• We’re not really having a conversation online with people.
• We post stuff on our blog / Twitter / Facebook page but it just seems to go into the ether.
• We ask questions of our audience but no-one answers.
• etc.

It’s a tricky one but I think I might have found an answer. Bear with me as I spend a few hundred words getting to the point as usual.

Image source

A few months ago I came across a group blog called Clusterflock and it quickly became one of those blogs I keep around in case I run out of things to read or when insomnia strikes. But there was something different about Clusterflock compared to the other rivers-of-stuff blogs I keep around the place. The Daily What is a great digest of Internet culture but it feels like a magazine or television channel. Here’s a bunch of things we’ve prepared for you to consume. Clusterflock, on the other hand, is like finding yourself sitting at a table with a bunch of people who are telling stories and sharing stuff. Strangers are welcome but you get the feeling they’ve known each other for a while. There’s in-jokes and things you think might be in-jokes but you can’t be sure and other potentially alienating phenomena that usually gets groups labeled as cliques, and yet I found myself drawn to it.

I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about this blog that I like. Sure, the stuff that’s posted crosses over with my interests and aesthetics – these seem, on the surface, to be my kinds of people, but there was something else. And then it struck me.

They’re not addressing an audience. They’re addressing the group. It’s not a broadcast model. It’s a group discussion that happens to be public.

It’s surprising how linear people’s attitude to online activity has become. Maybe it’s because the great “crowdsourcing” experiments didn’t really pan out but stuff seems to be very being publisher – audience driven right now. There are authors and there are commenters and there’s not much else going on. There’s nothing wrong with this per-se (my blogging is very soapbox-oriented, as you might have noticed) but it’s very one way.

What’s intriguing about Clusterflock is the contributors are talking to each other. The people in the comments are frequently other contributors and if they’re not they can use the Christopher Walken account to post.

Everyone is an equal at the table, if they want to be. You know what this reminds me of? Metafilter, the granddaddy of community blogs. Or, if you prefer, a forum.

No-one recommends a forum these days. The memories of empty phpBB boards with two welcome posts and no activity whatsoever are too raw. But the forum model is still an interesting one even if the tools can be a little all or nothing. It’s a level playing field with a low barrier to entry where the the community is in charge.

So, how can you use this newfound knowledge to solve your social media woes? How do you build a community that shares amongst itself and welcomes newcomers? My answer would be you don’t build a community. You take the community you already have – yourselves.

I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and pick on a real world example. We Are Eastside is a campaign to unify and promote various arts and culture businesses that reside in the Eastside/Digbeth area of Birmingham. I’ve worked with a fair number of the organisations involved and care what happens culturally in that area. I think the We Are Eastside notion is a good one. Most of these people and organisations are friendly with each other and working towards similar goals. It makes sense to create some sort of loose collective and punch their collective weight. The We Are Eastside booklet was a lovely thing giving a great snapshot of activity in the city most would be unaware of. The blog, however, has been a bit of letdown.

The diagnosis from this blog doctor is clear. The contributors, if they post at all, merely post press releases or duplicate their own blogs. The former, frankly, is a crime while the latter begs the question, what is this blog for? Is it just an aggregator? A Google News for Eastside? There’s nothing wrong with that of course and it might be neat to see a cleverly aggregated snapshot of the news from that district. But it’s not very interesting.

Howabout this. The blog is where the participating organisations share things with each other. In public. And have a conversation about them. In public. No press releases, no commissioned pieces, no duplicating blog content, just things of mutual interest.

Obviously this is easier said than done. People who’ve spent years seeing media as a one-way tool to can be uncomfortable having conversations about their businesses in public and some of the organisations (naming no names) might not be fit for such as challenge. Above all, there has to be need for this. It needs to solve a problem even if that problem is something as simple as “we don’t chat as much as we should”. Often it’s the simple things that create the bonds of community after all.

So let’s say there’s a need for a site where the various cultural and creative companies of Eastside can post anything they think is of interest to the others. And let’s say it’s a success. What benefit does it have to the bottom line? (I’m assuming that We Are Eastside got City Council support to increase the economic development of the area.)

Firstly there’s the obvious advantage of having businesses in the same sector connecting with each other, sharing resources and discussing them. This raises the intellectual capital and promotes collaboration and so on.

Secondly it demonstrates activity. People often say that walking around the Custard Factory complex you have no idea what’s happening in those offices and converted warehouses. This is a way of lifting the veil to all manner of people. Businesses looking to move to the area, customers looking for new suppliers, suppliers looking for new customers, people wondering what’s going on in the city.

Thirdly it’s a way of engaging with the audience on a level playing field. Remember Clusterflock’s Christopher Walken account which anyone in the world can use? Have a similar function where people who aren’t established on the scene can get involved. Sure, put in place moderation as required but set the tone yourselves first. Demonstrate what this space is for by using it in that way. Lead by example.

