Of course, what Urban Comms have done here is a bit of fun and a way to explore what’s happening on Twitter in the city and I wouldn’t want to dismiss that as a useful activity, but if we’re not careful we run the risk of taking this stuff seriously and reading far too much into the influence and reputation we think individuals have.

Sure, those with large followings have a lot of people receiving their messages but, and this is the mistake people who come from a broadcast background always make, that doesn’t mean they’re actually listening. Nor does it mean they’re going to act.

I have nearly 2,000 followers. Let’s be generous and say 1,000 of them are actually human beings who regularly use Twitter. When I post a photo to Twitpic of a link to my blog I can measure how many people click through and, discounting retweets, it’s around 50 on a good day. And here’s the interesting thing – it’s always been around 50. My audience may have grown but the number of people who are actively engaged with my witterings hasn’t, much. (Caveat – the amount of science going on here is less that zero.)

Tom Ewing did a bit of maths when a pop star with 14 million followers linked to his review garnering him about 5,000 hits. Tom errs on the side of extremely generous and estimates 2% of the star’s followers clicked on the link which doesn’t sound much like herd mentality to me.

As Lord Shirky of Clay so famously said, more isn’t just bigger, it’s different. But so is smaller. We are familiar with the dynamics of one-to-many but we don’t seem to be thinking about one-to-few.

Let’s do a not-so-hypothetical. A campaign emerges on Twitter about a big important thing. You see a message in your stream from Stephen Fry urging you to turn your icon purple or something. You then see a message from a friend who you’ve known for years and spent many a drunken night also urging you to do the opposite.

On the one hand is a man you’ve never met who you think is amusing when he’s on the telly. On the other is someone who probably knows more intimate details about you than your parents. The former has a million Twitter followers. The latter has 23. Who do you think will have the most influence on you? Who are you going to listen to?

Obviously it depends. Some of my friends are quite ignorant of matters global. But generally speaking Stephen Fry and your bezzy-mate are on a level playing field when it comes to influence over you.

In this post Joanna Geary looks at Fry’s claims not to have any influence and asks “Why should his influence on them be any more or less than a newspaper has on its readers?” To which I’d ask, how much influence does a newspaper have over its readers these days? Leaving aside my opinion that newspapers reflect the beliefs, prejudices and tolerances of their readers more than they dictate them the press is competing with a lot more trusted sources these days and none of them are staffed media outlets – they’re our bezzy-mates.

Of course a little bit of influence over a lot of people is cumulatively a significant amount, and maybe that’s all these organisations are after – a brief registration on the brains of a lot of people so they buy the right jar of coffee next time.

It’s all so very complicated.

Anyway, my other motivation for writing this post which kinda lost lost along the way was to mention NESTA’s Social Media – A Force For Good event tomorrow. They’ve got what looks to be a rather impressive lineup of My Fry, Biz Stone from Twitter and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn to “discuss the phenomenon of social media and its future impact”. I’m sure they have lots of interesting things to say and I may well tune in (as it were) but I would caution anyone against thinking these people really understand what’s going on at a granular level – not because they’re willfully ignorant but because they can’t know. Hell, as a compulsive early adopter I have trouble understanding how “normal” people use this stuff. But I do know that while I may idolise David Lynch and follow his tweets with pleasure his influence over my actions and beliefs pales next to that of my bezzy-mates.

Or, to put it another way, looking at the phenomena of Twitter celebrities is fundamentally missing the point of why this stuff is interesting.

As is often the case it was partly inspiring and partly irritating and, as expected, the question of the Digital Divide came up. In short, if all this stuff is happening online, what about the people who can’t get online? This is an important issue and I wouldn’t want to suggest otherwise, but I think the discussion might be being framed a bit wrongly.

Social media tools (and let’s use that term for the sake of argument) are an effective way of connecting people but they are not the only way. Believe it or not, people were connected before the Internet. They were even connected before the telephone or the printing press. What these new tools allow is for people to connect in ways that are a bit different. Sometimes they’re faster (email vs the post), sometimes they’re more interactive, sometimes they bypass limits such as time and place, sometimes they allow a larger number of people to be involved in a thing, and sometimes they enable a smaller group of people to function better in a noisy environment.

The fundamental thing, that when people are connected to each other and are able to converse, share and build it leads to interesting things and contributes to our society (and I put no value judgments on that contribution), remains unchanged.

