Curiously it was a throwaway comment by Christian Payne reported by Rob Lindsay from BRB that caught my attention and got me on my high horse. [Update: In a typical Twitter-storm way I'm misatributed - Rob's asked me to clarify that it was his glib comment made during Christian's talk and wants to make that clear. Sorry Christian.]

I responded that this “reeks of early adopter self-importance” but that’s unfair as I’m sure it wasn’t the thrust of Christian’s presentation [Update: it wasn't!] and I’m certain I’ve used the line a few times. What worried me was that this kind of approach to Twitter and the like might be seen as a sensible and comprehensive strategy by someone new to the concept of marketing over social networks.

Part of my worry is that marketing in a conversation space is hard and no-one to my knowledge has really figured out how best to do it, so an idea that connects easily with traditional marketing techniques is going to resonate quite strongly. And yes, getting well connected people involved in your project so they amplify your message is a good thing to do. You should be doing this anyway be they Twitterers, bloggers, radio DJs, members of the parish council or politicians in high office. Even a monkey like me that shies away from anything with PR attached to it knows this is PR 101.

The problem I see is that influence online is quite different to influence offline. How it’s different is, of course, complicated but I’ve had a stab at it before – see last year’s Influence is weird and Towards a Theory of Yurtification.

So here’s the thing. I think you shouldn’t rely on the influential Twitter users in your sphere too much because the nature of Twitter means they’re influence isn’t that great really.

• Twitter makes it easy to connect with people. This is great but the importance of those connections is lessened. This is not an indictment on Twitter (I have good friends I only communicate with through Twitter and my connection with them is strong) but merely an observation that when something is easy that doesn’t automatically make it worth anything.
• It’s a two way street. I can ignore you as easily as I can listen to you, and when I listen to you my attention is variable on my terms. In other words the listener controls the influence. This is radically different to, say, the newspaper journalist who could dictate the reception of a message by putting it on the front page, or an advertising agency by buying all the billboards. (cf Tom Ewing’s What Happens When A Celebrity Links You On Twitter?)
• The number of followers someone has on Twitter has very little bearing on how they are perceived in someone’s stream. Their tweets are not bigger or flashier – they look just the same as your friend’s tweets. The difference is in the content and how it resonates with the reader.
• This brings in a law of diminishing returns. The more people you’re addressing the less personal you can be. My favourite illustration of this is the threat videos of gurgling babies with 10 views on YouTube pose to broadcast television networks. Given the choice between a glossy TV show with a famous cast and a badly shot 5 minute video of my newborn nephew I know which I’ll choose to watch over and over.

It’s not that you shouldn’t involve the well-networked seasoned communicators. Having someone like that on your team can help inspire others to get the message out and help you avoid some easy mistakes. Better to think of them as guides who can help you navigate the terrain than couriers who can deliver your message for you.

How you craft that message and how it travels through the network is another thing altogether.

Last night I bailed on the Project Brutal meeting (which by all accounts went very well) and instead went to this:

Because there’s nothing I like more than a Question Time style “debate” about a nebulous and ill-defined sector of the economy.

More seriously (and here’s the liveblog if you’re interested in what was said) I had a question I wanted to ask and I got my chance to ask it. Unfortunately I made the mistake of assuming a) that I was capable of communicating a nuanced question about a complex issue, and b) that the question would actually be answered by a panel put on the spot without any preparation to deal with the complex issue I was putting to them. Which is why I have a low opinion of the Question Time format.

So with that in mind, here’s what I wanted to communicate to the panel and the room in general.

My general point was that when we talk about The Arts or The Creative Industries or whatever we are essentially talking about fostering a space in society where cultural activity can occur. I also want to take the view that cultural activity happens despite intervention from patrons be they aristocrats or government and has done since people told stories around the fire. If I could have included a link in my question I would have encouraged the panel to read Andrew Dubber’s McCluhan inspired 5 Ages Of Media as a background to this general point.

With that in mind I then wanted to question the role of cultural institutions as gatekeepers of culture. In doing so I wanted to take two examples, one negative and one positive.

I started with the positive one which contained a plug for the Created in Birmingham shop (for if I learned anything from SXSWi it’s that plugging your thing in a question is a surefire route to EPIC WIN). I told of the gang of lads that came in today generally taking the piss. This happens occasionally and it’s never a bad thing. They’re usually taking the piss because they’re intrigued but don’t really understand it. One of them, however, seemed to get it and was deep in thought. I explained to him how it worked, told him to email me some examples of his work and essentially didn’t fob him off. Immediately after the gang left one of them, who had been all mouthy and annoying, came back with a serious look on his face to ask about getting his work in the shop and I gave him the same pitch.

These lads were what I believe is referred to as chav hoodie yob scum. They may not produce anything of any worth, but they might. And we’ve given them an honest incentive to do something on terms they can understand and respect. Give me something I can sell and I’ll put it on sale. If it sells you get 75%.

Because here’s the thing. We’ve sold stuff by kids like this. One of them sold for £150. And while he was pretty articulate and savvy his mates who came into see his work on the wall were, well, ordinary kids. Not bad or good, just normal people.

Which is why the shop is such an amazing thing (and I say this as someone who seriously thought it would bomb – more on that another day) in that we’re not just bringing art to the masses who pass through the Bullring – we’re giving the masses a chance to be part of that process. Since we started this as bit of a joke and have done it with next to no financial support from any arts or culture organisations (due to us being too busy to ask for it) it makes me ask all sorts of questions about the effectiveness of cultural organisations in enabling people to take part in culture. I’m not sure what those questions are exactly but I’m determined to figure it out.

The more negative example was about how the Creative Industries, in the form that was frequently cited in the Digital Economy Bill debate, are actively stifling cultural activity in the misguided enforcement of copyright. For this I’d have recommended the panel spend a while reading Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture the central premise of which is:

“There has never been a time in history when more of our ‘culture’ was as ‘owned’ as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.”

In fact I’d recommend anyone involved in the creation and propagation of culture read it. He may not be right about the answers but his survey of the situation is spot on.

My example was handed to me this morning by Constantin Film, the owners of Downfall, who have claimed copyright infringement by the countless Hitler Is Angry videos on YouTube which, thanks to YouTube’s somewhat submissive response to DMCA takedown notices started rapidly vanishing.Here’s the TechCrunch report on the whole sorry saga. Of course there are now countless Hitler parody videos about the takedown of the Hitler parody videos such as this awesome epic and the whole thing has been a public relations disaster for the copyright holders.

And, of course, the panel agreed with me that what Constantin Films were doing was idiotic and that copyright needed reforming since this was a textbook example of fair use and parody. They also agreed that the Created in Birmingham shop was a good thing and that this sort of activity should not be done by cultural organisations but should be supported. Which was nice to know but not really the point of my talking into the microphone.