It’s never easy to throw a new form of communication onto an existing network, especially one as complex as a group of companies who happen to share a business classification and geographic location. The reason I picked We Are Eastside was because it’s a challenge and I’m not sure getting that bunch to run a group blog on top of everything else they’re doing is a reasonable request.

But it could also apply to a smaller group. Let’s say you’ve got 5 or 6 people in the office, a couple more on the road and a handful of freelancers. Would something like Clusterflock work for you?

I sublet a desk from Substrakt and have been keeping an eye on their company blog. As I understand it all of the team have to write for it as part of their job and what they write tends to be of a high quality. I can see why this post is a good thing – it shows them to be experts in their field and contributes to the developer community. Should this post become a valuable resource it will bring much Google traffic. But it’s very one way. It’d be interesting to read it as a discussion between Lee and Mark with space for others to get involved. Whether that would be as effective in promoting the company as the articles is debatable, mind you, but if you’re not in the position to produce a blog of the caliber of Substrakt then it’s something to consider.

“It’s all about the conversation” we say. And yet we build online platforms that look like this:

Source

forgetting the conversations tend to look more like this:

Photo credit

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If Ping, Apple’s new music social network, is a raging success then I’ll eat my hat. It might survive as a niche for those who live all their lives within the Apple ecosystem but I seriously doubt it’ll be adopted by a significant number of the 160 million iTunes users cited by Steve Jobs.

This isn’t because it’s a bad thing. It looks like a decent mix of Last.FM and Facebook neatly integrated into people’s music listening systems. The problem I’m seeing is that’s about it. It’s a functional thing that doesn’t appear to do much else.

Now, I’m aware that I’m judging this after playing with it for 30 seconds and that it took about 6 months for me to figure out what Twitter was for. But I now know what Twitter is for – it’s not for anything. Same with Facebook – ostensibly it’s to “connect and share with the people in your life” which is as vague as vague can be.

When a platform is for nothing in particular then it’s for everything you can think of. It seems to me that either your good at a niche activity or you’re good at integrating an abundance of niche activities. You can’t be both.

But all that aside this was the blast from the past that showed me Ping wasn’t there.

There are many ways this could work. At it’s most basic an integration into the OSX address book would be handy but that’s just a shortcut. More useful would be some kind of integration into Twitter or Facebook accounts, not to post annoying “@peteashton has just listened to Lady Gaga!” messages but to find out what my actual social network is listening to. These are the people I’ve built a relationship with and whose music tastes I don’t have access to. Smurshing these two datasets together would be awesome.

But no, Apple isn’t going to do that anytime soon. They need to own it all.

The approach to Ping is similar to Apple’s approach to Adobe Flash. They don’t like it because they don’t control it. Here’s Steve Jobs (quoted by John Gruber) from his notorious “Thoughts on Flash.”

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Let’s say Ping is integrated into Twitter and Facebook and some other social networks in a useful and interesting way. And then let’s say Twitter goes bankrupt or Facebook radically changes how it works without any warning. Ping is suddenly missing some seriously important vital organs and there’s nothing Apple can do about it. Twitter and Facebook don’t care what happens to Ping – only Apple does.

This might be a silly approach to building a social app in this era of interoperability but it fits with Apple’s culture. Either they can control it or they don’t want anything to do with it because if it breaks they’ll get the blame. (You can see this happen when Twitter flakes out and people blame Tweetdeck or some other 3rd party client for being rubbish instead of the source.)

I can sympathise with Apple’s position here. Latching on to Facebook or Twitter’s infrastructure is a risky proposition because they are closed platforms out of your control. If social networks were run on open standards then I’m sure Apple would be right in there just as they are with HTML5 over Flash. Their mantra is either we control it or no-one controls it and it’s a healthy attitude. Unfortunately the social Internet hasn’t matured to that state yet.

Stopping looking isn’t a crime. If you’re trying to actually do something drawing a line in your explorations is a good way to start. But if you’re in the business of media in the current era when anyone can create a media platform in seconds you should always be aware of your limitations.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last year. When Twitter first broke out in the UK I could have confidently told you how it was being used because I was part of the relatively small community that was using it. As Twitter adoption grew my knowledge changed. I could no longer tell you how people were using it because the number of uses were becoming huge. All I could do was help you understand the nature of the Twitter model.

It’s probably best to think of engagement through Twitter in terms of slices. I give Twitter some variables (these are the people I want to follow / this is the search query I have) and, after adding some more variables (these are the people who have mentioned you) it returns a slice of Twitter based on who’s posted recently. This slice is pretty much unique to me. The connection is has with other people’s slices is merely how much it overlaps (mutual followers, etc) and these connections will shift and change over time.

Watching people I feel I know well use Twitter can be fascinating. Because their slice is different their whole perception of Twitter is different to mine, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. I don’t want to play down the importance of the overlaps – they are the glue thats makes Twitter work – but I think the differences are often under-appreciated by those who celebrate the power Twitter has to bring people together. It’s these these effectively infinite differences between the slices that enable messages, ideas and links to thinks to spread across the network so quickly and effectively.

