjects that they define themselves is an excellent way of working towards this definition, if such a definition is even possible, and it amazes me that this isn’t considered by the intelligent forward thinking innovators on our cultural scene.

I mean, James runs a Stan’s Cafe blog. Does he think the people reading, commenting on, linking to and quoting his blog posts (if they indeed are. That stuff doesn’t just happen – like everything useful it takes a bit of work) are passive consumers? Does he think his blog merely provides “banal, push-button, Prozac primate stimulation”?

James says:

The key thing is to be there when it happens. To be part of it, up close, where you can smell the bodies and taste the air they stir.

Yes! Yes! Yes! You’re damn right. But being up close isn’t the only way to connect with someone. Stuff happens online which is just as interesting and vital, partly because it’s a different environment where people operate and think in different ways. Once you get over the prejudice that digital activity is always passive and accept that online communication is so multi-way that it makes the public meeting look positively totalitarian, once you see how the ambient immediacy of Twitter can create serendipitous ideas and actions or the way conversations across blogs are freed from constraints of time and space, once you realise that a world where everyone is potentially a publisher, a community leader and a creator of media then maybe, just maybe you’ll see how these things do not detract from your dreams for how society might be better but can, with a bit of understanding and work, help them to be realised effectively and efficiently.

The online environment is inherently neutral. It’s as useful as we make it and people like James, who understand the physical environment as well as we understand the online one, could make it very useful indeed. We need to get his sort on board. It might take a while but that’s my mission.

I’ll let you know when I figure out how.

Article came via Created in Birmingham

I met up with Katie Spragg yesterday who was telling me about the Colour blog she and a couple of comrades are running in Wolverhampton. Colour is “a West Midlands-based promotions group, founded in 2006. Our focus is bringing leftfield folk, electronica, ‘indie’ and other mainstream-eschewing artists to the area through our live events and DJ sets.” The blog is supposed to complement that and, I feel, does it well. It’s not just focussed on Colour but illustrates what the people behind Colour are like, what they’re interested in, what makes them happy.

I got to know Katie through my work on Created in Birmingham and she became the Wolverhampton ambassador, making sure my Brum-centric brain wasn’t quite so insular. It helped that Light House, where she works, is a lovely place and something Birmingham should look to emulate and I often thought they should have some kind of blog complementing the communities that existed there. Around the same time Creative Wolverhampton appeared on my radar as a blog that was of a similar breed to Created in Birmingham.

The reason I mention both these blogs in the same post is I think Colour is the more useful one. Sure, Creative Wolverhampton (when it’s being updated regularly) is an essential resource for facts and information about the city’s creative activity, just as Created in Birmingham is, but Colour, while less comprehensive and less focussed on the region, is much more interesting on a human level and much more useful to the region.

For a start it’s not insular. It looks outside its geographical area and even its subject, such as this post on Dave Eggers’s TED talk. As I found with Created in Birmingham, when you’re trying to be comprehensive about a city it’s very difficult to keep tabs on what’s happening outside and this can be a bad thing. But if you’re not concerned with that then you can bring ideas and influences in which is beneficial for all.

Secondly it shows what people in Wolverhampton who are doing stuff are interested in. Sure, only three people but it all adds up and helps to expand any preconceptions folk might have about the city. If you’re interested in promoting an area as somewhere where good stuff and interesting people are then this sort of thing is invaluable.

Thirdly, it’s very ambient. While Matthew’s posts in particular are thoughtful and well crafted there doesn’t seem to be the sort of strict editorial line you’d expect from a magazine-style site like, say, Pitchfork. As I scroll through the posts the experience is warm and floaty, like mooching around someone’s flat looking at their stuff and chatting about things over cups of tea late into the night. This makes the blog very welcoming and, one imagines, reflects the attitude they have towards the Colour nights themselves.

Finally, I’d expect none of this is deliberate or calculated, and that’s what really makes it work. These a sense of authenticity to the voices here that is impossible to fake.

Blogging about cities is something I’ve been thinking about a lot these last couple of years and while city-specific blogs like Birmingham It’s Not Shit and Created in Birmingham are great and what they do they don’t really represent the essence of the city that well, not to mention being rather difficult to emulate. Blogs like Colour, that are anchored in a place but reach beyond it, do this much better as well as being much more manageable for those who are doing stuff other than just blogging.

Gutenberg, unwitting grandfather of the zine revolution

The big connection is technological developments making the means of duplication accessible to a significantly larger number of people than before. The obvious starting point would be Johannes Gutenberg and his Movable Type printing press which took the manufacture of books out of the monks’ scriptorium and heralded a world of mass produced books. This is rightly seen as a quantumn leap in media distribution as it suddenly meant anyone with a piece of machinery and the knowledge to use it could print multiple copies of a book.

While I’d never heard of Gutenberg at the time the importance of this hit me around the age of eight. I remember the teacher was handing out books for the class to read together and was amazed that they were all the same, not just in content but in appearance. Page 44 of my friend’s copy was identical to page 44 of mine. This seemed quite revolutionary to me. A book, something I’d been brought up to believe was a sacred thing to be treasured and loved, was merely a copy. A machine had obviously produced them. But this didn’t reduce the importance of the book to me – it strengthened it. I saw the power in duplication.

The next logical step in my education came with duplicators I could work myself, first with the stinky mimeograph machine and then the machine that would change my life – the photocopier. The importance of this machine in the 1980s is hard to emphasise. You placed a document on the glass, pressed a button and a few seconds later an exact-ish copy came out of a slot. If you typed “50″ and pressed the button then fifty copies came out. This was magic.

Proto-anarchists creating their own media on school property.