Whether by accident or design they’d got my examples mixed up with my question. Of course I expected them to agree that the first was a good thing and the second a bad thing. That was why I gave them. But they were supposed to back up a more important, fundamental point which I think gets lost in all the discussions about Arts and Culture and Creativity and stuff.

That is that if (and it’s an big if) we’re talking about helping society do culture, the industries that has grown up to do this over the last couple of centuries are either becoming irrelevant or hindering this activity.

I’m not interested in why the Created in Birmingham shop is good at outreach so much as I’m wondering why the big cultural organisations don’t already own this sort of activity. (cf Hannah Nicklin’s critique of Such Tweet Sorrow showing the RSC is playing catchup in a major way.) And I’m not interested in the Hitler videos being taken down so much as concerned about how, in accepting this as the normal state of affairs, millions of people are, by definition, breaking the law when they “do” culture. (cf my post If people use your creations to have conversations, you win at culture.)

In essence I guess I was saying this: We’re talking about state support for the creative industries with the assumption that supporting those industries is a good thing for cultural activity in our society. Is it?

The event was hosted by the the International Dance Festival. I don’t think they’ve had much to do with Stirchley’s Folk Dancing group and I very much suspect the folk dancers have no idea a dance festival is going on.

That was my point. Sorry it didn’t quite make it through at the time.

So in one fell swoop the government has managed to piss off the copyright reformers by bowing to the pressure of the big media companies while simultaneously pissing off small media producers by attempting some much needed copyright reform.

It’s a bloody mess and no mistake, but I don’t want to talk about it in depth as others have done a much better job. Seriously, go read that post. It’s lucid and non-ranty and everything.

What I do want to talk about it something that happened the other day. But first a bit of background. Remember this?

Of course you do. And you’ll no doubt remember the inevitable parody site where folk were able to create their own captions and share them. Here’s a few:

I chose those six deliberately because they all have something in common. Can you guess what it is?

That’s right. They all use copyrighted images without permission. They are, in effect, illegal. What should have happened is the authorities should have contacted mydavidcameron.com and demanded they remove these images on pain of prosecution. But a better system would be where they didn’t do it in the first place. Or better still, weren’t able to. Right?

No. That’d be stupid. And yet it’s publishing a poster like that is very much against the law.

So, finally, here’s the thing that I want to talk about. Inspired no doubt by the Cameron site the Labour party have been running a competition for their supporters to design their election posters. This was the winner.

Whatever you think of it as an ad you can see it comes from the same mindset as the Cameron posters, one of mashing up cultural iconography to make a point. In this case the creator of the image, reported to be “Jacob Quagliozzi, 24″ has taken this image from the BBC program Ashes to Ashes…

and stuck Cameron’s head on it.

The way the debate is being framed looks towards Labour and the Torys being forced to apologise for using the image without permission and breaking copyright laws they are in the process of reforming. The Stop 43 site wants to know if they licensed the photo from the BBC despite it being patently obvious that they didn’t.

Here’s their argument in a nutshell:

I’d rather the debate was framed in a slightly different way: Both of these adverts almost certainly should be legal.

When you create something that has massive cultural impact, such as a television drama series that resonates with millions of people, you can expect aspects of that thing to become embedded in the culture. Traditionally this might be a catchphrase or a fashion trend. People will discuss issues of the day using your creation as a means to finding a common ground.

If this happens to you then congratulations – you win at culture. Many rewards will be yours.

Now let’s bring the Internet into play. As we all know, the Internet is not just a distribution platform for media. It’s mostly used for conversation and discussion of the issues of the day. Sometimes this is done with words and sometimes it is done with with pictures, video and sound. And, just as a catchphrase from a popular television program might be used to carry meaning through these conversations, an iconic image might also be used, just as Mr Quagliozzi did for his poster.

Twenty years ago the only people able to acquire the raw images, mix them together and distribute them to a wide audience would be major media outlets. Today anyone with a rudimentary image editing software and a cheap computer can do the same. And that pretty much means anyone. You might not know how but the tools are there. Rather like baking a cake. You just need an oven and some basic ingredients to do the same sort of thing as Mr Kipling.

But copyright is being infringed. The creator of the image has lost control over how it is copied and distributed. This is a bad thing. Theft has occurred. Imaginary sums of money have been denied to their rightful recipients.

And yet the copying has the same cultural resonance as someone shouting a catchphrase from the show across a pub to quickly and effectively communicate something. You wouldn’t want to ban that kind of activity, or require a license to use elements on the script in everyday conversation. That would be absurd.

But this isn’t an individual. These are political parties using copyrighted material to promote their ideologies. That’s different, surely?

Here’s something I spotted the other day:

Batman is owned by Warner Brothers who, like Disney, are very strict about the commercial exploitation of their icons. This Crimestoppers advert is blatantly using Batman to make a point and yet I saw no “™ used with permission” notice on the poster nor on the website. And why should they? Batman has indubitably won the culture game for “fighting crime without revealing your identity” and this isn’t strictly Batman, is it?

A few days later I found myself in Subway ordering a sandwich (it’s been a busy few weeks so forgive the lapse in judgement – for the record the sandwich was disappointing) and noticed the employees had “There’s a Sub for that” emblazoned on their shirts. Turns out this was an advertising campaign last year.

Which bears a striking resemblance to Apple’s iPhone ads from last year:

I notice Apple don’t use the “There’s an app for that” line anymore. That’s probably because they know they won this particular culture game and therefore can’t reasonably expect exclusivity on the phrase.

Which is why I think the Ashes to Ashes poster is a bit of a red herring. It used to be said that an artist cannot control how their work is interpreted once they release it into the world. I would add to that the loss of control over how that interpretation is absorbed into and transmitted through the culture.

The thing those six Cameron poster parodies have in common is they all use images laden with rich cultural meaning to comment on the Tory leader. That rich meaning came from the original creators getting something right an winning at culture, but the price for that win is losing some control.

Simply put, culture is controlled and managed by society. If you, through luck or financial weight, manage to infect the culture with your creation then you can reap huge rewards. But you also give the control over the interpretation of that creation to society to play with as they will. And these days that involves people making their own media with your creation as naturally as they might integrate it into their own conversations.

If we go down the road of making this activity illegal we will effectively be making a form of conversation illegal. Because that’s what happening with these poster mashups – conversation. And it shouldn’t matter whether it’s a kid on his laptop, a political party, a crime hotline or some boneheaded spermbag in an advertising agency.

More importantly this has nothing to do with orphan works so it’s a shame Stop 43 are trying to use it in this way. But then since they’re pushing this sort of scaremongering nonsense I’m not overly surprised. Thanks to the way copyright law was formed orphan works are a serious problem and the solution is going to be complex and painful for some. But this isn’t about orphan works. It’s about fair use.

Here’s a song and video that uses cultural iconography to make a conversational point but in the process breaks copyright law and is probably illegal. I’d rather it wasn’t.