The other great thing about the Twitter model is it’s a good way of understanding how the Internet works. One of the great early works about the Internet was David Weinberger‘s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s a very seductive phrase and one that I’ve returned to again and again over the last decade as it seems to be the fundamental difference between old media and new. But it also seems to me to be an accurate reflection on how society works.

In other words, what we’re seeing as a digital phenomena is more like the normal way of things. When Weinberger says in his introduction:

Then we go on the Web, and the pieces are so loosely joined that frequently the links don’t work. [...] But, that’s ok because the Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets. And, most important, the Web is binding not just pages but us human beings in new ways. We are the true “small pieces” of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing.

I’d say yes, that’s true, but what’s also happening is we’re rediscovering the power of that loose joining that our great-grandparents knew well.

Maybe.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But it makes sense to me. Big media is only 3 or 4 generations old and something must have held society together before then.

My motivation for writing this post came from a couple of posts. The first by hyperlocal guru Will Perrin about the Shott review of economics of Local Television where he argues “For me the overarching question is why do local video programming on TV rather than the internet? The internet does almost everything that small audience local TV can do but far cheaper and more flexibly.”

The second is a followup from social media for social good hero Nick Booth where he asks his network What would you show from Birmingham to demonstrate how the web can do local better than local tv? Now, I think I know what Nick’s trying to do here but I think he’s falling into the trap that appears whenever this sort of thing is discussed. It is very hard, if not impossible, to do x=y comparisons between big media models and the way the social internet operates.

He asks “if he were to come to Birmingham who could [Secretary of State] Jeremy Hunt meet and what locally grown bottom up Big Society media goodness could we show him to help demonstrate an alternative beyond Local TV?”

The implication being that what we have in Birmingham is a viable alternative in scope and reach to that put out by a local television station. And, as Dave Harte points out in the comments, it doesn’t quite measure up.

Overall, I can’t help feeling that even with all the sites mentioned there isn’t really much here that yet adds up to a viable local media scene.

No, it doesn’t. And that’s not to detract from any of the efforts out there because, with some exceptions, I don’t think they’re trying to be part of a vibrant local media scene. Either their not capable or they’re not interested or they have another agenda for doing what they do.

But there’s a more fundamental point. These sites Nick rolls out are, I think, aberrations. While they might be distinct from big media models they still share more with them than we might like to admit. If we’re talking about a media landscape it’s a bit like Houston (where my Dad used to live and which I’ve visited a few times).

This is Downtown Houston.

It’s about a mile across and contains lots of big tall buildings. It’s the skyline that Houston is known by.

pic by telwink

But Houston as a whole doesn’t look like that. I picked Houston because when I visited it I was struck be how spread out everything is. Land is relatively cheap in Houston and the motor car rules so the city sprawls in a way that boggles the mind of this walk-everywhere Brit. Here’s Houston as a whole with the Downtown bit marked in red.

And from the side:

pic by Jason McELweenie

This idea of a effectively infinite space housing a sprawl of relatively small buildings is what I perceive Birmingham’s local online media scene to be like. Sure, there are some striking things in the middle there which many people will point to as a shortcut, and yes they are impressive and important, but they do not and cannot and should not represent the whole.

The problem for the policy makers is they’re thinking in terms of things they can get their heads around, things that fit into the old models of doing things. There’s this attitude that because a model worked well in the past it’ll work well in the future and so we see bizarre projects like this Local TV thing (something which I’ve only ever seen supported by grey haired people who used to work in local TV back when it was a commercially viable model).

And so the danger for those who are trying to talk to policy makers is falling into the trap of comparing the old and the new within the framework of the old, to give the impression that these new things can fill the gap perceived to be left by the withering old things.

As Jon Bounds said last Spring after talking to a reporter about the decline of local newspapers:

He wanted to talk about whether blogging would “fill the gap” that a demise of local papers would create and kept trying to get us to say that we were waiting and wanting to do it commercially. We’re not. We said so a number of times. In my opinion it would be stupid, we’re already filling gaps and have been for years — the hole that “papers” currently fill isn’t a shape that blogging can be forced into (and papers themselves don’t fill the hole anyway).

There’s a tendency to see the shifts in the media landscape as a fragmentation of what was dominant into lots of smaller pieces. While I like the “smaller pieces” bit I do think the term “fragmentation” is a little misleading. It’s not that services provided by larger media outfits have been devolved – it’s more that the needs that those services were developed to fulfill are being serviced by something else entirely.

And, I would argue, that something will not be easy to identify as an entity. It’s a toolset, sure, and literacy in frictionless sharing environments like Twitter and Facebook are important, but it’s also an attitude, an understanding that this isn’t about using media in a broadcast way. It’s about using media without realising you’re using media.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that people like me make for the worst examples of social media usage. The early adopters and power users are too self-aware, too knowing in what they do online. Dubber calls Twitter “performance conversation” and I’ve been told off for playing games with my followers by posting provocative stuff for kicks. We’re the sort of people who are supposed to be pushing and tickling this stuff to see how it works. Everyone else is just using it, and that makes them a lot more interesting.