The other month I was on a panel at Caption, a self-published comics event in Oxford. Back in the 90s I organised stuff through the networks that had emerged around that scene, networks that were connected through the postal system. I thought about it and concluded that, actually, the only thing that had changed was the means of communication and the speed. The way that the community was connected, and more importantly the attitude and understanding of what that connectivity means, was still the same.

In the early 2000s when I was still involved in this scene it amused me no end that Mark Stafford, a cartoonist who was the very definition of digitally excluded (no computer access, no mobile phone, and no interest in having either) knew more about what was going on than anyone else out there. He was intrinsically connected to the right people in that scene. If you wanted to know what was happening you asked Mark. (He now has an old Nokia brick-phone and a friend does his website but I don’t think I’ve ever had an email from him.)

The thing about this offline connectedness is it’s pretty invisible, even to the people involved in it. I can look at my email and Twitter and so on and roughly map out my social network. It’s much harder for someone who’s network is based on walking around the streets and going to specific places regularly. Yes, they can identify shops or pubs or activities like walking the dog, but the nuances of their network, especially when you move past the friend-of-a-friend node, are hard to pin down. And I think because we’re comparing the two we assume the more visible activity is stronger and more important.

I don’t think either is stronger or more important. I think they’re both the same thing. For some people and some environments an offline network will be more effective. While for others an online network will bring rewards. Michael Grimes’ post Since using Twitter is a lovely example of someone for whom the offline network wasn’t working but the online one was and I see this again and again. For myself the reason I got involved in zines as a teen was partly because it allowed me to reach outside the limits of my offline network and find more likeminded people. I use social media to filter society, in a way, because, frankly, mainstream society doesn’t interest me.

Over the weekend I mooched around the Digbeth O’lympics which took place a various pubs in the area. This fantastic but quite low-key event was organised by people who are connected by those pubs was event had a different vibe. The Spotted Dog, for example, felt like a village fete with families and a BBQ while The Rainbow had a younger, more rebellious crowd. These were groups of people who were connected and had built up relationships around an offline environment. They are as constructive, inclusive and exclusive as any network online and, I think, can be understood in the same way.

We who spend significant amounts of our social lives online tend to forget that offline can be as if not more effective than online. While a decent web presence will often help these communities to function there isn’t always a need. The trick is identifying where the offline networks have degraded as society changes and where a need has emerged.

While we were talking I sketched this:

and I’ve been looking at it ever since.

When people move through the world, be it physically, mentally, emotionally or whatever, they do so with blinkers on. A psychologist can explain it in detail but as I understand it we are unable to process everything that our senses pick up on so we filter out the unnecessary stuff to stop us going mad. So when you’re concentrating on driving you won’t necessarily notice the colour of the sky or your friend waving from the pavement even though your eyes are receiving that information. (If anyone can remind me what this phenomena is that’d be great!)

Let’s take a random Guardian blog post as an example. Peter Preston is writing about how the Internet has ruined everything. Over nine paragraphs he introduces his idea and runs through a load of examples to back it up. In the middle of paragraph five he throws in this sentence:

We aren’t better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street, or Obama twittering away when he could be thinking.

The first comment, left by JosephPorta, picks up on this:

‘We aren’t better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street,. . . . ‘

I think those who watched Mr Brown on YouTube learnt a lot.
Enough to decide whether he is trustworthy or not.

So, we are better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street

Preston wasn’t writing about Gordon Brown being trustworthy. He barely mentioned the video in passing. But JosephPorta took this as a his cue to vent his feelings about it.

You might dismiss him as a single-issue idiot who’s either unable to engage in a conversation or trolling around leaving anti-Brown comments on newspaper sites, but I think it’s a lot more interesting than that. Have a look at his page of comments left on the Guardian site. Granted, it doesn’t make much sense as they’re all out of context but a couple of things jump out. First, there’s a healthy diversity to the topics he’s commenting on. And second, when you follow them through he sometimes adds something of value to the original piece or the discussion that follows.