Just now I went to another website running on WordPress with the intention of buying four items from it. The seller had given each item a Buy Now button which means each one had to be bought as a separate transaction. There was no option to buy them as a job lot, or to buy three of them. The site had been set up to cater for those who wanted to buy single items only.

As such I haven’t bothered to make the purchase. Maybe I don’t really want them items, maybe I’m terribly lazy (I must admit to feeling a bit guilty now I’m writing this and probably will make the effort later) but my intention to give this person some money was thwarted by a barrier.

This isn’t an easy one to get right. PayPal buttons are fairly flexible but covering all bases can result in your site being covered in far too many buttons, which can be another off putting barrier.

I’d suggest (and will be implementing) using the shopping cart rather the Buy Now option. This lets people add as few or as many items as they’d like and also gives you a few options for making postage fairer for larger orders.

But all in all the old retail rules still apply. You can learn a lot from your sales patterns but the real lessons come from looking at lost sales and figuring out why people didn’t buy that thing they liked. Then make it easier for them.

And all this applies to any sort of website. Online people have infinite choice. If you can’t give them easy access to what they want they’ll give up and go somewhere else. Of course if you stumble upon something people need that’s a different matter, but if you’ve got that you probably won’t be hacking WordPress blogs and PayPal buttons together.

The biggest stumbling block was why should they? Most of the work comes via word of mouth and their main form of communication is the mobile phone. Like the zine-producers of the 90s they’re already hooked into a powerful functioning social network based on reputation. What do they need new digital tools for?

Today we needed a plumber to have a look at the boiler, three days before Christmas during a cold snap. Plumbers are, as you might expect, a bit thin on the ground and Fiona’s usual source for such things was booked up until January. So, having built up a healthy following on Twitter over the last couple of years (as ever, that’s the critical part) I asked my network:

Within 10 minutes I had this response:

So what’s the difference between that and the standard list of “plumbers in your area”? These are recommendations, unmediated and unbiased, based on experience, from people who I trust.

Fiona, for it is her house and I have never been a home owner so should not be trusted with fixing parts of one, took this information from my social network and logged onto the social network where plumbers can be found. This social network is rarely mentioned on Mashable or Techcrunch but it’s really quite effective. You access it by dialing numbers on the telephone part of your mobile internet device and by talking to people using your voice. Of course, like all social platforms, it’s only as effective as the people you connect with through it but thanks to the head start we got from my Twitter network we were quickly tapping into Clive The Gasman‘s database. He was tied up but was able to recommend a friend who specialized in Fiona’s model of boiler. And the rest is more a story about fixing a boiler so I’ll spare you that.

A little later I tooted:

The plumbers were asking where she’d got their number from and rather than say “from a friend” she was being a bit cheeky. But it got me thinking. We spent too much time thinking about services and not thinking about the networks those services enable. Twitter allowed me to ask a few hundred people in my network to recommend a plumber in seconds. Those that fitted the criteria (living locally, trustworthy, knew a plumber, were online, could be bothered to reply) let me know in minutes. The telephone then allowed Fiona to query the plumbers network through Clive who took her criteria (make of boiler, symptoms, time required) and gave her a solution (call my mate). The two aren’t that different.

I used to joke that the Internet was just like the telephone only different and that we’d get used to it in the same way we’ve gotten used to having a mobile in our pockets at all times. While it’s more complicated than that it’s also kinda true. All these things are simply technologies and tools that enable us to connect with each other and, more importantly, ask questions. Sometimes the tech is old (garden fences spreading local news), sometimes it’s new. But the hive mind was always there.

The meeting was very illuminating and I’m happy to say I have a much better understanding of what the fund is for and what Anna and Steve are looking for in the applications. Here, then are my (relatively opinion free) notes.

What is the Digital Content Development fund?

The tag line is “establishing platforms for content delivery”. The platforms and the content are not necessarily digital. And, as we all know, the definition of “platform” and “content” is pretty fluid.

It’s a Pilot Project fund. They’re looking to, as Steve put it, float some boats and see what works. It is most certainly experimental and they’re interested in ideas that haven’t properly been thought through. The fund is to enable that thinking through process.

It’s less an investment in physical things, such as websites or infrastructure, and more an investment in ideas. They’re looking for things that will help change the way the organisation thinks about what it does with its content.

They’re looking to fund explorations in the following three areas:

1. New forms of organisational operation.
2. New forms of distribution.
3. New forms of engagement

In other words, the creation of stuff, the getting of stuff to people and the way people deal with your stuff.

Be interesting, not boring

There have been a lot of applications over the last year. Here’s a few things they really don’t want to see any more of:

• Digitising archives for the sake of it. There needs to be a good reason why that cupboard of VHS tapes should be put online.
• Creating broadcast-style channels.
• Revamped websites, particularly those primarily concerned with marketing / ticket sales.
• Voting, polls or any form of faux “engagement”

And here’s what they would love to see more of:

• Kernels of potentially interesting ideas.
• Things that aren’t necessarily technically possible yet but are conceptually interesting.
• Repurposing of existing technology platforms. Don’t re-invent the wheel, use the wheel differently.
• Using technology in new social ways. (Not sure what that means exactly. Could be connected to the above point.)
• Redefining what the core concepts in your organisation mean.
• Moving from analogue to digital while maintaining the level of innovation.

What are organisations doing wrong?

• Not thinking experimentally. This is a fund for experiments.
• Not being playful. Again, it’s for trying things you wouldn’t normally try. Approach it with a sense of play.
• Not taking risks. A nice aspect of the DCD fund is there’s no fear of failure. As long as you can learn from it, everything going horribly wrong is not a problem.
• Emulating retail or broadcasting. The retail model is important for selling tickets but this isn’t about selling tickets. Similarly, a one-to-many model of engagement isn’t going to succeed.
• Starting with existing content or platforms.
• No substance to the proposal. Effectively saying “We’re going to do some digital stuff but we don’t really know why.”
• Concentrating too much on technology. Tech is a tool you use to do something. What is the something?

Why?

The big thing I got from the meeting is orgainsations aren’t asking themselves “Why?” There are bids coming in that tick all the boxes but don’t seem to have been properly thought through (note: I haven’t actually seen any bids myself – that would be wrong). Organisations need to think about why they want to do it, what the implications will be, who they’re aiming to reach and what they’re looking to change.

My reading of this is that if this is a door that has been opened people are looking at the door and trying to understand how it works when what the should be doing is going through the door and exploring what lies beyond it. I appreciate that sounds like motivational nonsense but when you look at all the organisations going on Twitter because they think they need to go on Twitter but not really understanding how going on Twitter fits with what they do, it kinda makes sense.

You need my help with this

Well, maybe you don’t. But I’d be a fool if I didn’t mention that this is the sort of thing that’s right up my street. A big part of the Metapod Connect course I ran this year (helping arts organisations get to grips with the social Internet) was getting people to stop thinking about online engagement as another way to sell tickets and start thinking about it in terms of how it could change the way they work. I wanted people to question their roles as cultural guardians in an environment where the creation, distribution and consumption of culture has been radically democratised. This, I think, is where the DCD fund is coming from. It’s providing a space, through funding, to safely explore these questions and issues. And I’ve been thinking about them a lot.