I think the examples Nick and his commenters gave are good and important things that are doing important work. I would not want to take anything away from what they’ve achieved. But I do not think presenting stuff like Created in Birmingham and The Stirrer as replicating the services of monolithic media outlets is doing anyone any favours because it’s too easy to say they’re not without addressing the real phenomena. That these online things are the anomalies in a rich tapestry of stuff, most of which which is too small or to temporary to get a handle on.

No-one should try and predict the future but in order to better define the present I’ll have a go. I think things online are going to get more atomised. We’re going to see smaller pieces reaching smaller audiences over smaller periods of time. I think concepts like hyperlocal will be seen as transitional stages between the big and the small where the small is effectively the personal. And I think we’ll see the importance of identity diminish as reputation is spread across networks and becomes a more fluid thing.

(As an aside I think Tumblr is a fascinating example of this and something I want to study in more depth)

In short I think the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole.

And I think this will be a good thing.

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Paperchase

Nancy Smallwood complains about sexist promotional material in the shop window and is replied to by the Marketing Director of the company, Robert Warden, in a manner which Nancy describes as “patronizing, rude [and] unprofessional”.

Without getting into the debate itself (which, as Nancy says in an update to her post, isn’t what she’s really upset about), or taking sides on who’s right or wrong here I must say I found the exchange quite refreshing.

We’re used to corporations either hiding behind faux-apologetic customer-is-always-right lies or heavy handed legal speak so to have someone high up in the company stand up and say “I have sufficient faith in what my team is doing that I will shout you down” comes as a bit of a shock.

Yes, his manner is obnoxious and no, I wouldn’t advise anyone to address their customers like this but I think we should be celebrating that this discussion is happening in an unmediated, human-voiced way.

National Theatre

The other day some Evening Standard hack quoted Steve Norris saying nasty things about the National Theatre. “I think the National Theatre should have a Compulsory Demolition Order!” he japed. In response to which whoever was controlling their Twitter account posted:

The subsequent panic is nicely documented by Megan Vaughan but in short they deleted the tweet (logical) and claimed they’d been hacked (laughably absurd).

Was the tweet malicious? Was it a private message accidentally broadcast? We’ll never know. But what we do know is that people who work at the National Theatre feel passionately about their building and the work that goes on inside it. Unfortunately the institution cannot publicly defend itself against attacks from those who might control its funding. Slips like this give us a peek behind the curtain.

Conclusion

Every so often I come across the question of how large companies and institutions can use the social internet. The answer usually boils down to the nature of that organisation. How do they communicate internally and with their customers? Is that communication controlled by the PR department or are people free to speak their minds?

Being one of those annoying free spirits who can say what he wants online I tend towards the opinion that companies should let their people speak their minds (within reason, obviously). If you have enough faith in your offer or product and have employed staff who give a damn and are empowered to make adult decisions then what have you got to loose?

But I also accept that this utopian ideal doesn’t play in the world of corporate PR, which is why I don’t tend to work in that area. (If you need advice in that department my better half runs the blogs for Grant Thornton.)

It’s an interesting phenomena though. As people at the higher levels of companies get more comfortable with communicating through social channels we can expect more unmediated utterances, and as bloops on Twitter become mundane and outrage passe we can expect to see the leash loosened on those corporate tweeters and Facebookers. I’m looking forward to it.

Okay, here’s the tweet I was expecting to see.

Not picking on Digital Maverick as I’m sure the sentiment is being echoed all over. Here’s another which echoes the disquiet people in the West Mids have felt having seen it emerge from our patch.

If you’ve somehow missed it, or are reading this in the future when it’s all been forgotten, a lady threw a cat in a bin, was caught on CCTV which was put online and is currently under police protection as the world goes mad. It’s a nice little perfect media storm as on the one hand it’s really quite odd and on the other it’s really not very odd at all. You can be outraged while also understanding how to be outraged.

(BBC News | Boing Boing)

What I don’t want to do is address the rights and wrongs on throwing cats into bins or posting cctv video online or any of that. What I do want to address is the unease people are rightly feeling at the role social networks and online environments have played in the identification and hounding of this woman.

As with all things to do with The Internet it’s more complicated than you’d like to think, although the world is more complicated than most people would like to think which explains the Daily Mail, but I digress. There’s a reason people like me show pictures like this when we’re talking about the social internet.

It’s to drive home the point that when everyone is potentially connected to everyone else things get very complex indeed. So whenever you think of some simple explanation for why something happened because of the Internet picture that image in you head.