I played about with the school photocopier whenever possible for a few years until at the age of 14 I was visiting a friend. He was a roleplayer and while I was more a comics nerd the two subcultures were geeky enough to cross over. I was flicking through one of his magazines and found the fanzine reviews section. Despite not really being that interested in the subject matter the idea that there were people producing their own magazines using typewriters and photocopiers lit up in my brain so I sent of for a bunch of them. Seeing how easy it was I decided to do my own zine about comics. It was, of course, awful, but it was mine. I typed everything up, laid it out, stuck in the pictures, worked out the pagination, made multiple double sided photocopies of each page and stapled them together to create booklets which I then tried to sell at the London comic convention. In 1988 I became a publisher at the age of 15.

And I wasn’t alone. There were, I discovered, hundreds of thousands of people like me who were producing their own magazines with print runs ranging from ten to a few thousand, the majority “printed” on FE college copiers or at sympathetic copy shops. And the legacy went back to the 1970s and the punk movement. 1976′s Sniffin’ Glue was the legendary one and I saw a few copies in the 1990s. They were badly-typed single sheets of A4 roughly stapled down the side with the headlines written in marker pen, but they were the lifeblood of the nascent punk scene doing the work that the mainstream music press would not or could not do.

Sniffin’ Glue, setting the bar nice and low.

But more important than the ability to publish was the way these publications enabled communities to form between the readers who were also publishers and the publishers who were also readers. Every zine worth its salt had a reviews section at the back where it listed other zines with their addresses. Sending a bunch of 50p pieces (securely wrapped in cardboard) and SAEs to these addresses would let you into a whole new world, and each of them would lead you to more zines. People would write letters to zines and their addresses would usually be printed too so you could correspond directly with others around the country and the world about that niche subject that in your town only you were interested in. From these networks came exchanges of ideas, collaborations on projects and deep friendships which would not have otherwise happened. (And, of course, personality clashes, legal threats and bitter wars of words.)

The thing is, we all thought we were special. Despite the advocacy of the DIY movement, that anyone could publish a zine, the “movement” was pretty exclusive. Normals were not to be encouraged. There was a definite Them And Us thing going on, regardless of how borderline-mainstream the subject matter was. This was a special thing for the marginals, the dispossessed, the people who television and magazines were not serving and never would. They weren’t giving us the media we wanted so we had to create it ourselves. If your favourite band is Take That then you’ve got Smash Hits serving you there. If it’s the local ska-punk band with a following of a few hundred who distribute their music on cassette then you’re going to have to conduct the interview, type it up, stick it together, slot in the photos (that you took yourself), publish the zine and sell it at their gigs because no-one else is going to.

Blogging, when it started off, was a similar sort of thing. Those who were already immersed what we now call “social media” or “Web 2.0″ saw this blogging thing and latched onto it. Interestingly very few zinesters did as they distrusted this new Internet thing, which is ironic really when you think about it. I wonder if the 60s counter-culture publishers of Oz and IT felt the same about the photocopied zines that followed them? But anyway, it fell to the new digerati to define this new medium, many of whom were quite ignorant of the zine heritage. And yet I could see massive parallels between the zines and the blogs.

Blogger.com in 1999. Readable version.

We’d been told for years that the Internet was going to change the world. Anyone could put their stuff online and reach a potential worldwide audience of millions, but doing so required skills that seemed arcane to most. You had to master the mysterious HTML and FTP and all manner of acronyms. This was not easy. It was a bit like a mimeograph. Tricky, messy and, if you stayed up all night working on it, a bit smelly. When Blogger came along in 1999 (I first saw it in early 2000) it was like the photocopier. Once you’d set it up you could publish with the same ease that you could press the copy button. Write a load of text in the box and hit publish. Suddenly you’re on the same playing field as the online arms of the New York Times or the Guardian or the BBC. You’re a publisher.

But whereas zines tended to stick on the sidelines of society, blogs and their associated platforms of video and photo sharing sites have exploded into the mainstream. And by mainstream I don’t mean the media but the real mainstream of “ordinary” people and their “ordinary” conversations about “ordinary” stuff. Sure, it often looks geeky but let’s be honest, everyone’s a little bit geeky. Everyone has their hobby or niche interest that they can’t talk to anyone else at work about and now everyone can connect though the communities that build around blogs and social networks and forums with others like them from across the country and the world.

Ideas are exchanged, exchanges of ideas, projects collaborated on and deep friendships formed which would not have otherwise happened. (And, of course, personality clashes, legal threats and bitter wars of words. Nothing changes, really!)

Blogger.com in 2008. Readable version.

You can now set up a blog and be publishing to the world on WordPress.com or Blogger in seconds. Not hours or minutes but seconds. Hell, I bought a domain name, pointed it to a host, installed blogging software and was publishing independently in under 20 minutes the other night. If access to a photocopier was revolutionary in the 1980s access to publishing on the Internet in the 2000s has such a potential to change our society that words like “seismic” don’t quite do it justice. Everyone in the world is potentially a publisher and distributor of media as well as a consumer.

The question is how do we deal with this change? What historical precedent can we refer to in helping us get to grips with what this all means? I think the relatively short history of zines and the empowerment politics of punk can help here. This seems obvious to me having been immersed in both of them throughout my life but the funny thing is I don’t think most of the millions of practitioners of this modern Make Your Own Media culture would recognise themselves as part of a zine tradition. Perhaps they don’t see themselves as publishers or media distributors. Perhaps they just see themselves as talking about stuff, socialising on the internet. That, I think, is even more radical. Are we seeing the end of “media” as a concept now that everyone can do it?

But that can wait for another day.