Drop me a line.

Preparation

First the practical stuff. With about 36 hours to prepare and zero budget a DIY approach was needed. I had available to me a 9 year old G4 Mac and a hefty CRT monitor, the sort of kit that was cutting edge in 2000 but now struggles with YouTube. On this I installed Seesmic Desktop, a Twitter client that displays information in columns and, most importantly, can have most of the controls hidden away into a pseudo-kiosk mode. I logged in using an unused ghost account to avoid hitting API rate limits on the accounts I was using to monitor stuff. The screen was placed on a stack of boxes and cases and the screen surrounded with explanatory notes stuck on sheets of A3 paper. It looked like this:

On the left I wrote:

Follow @supersonicfest

We’re using Twitter to keep you informed during the festival.

Schedule changes, unexpected goodness, cake shortages, late starts, all that sort of thing.

Follow @supersonicfest in your Twitter for the latest.

On the right I wrote:

We need you to Tweet

The best info comes from the crowd and we’ll be retweeting what we find.

To be found include one of the following in your tweet:

#supersonic / @supersonicfest / supersonic festival

(a note about just putting “supersonic’ meaning you’ll be lost with the jet planes and Oasis fans)

And then at the bottom I explained what each of the columns were in hopefully clear terms. Here’s a close-up of those explanations.

The idea was to drive people to their phones to participate rather than have them simply consume the information. I was demonstrating that their messages were being monitored and would be broadcast through the @supersonicfest account if deemed useful or interesting enough. And even if I didn’t they’d still be available to anyone who did the same searches.

The method

So how did I keep on top of all this myself? Bear in mind I was not just running the Twitter. I was also an enthusiastic member of the audience and I was taking photographs of as many acts as possible. This had to be as streamlined and non-disruptive as possible. I needed to spend no more than a minute or two every half hour checking and retweeting.

It was here that I broke a personal rule. I used Tweetdeck on my iPhone. Tweetdeck is the Twitter app for people who spend far too much time on Twitter and the iPhone app doesn’t skimp on features. While I probably exhibit that behaviour I don’t think it should be encouraged – Twitter should be a background thing that compliments whatever you’re doing, offline or on, not something that dominates your life. In my opinion. But, that said, sometimes you need to be monitoring numerous accounts or searches and that’s when the overkill of Tweetdeck makes some sense.

I managed to keep it down to three screens (click for bigger):

The first column is “Mentions” – any messages with @supersonicfest in them. The second is a search for #supersonic or “supersonic festival”. I could have bundled these two together but suspected they’d be subtly different with the former talking to to the festival and the latter talking about it. I’m not sure if this actually happened – research would be needed. The third column was mentions of “supersonic” without the words @supersonicfest #supersonic or festival. In other words the contents of the bucket after the tweets had been filtered. Lots of noise here but worth checking once in a while.

When I found something worth retweeting I’d tap on the message, then tap on the “retweet” button and finally edit it a bit, usually just removing the hashtag or @supersonicfest username so it wouldn’t reappear in the searches. So retweeting the tweet in the top-left of the above image would look like this:

That whole operation takes about 20 seconds. If that.

So that’s the system. What actually happened?

In practice

First off, there was already a fair amount of Twitter activity happening around the festival. I put this down to two main factors – firstly Lisa Meyer of Capsule had been actively running the @supersonicfest account for a good 6 months before the event, building up a good following and a sense that Capsule used this medium in a way worth paying attention to. Plus the name of the account implied it would be used during the event (this isn’t something I would have advised on, by the way, since Capsule could be seen as more than just Supersonic, but in this case it worked well). Secondly the Supersonic audience is, shall we say, somewhat geeky. These tend to be people who are very passionate about very specific sorts of music and relatively obscure bands and the Internet lends itself well to forming communities around niches. While Twitter is certainly more mainstream than it was a year ago the “power users” will tend to be those who have already found a need for it. I’d go out on a limb and say there were more active Twitter users as a percentage of the total audience at Supersonic than at a more mainstream or art-crowd event.

(Evidence for this also comes from the Collective Memories that had been done in 2007 and 2008 which gathered mentions of the festival across the Internet. As I said in my How To Do A Collective Memory post Supersonic really lends itself to this, probably because the audience tends to discuss such things publicly online whereas the attendees of, say, a concert at Symphony Hall might discuss it offline or in private. But that’s a subject for another day.)

Given that it’s the nonsense on Twitter that forms the glue from which serious “useful” stuff can emerge (See Jon Bounds on this) I needed to ensure that should some “news” occur people would feel it worth tweeting which meant my job was not just to monitor what was being said but also to encourage it. This was particularly apparent on the Friday night which has more of a “big gig” vibe than a festival one. People said they’d arrived, said what acts they were watching and enjoying and that they were going home. I simply gauged the general zeitgeist and retweeted accordingly, trying to spread my postings across as many people as possible to get the sense that people were being listened to. “Ooh, I got retweeted. I’ll write more now!”

Thanks to the festival running fairly smoothly there wasn’t too much urgent news to communicate but I did pick up on some minor if useful stuff. A schedule change was the biggest thing but I also sent out news about the merchandise room, live streams from Rhubarb Radio, cake supplies at the tea stall, the relatively cheap cider, cafes in Digbeth for breakfast, what Nisennenmondai means (Y2K bug) and so on.

Sharing immediately

On Saturday morning I brought up the search pages on Twitter for #supersonic, @supersonicfest and “supersonic festival” from 8pm to 3am and printed them out on 6 sheets of paper which I stuck next to the monitor with the title “What you said on Friday”. It was raw and uncensored and included a few criticisms but that was important. This had to be genuine in order to get people to be genuine. To run something like “tell us what you loved and we’ll stick your tweet on the wall” would have been pointless. And, to be honest, they weren’t telling “us” what they loved. They were telling their friends. We were just picking up on it.

Some of the tweets during Sunn O)))’s set on Friday

I did the same thing for Saturday (you can see both in the photo at the start of this post) which, since it ran from 4pm and was a lot more social, had a lot more messages. This time I copied the text into a document and edited out the cruft (“half a minute ago from web · Reply · View Tweet”) so I could fit them all into a manageable 11 pages. While I did spend a fair amount of time figuring out how best to do this once the system was in place it would probably only take an hour to do, if that.

The effect of this on the Sunday was quite striking. Along with the 40 or so real-time tweets shown on the monitor there was a record of not just what had happened on the previous two days but what what it had been like. The festival had been reviewed by the festival go-ers and published immediately, analogous to those daily newspapers that get published at large trade events or conventions. Because it was posted in the Rhubarb Radio studio which was constantly occupied I found out people were constantly checking it out, both for current and yesterday’s news. Some of this was people finding their own names but there was definitely interest in this. And as such it became a meeting point and a place for striking up conversations with strangers. People gravitate towards information that is relevant to them and talk around it and that this happens offline as much as online.