The same applies when someone tells you they can guarantee amazing results using “the power of social media” or some rubbish. They can’t. All they can do is amplify what’s already there by applying tools and strategies in intelligent ways. How successful these are depends on the people in the network and people, if you hadn’t figured it out yet, are complicated and weird.

So you’ve got a complex system connecting complex individuals in a complex world. But there’s more.

One thing we know the social Internet does well is help to amplify human activity. If you’re part of a matured network, whatever platforms it exists on (Twitter and Facebook are just dominant aspects of social activity), information will spread across it much faster than it would have 10 years ago. And since the networks are predominantly bonded through conversation a byproduct of this information is action which in turn is accelerated.

For those who’ve been working with this stuff for a year or more this isn’t news. But the way it’s been communicated has been generally positive. Social Media will help bond communities, boost news dissemination and generally make the world a better place. And, despite my tendency towards misanthropic pessimism I would agree that online social tools can make the world better. People tend to do good things. This is how we’ve developed this thing called society.

But, of course, people also do bad things. And, because good and bad are subject to interpretation and such, people who do bad things often think they’re doing good things. And, of course, some people are just dumb. This also explains the Daily Mail and countless other things that big media exploit and serve, but again I digress.

I’m rambling. In case you’ve forgotten what we’re talking about, here’s a picture.

So, my point. Let’s break it down.

People are complex creatures who work together to achieve mutual goals.

The Internet is a complex system which amplifies human communication and activity.

While the medium does affect and inform the content of the message and the manner in which it is processed (cf anonymity on 4chan) the starting point or source is people. The online/offline difference in environment is analogous to the difference between meeting in a lunchtime cafe or a Friday night bar.

In short, then, social media doesn’t hunt down and demonise people but when people hunt down and demonise people using social media it’s a lot quicker and louder.

The good thing is this sort of phenomena doesn’t happen that often, or at least no on this sort of scale. This was a perfect storm that hit all the right buttons. I mean, the message was communicated via the template of a funny cat video and everyone knows what to do with a funny cat video.

But if you’re of the opinion that “social media” is exclusively a tool for positive, constructive action then you’re going to be horribly, brutally disappointed because we’re talking about people.

As you’ll no doubt be aware, because you’ll all have bought tickets already, I’m taking part in a debate at the MAC this Thursday entitled Social Media and Globalisation with the two Jons, Hickman and Bounds.

The brief was a slightly odd one as it seemed to simultaneously encompass everything and nothing so we’ve decided to use it as a jumping off point for some more interesting discussions about the whole Social Media thing than have maybe been covered at these events before. We’ve been rabbiting on about this stuff for years now so let’s see if we can push the debate forward a bit.

For my part I’m currently planning to talk about Facebook’s march towards being a global utility. I’m interested in how services that emerge on the Internet such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al attempt to mimic the Internet’s global reach without the distributed structure that makes the Internet sustainable.

Rather than take the “Twitter is going to fail” stance, which is kinda lazy (even if I do believe it), I want to compare the success of these services with the success of more traditional global brands. I’m wondering about the trade-off between freedom and ease of use.

Like all the things I’m interested in I don’t have a core argument or position to stand by because I’m still thinking about it. I’d like the audience to help me work out what’s going on here and whether it’s a problem. If you’d like to be part of that audience it’ll cost you £3.

This weekend I was in Huddersfield for a bit of social reporting at the X48 Gamecamp. Social reporting, as I understand it, involves quick and dirty reporting on an event using a variety of platforms (blogging, Twitter, etc) and media (video, audio, photos) while monitoring, extracting and engaging with the conversations that are already happening online.

Like most things this works best when the organisers of the event also get involved but it really helps to have one person who is dedicated to the collection, dissemination and monitoring to pull most of the weight and give those actually running the event the ability to contribute without it getting in the way of their job. At X48 I was that person.

X48 is a marathon computer game coding competition run by Pixel-Lab for Microsoft where about 15 teams of university students have about 27 hours to produce a game for the Xbox platform. As an event it’s potentially not that interesting on the surface. The teams get their theme and then bash out code all night.

But Pixel-Lab need to have something to show from this event, something more than a bunch of games and feedback forms. They need to show that the way they do these things is different and better. Which is where the social reporting comes in, giving a human face to the outside perception of the event. And so they asked me to be their social reporter.

My main tool was the Flip Mino, a relatively cheap video camera with a big red button.

I have an early version of this and I love it for its simplicity. You can’t go wrong with a big red button and the built in USB connector is a real boon. Make the film, whack it in the computer and upload.

My intention was to have everything I filmed edited and uploaded either during the event or within a day of it ending, for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to get it out there when the event was still fresh so that the participants would share it amongst their friends. And secondly I was only on the clock for those two days and didn’t want it bleeding into my other work. The side effect for the client was they also didn’t need to pay me for post-production time, which doesn’t hurt.