So let’s look at my sketch again, this time using the whiteboard as the medium of choice:

Whenever JosephPorta comes across an article he reads through it and applies his personal filter, picking out the bits that fit with where his mind is at the moment. If he’s annoyed about Gordon Brown then any mention of Gordon Brown being annoying will register, and if the rest of the article doesn’t register then that sentence will stand out even stronger. As far as he’s concerned the article is about Gordon Brown and not how upset Peter Preston is about the Internet. And if he’s not a troll or an idiot we can probably say that he doesn’t think his comment is out of place or missing the point given that he pressed the “post your comment” button.

And, of course, sometimes an article will fit perfectly with whatever he considers important. In that case his comments will chime perfectly with the substance and spirit of the original piece and the original writer will read his comment and be reassured as to the thoughtful, considered response their readers are capable of.

This is slightly different to a basic browser history. You can bring up all the pages you looked at today but all it tells you is what pages you looked at today. It doesn’t say what you thought of them or which bits you focussed on. And while browser history can be useful to a certain extent it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Something closer can be seen by looking at popular items on Delicous. Let’s take TechCrunch’s publishing of internal Twitter documents and look at a few ways people have tagged them:

• twitter, strategy, socialmedia, business, management
• documents, confidential, revenue, transparency, internal, leak, startup, twitter, techcrunch
• Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Facebook, AOL, TechCrunch, MarissaMayer, AlGore

Certainly there’s a general theme to the tagging (which is one of the ways social bookmarking works – describing the content of links by which tags bubble to the surface) but those three strings of tags betray three distinct understandings of the piece. The first sees it as an insight into the business practices of social media companies, the second sees the leaking and publishing of the documents as the important thing while the third is interested in how these documents relate to a smorgasbord of other companies. All of them are right but each has zoomed in on a different thing and extracted a different meaning.

It’s a bit like art, really. Once the artist puts their work in the public sphere they lose control over its interpretation and any artist who gets upset that their intended meaning is ignored or edited by the viewer is never going to be happy. The viewer comes to the piece with their personal baggage and zooms in on the aspect that resonates best with that baggage. Hopefully it’ll add to their conception of the world and take them in interesting new directions but unless their baggage matches the artist’s completely they’re unlikely to “get it right” especially on the first viewing.

The same, I think, applies to the reading of news articles and always has done. The difference is that online the reader has the ability to comment, to pull out the bit they resonate with and mark it.

Am I right? Is there some research that backs up or refutes this? The comments are yours…

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.

Let’s start of with a graph. Cos you know I love a nice power law distribution graph.

Here’s how The Media traditionally works:

On the far left you’ve got the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the people who can afford to advertise in their media. Not many of them and a lot of reach. And on the right you’ve got everyone else with the theoretical ability to publish media but not much reach. Media’s an easy one but you could also apply this to knowledge – tenured academics have resources that the rest of us don’t. But let’s stick with media.

As old media outlets are weakened thanks to technological change something has to fill that vacuum. Surely a new business model will emerge and while the old companies might not be at that far left someone will be and the graph will pretty much look the same.

But in this new world everyone on the right is publishing much more than they were and even if their reach is low it’s still significant in aggregate. A billion five minutes videos getting 10 views is 50 billion minutes of attention that the big players aren’t getting. So while the power law distribution is still in play it’s shifted somewhat.

It’s at this point that my thoughts turned to yurts. I think the future of media distribution looks a little like this:

Bear with me on this one…

Originally I was thinking the media distribution currently looks like like a teepee but when I looked at photos of a teepee it didn’t seem right. What I actually had in mind was more of a volcano like this:

(That’s the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines.)

If you chop the photo in half you get the power law distribution graph:

Well, sort of. But you get the idea. Now, let’s superimpose the yurt on to the volcano and stick some numbers on it.

At point 1 you’ve got the kings of all media. They’re still the ones with the most reach. But the fall off from them isn’t so steep. Those at point 2 have increased their reach a bit while those at point 3 have increased their reach at lot meaning the difference in reach between 1 and 3 isn’t as great as it was.

I threw in point 4 as an afterthought but it’s actually really important. 2 and 3 have increased their power and influence at the expense of 1 through adoption of what we currently call social media but those at 4 aren’t using this stuff so have stayed where they were, only instead of a slope up to the top there’s a sudden, sharp incline. Obviously this is only there because I superimposed a photo of a yurt on a volcano but fits current thinking about the digital divide and needs to be considered when thinking about these things.

So that’s my Yurtification theory. In short, the pyramid will be softened, Mongolian style.