So during the event we’d provided a space, both online and off, for people to socialise. I’m under no illusions as to the importance of this – it’s a tiny part of a large whole – but it fits nicely with the cafe, food court and bars and hopefully helped people meet both online and face to face. It satisfied my requirement that social media adds value with the minimum of disruption and without getting in the way of the important stuff – in this case the acts on stage.

The data

After the event we were left with a whole load of data. I did a bit of analysis here and Neil took it a bit further. While one should always be careful with statistics some of the visualisations are at least interesting. Take this Steamgraph taken directly from the Twitter search results:

Here you can see in red the conversation about Goblin simmering over the weekend in anticipation of their performance on Sunday night. That’s not too surprising since they were a headliner and the same goes for Sunn and Thorr’s Hammer about whom buzz is expected. But it’s interesting to see Tartufi and zZz getting some action.

The steamgraph hints at another use of this data. It’s in real time. Whereas reviews on blogs and in magazines are written after the event and photographs are calmly selected and processed before being uploaded, this is raw reaction to the festival as it happened. We can slice through this and see what people thought about the festival at 10pm on Saturday when they were at the festival at 10pm on Saturday.

Here’s a very simple web page with all the tweets divided up by hour. If I find the time I’d like to divide this into web pages for each hour and include photos, videos and excerpts from reviews from the collective memory. Maybe it’d work better as a book – the crowdsourced report on Supersonic 2009. There’d be copyright issues for sure but that doesn’t stop it being an interested idea.

But the surface has only been scratched here. Because this information is fairly structured we can play with it and see patterns. But we should also be aware that this is only a small sample of the audience. 146 individuals contributed to the pool of data including some of those listening online. The attendance at Supersonic is roughly 1500. That’s less that 10%. Which, actually, is pretty good. Before I looked that up I was expecting it to be much lower. Hmm. But it’s still a minority and conclusions should be drawn with that in mind.

Conclusion

So, was this worth doing? I think so. The act of visibly listening encouraged more feedback which has value and it added a new facet to the community Supersonic attendees. While there wasn’t a conversation happening between Capsule and the audience per se (Lisa was busy, y’know, running the festival and I can’t speak for her) the liberal re-tweeting did communicate the fact that they were listening. And the uncensored public nature of the medium did encourage honesty which at least one person picked up on.

ZpoonZ wasn’t too happy with the scheduling

That’s not buried away in the survey or in a private email. That’s in public for everyone who’s searching for it to see. Now in context that’s just one person and its importance should be judged alongside the rest of the tweets. But this sort of transparency should only be attempted if you’re prepared to deal with all the feedback being public. If he’d sent the above on Saturday afternoon it would have been on the wall on Sunday (and in the interest of balance I did re-tweet this one). I believe Capsule have the confidence and self-belief to take that on the chin, or at least see it for what it is (complaints about scheduling at festivals are nothing new). Would you?

If I were to do this again I’d…

• Get more people to contribute. Since it’s a very low-impact activity I’d try and get volunteers or sound engineers based at each stage to tweet what was happening in their area with one other roaming around monitoring the searches. Given the lead time I didn’t have a chance to integrate the project into the workings of the festival and while this wasn’t a problem it would have made it more interesting and useful to get a “back-stage” view.
• Have a bigger screen. Not necessarily a projection (they’re hard to read) but certainly something that more than one person can read at any time. Maybe four screens, each with a different search on it.
• Have more Twitter stations. This brings in costs and potential security issues, no to mention greater potential for things to go wrong, but it would have been nice to have a monitor in the cafe and the food court and at the entrance to each stage. 90% of the audience weren’t on Twitter, it seems, so how can we bring that information to them more effectively.
• Get the print-outs up quicker. Set up a system that scrapes and cleans up the Twitter search so it can be printed out on-site and posted up ever couple of hours.

But ultimately it would depend on the event. I understand the Moseley Folk Festival are looking to do something with Twitter this year (which is why I’m writing this up now). That’s a very different style of event with a different audience so a number of the nuances of Twitter at Supersonic won’t apply. But hopefully the general stuff will.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface on this but at 2500 words I’d better stop.

Any questions?

Rhubarb Radio recorded all the audio from the Barcamp (you can find mp3s of each talk here) so I took my slides and recreated the talk as a movie.

If you’d rather you can download the mp3 or just look at the slides in isolation.

Here are the links from the last slide:
moseleyexchange.com
indyhall.org
citizenspace.us
nwcny.com
workatjelly.com
refreshingcities.org
coworking.info

I didn’t include the questions in the video because I didn’t have any slides for them and wanted to keep the talk as a discrete object but you can find them about 15 minutes into the mp3. I might do something with them later.

I’d welcome your thoughts on this either in the comments or on your own blogs (leave a link below).

Here’s a photo of me during the talk taken by Casper, probably during one of the pauses since I appear be looking at a slide and wondering what I meant to say about it.

For most things this is a no-brainer. To do sometime better takes time while costs more. Easy. But I’m wondering if social media tools, and the Internet culture that creates them, change this.

Back when Stef and I started Created in Birmingham one of the (many) things we wanted to show was how you could get a perfectly good website for next to nothing. At the time most civic-style websites were costing tens of thousands of pounds to deliver and a frightening number of them were, frankly, rubbish with short lifespans. We used WordPress, which is free, and an off the shelf design, which was also free, and had it up and running in an afternoon. The only thing that cost money was the content which, we felt, was how it should be.

So in this situation it was good and cheap and fast. For what we wanted to do, anyway.

Sure, there’s still a huge market for bespoke web design and even with plugins and such platforms like WordPress won’t always do exactly what you want them to do. I’m not suggesting the death of the website building industry by any stretch. But the fact is I can have a website up and running in minutes that is cheap, if not free, and very good indeed. Especially when compared to some of the bespoke rubbish the snake-oil salesmen sell for absurd sums. (And I’m not tarring everyone with the same brush. The same applies to the nascent social media industry, if not more so.)

“Good” is subjective so let’s assume free software like WordPress is good and park that. It’s cheap because, well, it’s free software. So the thing that’s aparently been eradicated is fast. Since you can’t have something from nothing, where did fast go?

When you get something bespoke it generally means a handful of people have worked on it. If it takes 5 people a week to deliver then you’re looking at 200 hours of work which you’ll be billed for. But Open Source software is written by thousands of people over many years with no cost to the end user. Why this happens is a subject for another time but it boils down, I feel, to a culture of collaboration and sharing for mutual benefit.

So when you pay someone to develop a site run on WordPress they’re not building it from scratch. They’re modifying something that has had hundreds of thousands of hours spent developing it. This speeds the process up no end.