In order to achieve this I devised a simple workflow using iMovie on my Mac – a simple top-and-tail with the occasional transition – and used a paid-for Vimeo Plus account for immediate processing and relatively unlimited space. (You could get the same from YouTube but Pixel-Lab prefer Vimeo for some of the additional features)This way footage I took could be online and viewable in about 20 minutes.

All the videos went into the X48 Vimeo group:

Along with this I had the blog on the X48 website to play with. I decided to use the blog posts to gather together the somewhat random stream of videos, photos, tweets and so forth into little packages to give the casual reader something to get a handle on. So here’s a couple of videos of teams discussing amongst themselves and here’s three films of one of the mentors advising the competitors. This stuff is great because it shows the process and the benefits of the event, in this case teamwork and expert advise.

Twitter is, of course, ubiquitous and running the X48 Twitter account was part of the job. This involved relaying important information to the competitors but also keeping the wider community informed of the event. More important, though, was the monitoring of the #x48 hashtag which was gathering various conversations in one place. This gave us another way to measure the mood of the event and, in a practical sense, more media to collect. In this post I gathered the 4am thoughts from a judge and a screen-grab from a team. And post-event people are using the hashtag to flag their reports and reflections, such as this blog post which came from this tweet.

Photography wasn’t part of my remit, which was a relief as I could concentrate on the filming. It was looked after by Pixel-Lab man David Hayward who quickly put them up on Flickr as another resource to be used and shared. David was a handy bridge between myself and the organisers as he was intimately involved with the event but, as far as I could tell, not given a major role. He was the wingman, there to support and troubleshoot. This meant he was able to help me feel part of the event and understand what Pixel-Lab needed, while also producing content of his own to complement mine. And all Pixel-Lab staff had access to the Twitter account. While this did mean it didn’t really have a unified voice and occasionally repeated itself that wasn’t really a big problem given the chaotic nature of the event.

As you’d expect the event got a bit hectic towards the end and I found myself rushing around getting footage of the judges talking to every team. Then the awards happened and it was over, everything was packed up and everyone went home to sleep. I edited down the last videos on the train and uploaded them from home meaning my work was done.

There was still more to do, though – monitoring of the Twitter reactions, searching for blog posts and photos from the participants and other Collective Memory stuff – but Pixel-Lab are more than capable of doing that themselves. What they needed was an extra body during the event itself.

If you need an extra body to do your social reporting, that is something I do. Get in touch.

And meanwhile, here’s a short film I made on Saturday night, filmed during the dinner break and edited immediately after. I call it Seventy Two Pizzas:

Cartoonists and illustrators blogging and using Twitter isn’t at all odd. Most of them work alone and nearly all use computers these days so connecting with their peers online makes a lot of sense. But Neill’s one of the cartoonists who’s been doing some interesting stuff with his blog and Twitter lately. I don’t think he thinks it’s interesting – I think he thinks it’s just stuff he finds fun to do – but I think other artists in all sorts of disciplines could learn something from him.

The first thing to remember is this has all grown out of his blog which he uses to share the by-products of his work. Like most artists he can’t really publish the stuff he’s paid to do – that’s for the client – but he can post rejected versions of work after the fact and stuff he does for fun. (In the latter case it’s interesting to note that a few months after posting what amounts to Doctor Who fan art he’s recently done some paid work for Doctor Who…) Like most cartoonists I know he can’t help drawing so his blog provides an outlet for that.

This June, after a slight lull in his blogging, Neill announced a new project, The A-Z Of Awesomeness

Like all the best ideas it was actually a rip-off of another cartoonist’s project, Garen Ewing’s A-Z of Comic Strip Characters where Garen used a Facebook group to vote on which character he should draw each day and while I could write a whole book on what Garen’s been doing with his online presence to promote his work in this case I think Neil’s is a little more interesting because Garen was mostly preaching to the converted with his A-Z. Neill reached a new audience with his.

It’s worth revisiting how Neill announced the project:

I have been feeling the need lately to just draw some stuff that is fun, for my own amusement. And so I am going to spend the next month doing just that: drawing STUFF that is AWESOME. And the best part is – you get to tell me what.

Basically he’s doing this for a laugh and to recharge his batteries, and he knows that it’ll be more fun if people get involved. He’s not trying to reach an audience of thousands or hit certain demographics. Using the same system as Garen (Facebook group) he asks people for combinations of geeky things he can draw, which soon got out of hand: The Fantastic Four saving the Finnish Ambassador from Fred Flintstone, who’s Flinging Flaming Fajitas at his Ford Fiesta was a particular favourite.

The series started to be collected on the Comics Nexus site which widened his audience and put him on some new radars, one of which was ready to pick up on this:

That’s Joss Whedon. If you’re not aware of him he created Buffy The Vampire Slayer and is the recipient of serious hardcore fandom adoration. The people who like Joss Whedon have a rather popular website – Whedonesque – and this was soon driving traffic Neill’s way.