I’ve scratched the surface here, mainly because I didn’t want to get into a long explanation of stuff like the Free Software movement, but also because I’m more interested in whether we can get to a place where you can get good and cheap and fast in the offline world. Can collaboration and sharing be applied to business in this way? Or is that just Socialism by another name?

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

M’good chum Nick Booth aka Podnosh is running a new blog, Be Vocal. It’s part of Digital Birmingham’s Open City project but specifically looks at how “the web is being used for what you might call civic good” and in particular mashups of local data.

The Brum Blogs map is a simple but effective example of that. It takes some basic data about local blogs (the name, location and web address) and automatically plots it on a Google map. Now we can navigate the the local blogosphere visually.

Another example is Twittermap which takes the location from people’s Twitter profiles and maps their tweets. Whereas other twitter mapping services look at the whole globe you can limit this one to a radius around a location – here’s the current Twitter activity within 10km of Birmingham. It’s actually very simple to do. They’re just taking this standard Twitter search and mapping it.

Here’s another example:

Like most police forces Leicestershire has a helicopter which frequently buzzes around annoying the hell out of people, especially at night. They’d probably be less annoyed if they knew what it was actually doing up there. This map takes the location data that they presumably produce in their reports, adds the level of information usually issued to the press and maps it. It doesn’t stop helicopters being annoying but it adds context and informs any discussion about the practice. (via Midge)

The reason maps are popular for mashups is people can immediately understand what’s going on. But that’s just scratching the surface of what can be done by combining data sources and delivering them in new ways. Quite often a mashup is is greater than the sum of its parts. and because we’re using computers the mashing up process is often automated from existing activity.

If this sort of thing interests you then keep tabs on Be Vocal, in particular if you have ideas for mashups but no idea how to go about doing them. One of the aims of the blog is to inspire new ideas that can then be helped into reality by Digital Birmingham.

But no, this one is sort of important because it ties in to reputation and trust and all that stuff which powers the social Internet whether we like it or not.

Here’s a tweet:

bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

Sally agrees that this is not only amusing but also interesting and wishes to share it with her followers, so she hits the re-tweet button in her Twitter app of choice. (Like most cool things about Twitter you can’t do this from the Twitter website. This is because Twitter is not a website. It’s an open database with a somewhat mediocre website tacked on. If you’ve only ever used the website and think Twitter is fine but not all that this is why. But I digress. Back to Sally’s re-tweet)

sally: rt @bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

John is following Sally and agrees with her. He does the retweeting thang too:

john: rt @sally: rt @bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

And so does Janet:

janet: rt @john: rt @sally: rt @bob: An amusing and / or interesting thing

And now it’s getting a bit long. Let’s say for the same of argument it’s pretty much 140 characters, the Twitter limit. When Henry sees this he has to make a decision. Editing must be done. So he posts this:

henry: rt @janet: An amusing and / or interesting thing

Err-urr! Y’see what he’s done here? He’s credited Bob’s witty thing to Janet when all Janet did was pass it on. Bob gets not credit. Janet gets an undeserved credit.

Now that’s not really a problem, but what if it wasn’t just a joke but an opinion? What if by retweeting all Janet was saying was “look over here and what Bob said. I might not agree with him but, golly!” This has not been turned into “I’m Janet and I think this.”

And so on.

Retweeting might look like a chorus of “me too” echoing around the echo chamber but it ain’t necessarily so. it’s more analogous to quoting or linking to something of interest. Here’s an example with the name removed because they’re not the first and they won’t be the last:

I didn’t say that. What I actually said was this:

Now, I support the message and want it spread around but the top one implies that I might have had the idea or be involved in organising the gathering. Sure, I’m going to try and make it but I’m by no means a contact. Rich, on the other hand, has been campaigning on this issue for ages. Folk should be directed to him, or at least be aware that he’s at the middle of this.

Credit is important in this game but it’s not just about vanity. It affect the message and its effectiveness.

And I would never sign my tweets with Xx. That’s Rich’s thing and he’s welcome to it. ;)

Does that make sense?

Above are the slides for the talk I gave last Friday to launch the 6 month Metapod Connect course I’m running with Helga Henry at Fierce Earth. Unfortunately (and somewhat ironically) I’ve been too busy planning and delivering the course to blog about it at length but it’s all going rather well and I’m learning a lot in the process.

I hope to record some audio for these slides as they weren’t designed to stand alone, so with that in mind, some notes.

• This was a three hour talk (with a break!) intended to load the participants with as many concepts and ideas as possible. It was not intended to be comprehensive or in depth. That will come over the 6 months of the course.
• After the “My Flickr Story” section, designed to ease them in and help them see when I was coming from, I did a lot of talking around the issues and Helga stepped in repeatedly to add context. I also encouraged questions and interjections.
• The participants were all from small to medium sized cultural organisations which receive Arts Council funding. The point of the course is for them to think about online culture and how their organisation might engage with that.
• There’s a lot of info in the slides. I don’t usually like to have so much stuff up on screen. And I know this breaks all the presentation rules. I could say social media is scrappy and DIY and I wanted to preserve that but the fact is I was on a deadline. (And I like scrappy and DIY.)
• Did I mention I barely scratched the surface?

With that in mind, please feel free to discuss the issues raised here in the comments. I know Jon Hickman has some views. Take it away, Jon!

I think unless you’re using it as a pure info feed (and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that in itself) the personal is the only way to go. The thing is you have to think of it as part of a larger communication strategy.

Here’s a very rough illustration of how a large-ish organisation like Channel 4 communicates with its customers / audience / fans, etc.

Lots of people inside the bubble communicating in a large number of ways to the wider world. It’s more complex than this, obviously, but in essence we’re talking one-to-many broadcast. Which for Channel 4 is fine. It’s what they do well. And, more pertinently, Channel 4 as an organisation cannot sustainably have a many-to-many conversation with millions of people.

So with that in mind lets add Twitter:

Again, absurdly over-simplified. Here I’m thinking what might the org want to get out of this, the answer being communicating their message to a wider and more diverse range of people. Here the org is still doing the broadcast thing but people within the org are communicating with people outside the org who are passing their message on to their own networks.

I saw this happen when Joanna Geary was working for the Birmingham Post and successfully integrated bits of the newsroom into the local Twitter community (back when you could safely call everyone using Twitter in Birmingham “a community”). How much their reach grew through this is debatable but there was definitely some growth. I’d be interested to see how The Guardian measure the value of Jemima Kiss‘ Twitter account to the organisation. I’d also be interested to see whether that value is attached to Jemima herself rather than The Guardian. But that’s a ponder for another day.

Like I said, this is just one idea of many. Feel free to take it, modify it or dismiss it out of hand.

And they did.

And then someone made a live updating map out of it:

Let me just say, before I go any further, Twitter is really weird. This stuff doesn’t make sense. Sure, It’s great to have a load of people providing weather reports across the country in a standardised format that can automagically be turned into a live updating map. That’s fantastic. But how the hell did it happen?

I suspect it’s a combination of a number of factors, most of them human:

1) The British love talking about the weather. Before the snow even started #uksnow was a “trending topic” on Twitter Search. Furthermore, snow in Britain, especially urban southern Britain, is a relatively rare event.

2) Hashtags have, it seems, become mainstream, at least amongst those who’ve been using Twitter for a few months.

3) The British, while loving to talk about the weather, do so with their tongues firmly in cheek. The notion of rating the snow out of ten, therefore, appeals to a certain sense of humour. Hell, if you’re going to react to something in an over the top manner you might as well go the whole hog. After all, this is snow in Britain. (At the point, remember, no-one knew it would be the worst best snow in 18 years.)

4) Whoever started the “rate your snow out of ten” thing was obviously fairly well connected but it spread incredibly rapidly for a meme. I reckon this because it was instantly comprehendable. The hashtag made sense (unlike some) and was already in use for general chatter about the snow, British people know a postcode when they see one, and everyone understands a rating out of ten. Also, everyone had the data in their heads ready to input. “It’s snowing fairly heavily in my area” = “#uksnow B13 6/10″.

5) What’s really interesting is there was no real purpose to doing so. Just a faith that someone, eventually, would take this data and do something with it. I guess this has a lot to do with precedent. Whenever there’s a collection of data released onto the ‘net you know some visualisation nut will turn it into a graph or a map or something. So it would have been really odd if, within 12 hours, there wasn’t a live updating Googlemaps mashup.

6) You can’t easily hack it. There’s no opportunity to insert rude words. You could probably tweet inaccurate reports but they’d be buried by the amount of accurate ones so the system is pretty self-healing.

7) It’s fun.

Sure, the map isn’t that accurate. It’s biased towards major population centres and is notably empty in Scotland (where, I guess, snow is a bit more mundane than in London). But as an exercise in spontaneous collective reporting across many networks using a single keyword to bond otherwise disparate groups, well, it’s pretty fascinating.

Could you replicate it? I dunno. The thing about projects like this is no-one owns the end result, which is one of the reasons folk are willing to participate. If a major site had asked people to send in reports (like the BBC does) they might well get some but the end result would be owned by that site. The thing about a project which no-one owns is that everyone owns it, even if they only contributed a couple of bits of data. This is our map, just as Wikipedia, by using the GNU Free Document License, is our encyclopedia. That, I think, is what makes this sort of thing interesting and not a little bit exciting.

Now, go play in the snow people!

(Bus photo by @dubber using the Atheist Bust Slogan Generator)

[Update: Within minutes of posting this (and informing Twitter) it comes to my attention that Paul Clarke came up with the standard of #uksnow [postcode prefix] n/10 and started the meme off. As part of the UKGovWeb lot he’s only a degree or so away from me on Twitter which explains how I heard about it so quickly. Nice one Paul!]

One of the things I’ve never managed to crack is how to keep track of all the comments I leave on various blogs, forums, newspapers, etc. There’s no standardisation (some have RSS or email updates for comments but many don’t) and while many solutions have been attempted (the latest candidate seems to be Disqus) they never seem quite comprehensive enough so I’ve preferred to keep things in house.

My previous solution was to have a folder in my browser bookmark toolbar and to drag pages into it when I comment on them. Simple, but all that data is just sitting there doing nothing. Indeed, I had to delete most of the folder every so often to keep it manageable. Not ideal. Not to mention it being a step that wasn’t a natural part of how I move around the web. I do, however, use Delicious.com a lot, so I devised a system which works like this:

After leaving a comment I select the text I wrote and click on the Delicious “Tag” button (Install it from here). This automatically populates the Notes field with my comment. I then add the tag “comment” and save:

Since I tag all the pages I comment on with the same tag I can filter them from all the other bookmarked pages.

That’s all nice but what else can I do with this data? Luckily Delicious provides RSS feeds for pretty much everything so I can take those bookmarks and at the very least display them elsewhere. So using the simple WordPress plugin Inline Feed I threw together a page on my blog which looks like this:

And to prove how simple it is, here’s the code. If you can even call it “code”.

Finally we come full circle. Using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks function to subscribe to the Delicious feed I can access a list of pages I’ve recently commented on directly from the toolbar.
(You can also do this in Safari and I believe even Internet Explorer.)

Sure, there’s no notification of new comments and I have to click through each one (meaning it still feels like a pre-RSS system) but it brings tracking comments inline with the rest of my bookmarking activity, allows others to follow my conversations should they see fit and despite my years I still get a little tingle when the toolbar automatically updates. Feels like magic.

How do you keep track of comments you leave about the place?

In the morning there were a number of talks. Some were good, some were not so good but the best was from Gail Durbin of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The videos appeared on the C:Cubed website a while back but, annoyingly, were not set up for sharing so I did a naughty thing and made a copy of Gail’s talk, uploaded it to Viddler and annotated it with links to the items Gail mentions as she talks. It’s about 10 minutes long and well worth watching.

As I watched Gail talk I grinned and grinned and grinned. She absolutely got it 100%. Everything she said was textbook social media gold. And she’s demonstrably not a web nerd. Her jargon might be a little off but she approaches this stuff with exactly the right spirit for success. Here’s a quick checklist of the things she’s doing right:

• You don’t have to have lots of money to do it. Technologically speaking the V&A’s website is pretty shonky but that’s not stopped them. The blogs use WordPress (free) and most of the projects seem to be based on email, a social media tool we often forget about because it’s so ubiquitous.
• Web 2.0 is about task, not technology. Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact I think I’ll be using this in my talks.
• You have to seed these sites [or else] nobody will contribute to them. Spot on. The notion of “build it and they will come” is wrong. You have to show people what you want them to do by doing it yourself. The point about using your full name is also important. People are more likely to interact and share with other people than they are an institution. Use the tools as you would have others use them. Flickr does this very well where all visible staff members are also active users of the site.
• You don’t always get lots of contributions and this is not a problem. The pattern of interaction in a social space is often like this with, say, 5 really active users, 50 occasionally active users and 500+ lurkers who might pop a comment in or rate something occasionally.
• It’s not for us to determine how people do these things. I think this is an important attitude for an institution such as the V&A to have. Many cultural organisations will have an idea, implicit or explicit, of what is “good” or “right” which is fine but doesn’t always enable engagement and people feel they might be getting it wrong and not contribute. That’s not to say you don’t need some filtering system but by giving people the leeway to curate the space themselves you allow interesting things to bubble through, often things you’d never considered.
• Sometimes you get more creative things if you limit what you’re asking them to do. “Limitations are possibilities” someone once said. Give people a challenge and make them work within certain perameters. Don’t make it too limiting, just enough to get them thinking. The problem with a lot of social media tools is you can do anything you want with them, which is great in theory but daunting in practice. This is one of the reasons Twitter works. It’s blogging but you’re limited to 140 characters so you have to get creative. Or to take a more traditional example, haiku.
• We accept everything (except offensive, irrelevant and half-finished, which is fair). The subsequent rating system is key to this, allowing users to easily promote the good stuff up the list. Digg.com is the classic example of user rating but here it’s being used on a much smaller scale.
• Sue Lawty’s blog. I love this example for obvious reasons. Sue Lawty was their artist in residence and was “deeply hostile to technology” but agreed to have a go at blogging. After a while she started getting feedback from people who had been inspired by her work to do their own and from this The Beach Project evolved. This is a great illustration of how this isn’t about technology, it’s about communication and sometimes the best people to use this stuff are the people who have the most averse reaction to it. (I’m thinking of you, Yarker!)
• 400 contributions from all over the world with no promotion. The World Beach Project has spread through word of mouth. Here’s a Google Blogsearch for it but that’s just scratching the surface. This sort of project is a classic “social object”, something that people want to tell other people about and, more critically, can have a go at themselves. You don’t need to promote something like this. If the idea is good enough you just need to seed it and have patience.
• Be prepared to fail and move on. The list of projects on the Things To Do page is very long and I’d imagine most of them have had a takeup between poor and reasonable. But because the set-up and management costs for these things is so cheap it doesn’t matter. I’d imagine people working at the V&A have ideas for projects involving the public every time they walk through a gallery. Previously they’d have had to go through a long winded process of planning and budgeting to see them in action. Now they can get them up and running in a few days and, if they work, develop them further.