By the time he’d completed the series he’d amassed a pretty large readership but also some pretty large bandwidth bills due to him hosting the images himself (tip – use Flickr for this sort of thing, ala Laugh Out Loud Cats and Stormtroopers 365, and embed the images in your blog – you’ll double the audience and save yourself a bill) so he made up some posters to sell, copyright be damned. A limited edition of 250, each with a sketch, for £10 each. And he made the high resolution file available to download should anyone want to print their own (sans sketch, obviously).

He sold out pretty quickly.

Any lessons we can learn from this?

Well, the first is that established pop culture icons have a value and if you play with them you can benefit from that, to a certain extent. Neill was flirting with copyright infringement here which is potentially dangerous for a freelancer who works for the companies who would defend that very copyright. But “fan art” has long been part of comic book culture and I’ve never heard of an artist, pro or amateur, being sued for this sort of work. In fact, for all it’s many faults, the US/UK comic industry is made up of fans who understand the culture that supports it. (Slavishly serving this culture might explain the shinkage of said industry, but that’s a post for another blog…) The only problem emerged when Neill came to produce a physical object – the poster – which he’d have to sell. I think the legal loophole here is he was giving it away and charging for the sketch but I wouldn’t like to be sure.

Can other artists do this sort of thing? I think so. “Fandom” has a lot of negative connotations, and rightly so as fans of sci-fi/fantasy stuff can be quite disturbingly odd at times, but I think the basic principles can apply to most fields. Fans are basically people who like a sub-set of culture a lot and are pretty knowledgeable about it.

The chances are you don’t understand why Neill’s A-Z of Awesomeness works. It doesn’t make any sense to you. But you probably have something you’re incredibly nerdy about, be it 20th century abstract painters or Eastenders or Italian horror films or whatever your cultural Specialist Subject on Mastermind might be. And the chances are there are others who are as nerdy about it as you are. And when you talk with those people you make jokes that no-one else gets but which are fricking hilarious, seriously, no really. That’s all Neill has tapped into here – the shared humour of a niche, something Jon Bounds touches on here.

The beauty of the Internet it is allows like-minded people to connect with each other, no matter how obscure their interests. If you find something amusing the chances are there are others out there who also find it amusing. I’m pretty sure than in Oxford, where Neill lives (or did the last time I sent him something by mail…) the people who find his A-Z amusing would fit in a small room. Internationally they’d fill a football stadium. The same applies for whatever makes you smile.

The trick, I think, is whether that bunch of people is connected. Comics nerds are a digitally connected community. Joss Whedon fans are an absurdly connected community. Neill was able to ride those connections with relative ease. How connected are Rothko fans? (genuine question – I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re pretty well connected.) If you’re a painter who loves Rothko could you do something that rides that network?

The thing about the A-Z was it took up a lot of time. As he said in the introduction, he was looking for something to recharge the batteries for a month before moving on to new work so you could think of it as a sabbatical. This means it doesn’t come under my Creating Byproducts definition. His next project does though.

Hashtag Funnies really is a byproduct. Every morning, before he starts work properly, he spends an hour drawing a comic using a trending topic on Twitter as his starting point. He then posts it to Twitter. This is like an athlete sharing their exercises (although this isn’t too far fetched – Dave Harte tweets his daily runs) in that it’s part of the process. He’s not doing any extra work and, if anything, the discipline of producing something good enough to share every day will make his work better.

He doesn’t worry about what the hashtag means (and frankly no-one should worry about what trending topics on Twitter mean) – it just a parlour game. Pick a card and draw a page.

Again, this isn’t anything particularly revolutionary. Artists have been sharing their sketches and practice work for a while now. The difference is Neil has realised he could turn his warm-up into an actual things that people might want to read. (I’m resisting using the word “productize” because it’s not a word, so I won’t.) So far the stats aren’t amazing (47 views for #tellmewhy and 37 views for #chocolatemilk, not including visits to the blog) but that doesn’t really matter. If it finds its audience then great. If it doesn’t then it’s not as waste as Neill would have spent that warm-up hour drawing anyway.

Dave Shelton, another bald male glasses wearing cartoonist I have a lot of time for, has a blog which he posts sketches to. They’re fantastic sketches and I would never want him to stop, but they’re still sketches. For whatever reason Neill Cameron doesn’t post sketches that much – he posts things that are more complete, that have a story or a joke or some hook which make people smile and want to share them.

And that is why I find his online activity interesting.

No other reason.

For more extremely vintage animated gifs, check this resource from circa 1996. For a more contemporary take on this artform, see lovegifs.

So if you need to contact me urgently, um, you can’t.

The next one is on Tuesday 14th at the Old Contemptibles on the corner of Edmund St and Livery Street, just down from Snow Hill Station. Here’s a map and Here’s links to all the info you need on the Paradise Circus blog.

What is Social Media?