I could go on and on but I think you get the message. Concentrate on the ideas rather than the implementation. Keep it small and manageable – you can grow if it works. Fail often and learn. Technological solutions are good but you can do a lot with email and a shonky website. And above all treat the people you want to engage with as people.

Did you find this as inspirational as I did? Anything you’d like to add?

But as a Brit my knowledge of the intricacies of the US political system is pretty limited so I was left with a vague sense that a tipping point had occurred but no evidence or context to develop it. So I was pleased to come across this talk by Henry Jenkins at MIT entitled The Role of Civic Media in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. If you’re short on time you the meat is in the first 25 minutes. The rest is Q&A and also has value.

There’s a lot in there which I’m still processing but I’d welcome your thoughts.

(I forget who linked this to me…)

1) How can I justify spending time producing stuff for the Internet that doesn’t immediately earn me an income?

2) How can producing stuff for the Internet earn me an income?

A nice illustration of the answer I usually give popped up behind door number 6 of 383 Project’s advent calendar of cool stuff they found this year.

Chris Pugh created a poster called Science Machine. This was to be a limited edition run of 250 prints selling at $45 each. I haven’t looked into how he went about selling them but let’s assume he bypassed the usual channels and just sold them off his website. Selling all 250, which he did, would give him $11,250 before costs and with no commission to pay. Not bad.

But how to sell them without an agent, distributor or gallery? Luckily he had the foresight to set his computer to take a screenshot every five seconds which he then made into two movies, a short seven minute edit…

And the full eighteen minute version…

The short video has been watched 297,000 times while the longer one (which presumably didn’t “go viral” in the same way) has been watched 7,000 times. And someone ripped the video and put it on YouTube gathering another 17,000 views. Interesting to note that they also copied the description and links ensuring those who wanted to could follow through – that doesn’t usually happen unless the ripper admires the individual behind the original work. Some rough and ready analysis therefore says that 1 in 1,284 people who watched the video bought the poster. That actually seems a little low to me in Internet terms but you’ll note that nowhere does Chris allow people to scroll around and explore the image. You watch it being made and you can look at photos of the prints but if you want to see the details and dwell on the art you have to buy it.

Compare this with Rhodri Marsden’s lament that despite 250,000 views of his music video he only sold 58 mp3s, a ratio of 1 in 4310. Rhodri’s problem here, I think, is that once you’ve watched the video there’s no incentive to buy the mp3 unless you really really really love the song. I saw the video when it was doing the rounds. I thought it was nice, watched it a couple of times, possibly blogged it and then moved on to the next thing. There was nothing else to see there. Chris Pugh, on the other hand, has made me hungry. I want to see more of his artwork. I want to drill in deep and really get my head around it. If that hunger stayed with me I might well send him $45. If I could download a high-res version of the print my hunger would probably be satisfied.

I was going to avoid too much maths but got curious so here’s a little bit more. In order to make the same amount as money as Chris, Rhodri’s video would have to be watched 48 million times (11,250 / 58 x 250,000). To be honest that sounds about right for a music video.

Rhodri’s situation also helps me illustrate the answer to question one. He spent a good chunk of time and money making the video which is the main reason for his lament. Chris simply set his computer to automatically take screengrabs as he worked, threw them all into some video editing software (iMovie would suffice), whacked a music track on top and uploaded it to Vimeo. Financial outlay: zero. Time outlay: a couple of hours, maybe more. The video was a byproduct of his actual work.

So here’s the lesson.

1) Look at the process by which you do what you do. Is there a byproduct? Can you very simply create a byproduct?

2) When releasing the byproduct to the world make sure you don’t accidentally give away the product itself.

There’s much more to it than that of course. But if you want to know more you’ll have to employ me. See what I did there?

What’s wrong with these pictures:

Google Blog Search is a fantastically useful service. It takes RSS feeds from blogs and similar platforms and allows your to track certain keywords using the Google Alerts system. So if someone mentions you on their blog and you’re tracking your name you’ll get a notification. This isn’t a vanity search – it’s an essential part of what makes the distributed network of weblogs conversational.

It’s also a valuable tool for blogging about a subject. One of my jobs is running the Custard Factory site and every morning I check through my “Tracking” folder to see what blog posts, news article, Flickr photos and YouTube videos have been put online about the Custard Factory. It both speeds up my job and allows me to bring in things that might otherwise have slipped past the traditional radar.

That is until Google tweaked Blog Search.

I can’t find any official announcement but a few days ago a few of us noticed our alerts were suddenly a hell of a lot less useful. Previously Google would just index the content of the RSS feed, in other words the stuff you’re reading here between the title of the post and the title of the next post. Now, for some bizarre reasons known only to themselves they’re indexing the whole page including the sidebar.

And that’s what’s wrong with the above pictures. That post has no mention of the Custard Factory yet it appeared in my “Custard Factory” alert because the phrase appears in the sidebar. The thing is, that phrase appears on every page of the blog meaning that every time I post something it’ll appear in the alert regardless of whether it’s relevant or not.

And it gets worse. Check out this one:

That’s from this post by my old chum Rol but if you search the page you’ll find no mention of Custard Factory at all. That’s because Rol has a widget on his sidebar that has a a snippet of the last post from all the blogs he’s following. When Google indexed the page this post of mine was the most recent thing I’d published. Now it’s not. And even more stupidly it had nothing to do with Rol whatsoever. He probably never even knew the words appeared on his site.

If you think this is stupid and would like Google to make their Blog Search useful again please let them know using this form. I thank you.