You may have picked up hints that I don’t really like the term. It’s vague, no-one really knows what it means and because of that anyone can claim to be a social media consultant potentially putting it in the same dirty corner as Search Engine Optimization (although that industry has cleaned up a lot in the last couple of years). But we appear to be stuck with it, at least until it gets too big and divides into sub-industries, so we’d better figure out a definition, preferably one that doesn’t involve too much jargon.

Here’s a braindump of topics:

• Blogging
• Photo sharing
• YouTube, etc
• Facebook, etc
• Online tools for communication
• Blurring of publishing and conversation
• Metadata rich objects (text, video, photos) on the Internet
• Sharing of information, advice, experiences
• Augmenting the “real world”
• Blurring of offline and online
• Low barrier to entry
• non-hierarchical
• Distributed communities
• Geographic or temporal limitations removed
• Ambient relationships / awareness
• Cats with captions on them

That’ll do for now. The Wikipedia entry for Social Media also has some ideas though there by no means definitive.

So what would you say if someone asked you the question? You have until Sunday evening to collectively produce an answer!

Here’s a talk I would have liked to have gone to this week. Clay Shirky talking and doing a Q&A at the LSE to promote the paperback of Here Comes Everybody. No time to summarise right now (though you can get a sense from Twitter on that day) but take my word for it, well worth a listen.

Download audio file (20090203_1830_hereComesEverybodyHowChangeHappensWhenPeopleComeTogether.mp3)

Download mp3 (42mb).

Photo by Rain Rabbit

The last few weeks have been very useful for me, giving me a bit of distance from everything that’s happening both in the social media world and in Birmingham and a chance to calm down and take stock of what was a pretty crazy, intense but above all fantastic year.

But enough of that. I’m back. I’m answering calls and able to meet up. As usual I’m planning to be around the Custard Factory complex most afternoons and will blurt my location on Twitter. If you fancy meeting up either to talk serious business or for a quick chat over a cuppa about nothing in particular feel free to ping me.

You might be familiar with the Emergent Game, run by Nikki Pugh this summer as part of an arts festival in Birmingham. I was brought in in the early stages for some old fashioned brain storming about what might be possible using social technologies and I blogged about my initial chat with Nikki in February.

As it happened I didn’t have time to fully engage with the Emergent Game when it took place but I watched from a distance with interest. The basic principle was that people played through soft toys they bought in charity shops using Twitter as the core communication service with others added on as needed. Some took photos from their phones, some started blogs but everything was done from the point of view of the toy, or Luden in the terminology of the game. Nikki and her team then set missions which responded to how the game was evolving, which took place in the real world streets of Birmingham.

Within the limited resources and timescale the game was pretty much a success and Nikki is keen to develop it further. She’s taking it to Japan soon, which should be pretty insane given the cultural differences in mobile phone usage, but the really exciting development is an invited to apply to the Banff New Media Institute in Canada to take part in a residency during November. The only stumbling block is funding.

She needs at least £1500 to cover basic costs, asked me for ideas outside the usual arts funding sources and, after a nice chat on Sunday and a recommendation that she blog about her plans, I started thinking about it.

So far Nikki’s been approaching this as an artist, which is what she is, but I think she’s actually doing some fascinating R&D in mobile platforms and how people can and will engage with them. The stuff she’s talking about hooks in perfectly with research and theories about social media, the sort of things that power the “digital revolution” or whatever it’s being called these days. This has relevance to the digital economy which Birmingham is so keen to encourage as well as being of interest to businesses that are looking to move into mobile distribution for their content. Part of the changes to the Birmingham Post and Mail is the development of a mobile site which (in my view) needs to be much more than a simple rejigging of their web site. It would ideally be truly mobile, reacting to where people are and involving them on that level. This is the sort of thing Nikki is investigating with her game.

One of the things Nikki’s planning to develop at Banff is notions of Bridge Objects, “intermediaries between technologies typically found on most mobile phones and more complex functionality provided by web-based applications.” The idea is these objects act as “2-way conduits for the exchange of different media in real-time (i.e. immediate) and in real-space (i.e. related to a location in a physical landscape).” This has been developed by advertisers to a certain degree where people can download information (wallpapers, for example) via bluetooth from advertising boards but the 2-way system is a lot more radical when you plug in geographical data. The application of this sort of thing, both commercially and socially, is rather mindboggling. (Quotes extracted from the draft proposal she sent me.)

I like Nikki. I consider her a friend and want to support what she’s doing, so I have a bias here. But I also think she’s got the right sort of brain to be exploring this stuff and that this is exactly the sort of thing our digital development agencies in the West Midlands should be supporting. I’ve given her contacts at Screen West Midlands (who now cover digital as well as film/TV) and Digital Birmingham and have offered advice on how to move her pitching from Art to Tech but I wouldn’t want to see this opportunity be missed by the region.

Oh, and she’s also a bit of a geek being quite happy to hack WordPress templates and do a bit of coding, a rare trait amongst contemporary artists!

If you can help either directly or just with some advice, please read her blog post and drop her a line. Or drop me a line and I’ll introduce you.