cybersoc.com

glocal 2.0 day two: dragan varagic on tracking balkan blogs

  Dragan Varagic is describing the Balkan blogosphere at (g)local 2.0: "In Serbia there are maybe 20,000 bloggers... maybe 50 who are very good bloggers."

The most popular of these blogs websites in the Balkans can have as many as 150,000 visitors per day. [Added Correction: Dragan informs me that he was quoting figures for websites, not blogs. Blogs, he tells me, can get as many as 1500 visitors per day.]  There are busy blogs and influential blogs, according to Varagic, and they aren't necessarily the same.

Dragan's presentation walks us through all the different blog tracking and ranking tools - technorati, alexa, bloglines, google blog searches for links, linkhounds, Brendan Cooper's PR Index, etc - most of which he says are indicative of traffic and influence but none of which are able to give the entire picture on their own. Who is visiting is also important.

Based on Technorati rank alone (approx 92,000) the most influential blog in the Balkans is Borja.org. Dragan's own blog is 6th. But in Dragan's opinion, and he's a leading regional expert in blog tracking, the "most influential" blog in Serbia is probably mooshema, which ranks 3rd out of Balkan blogs on technorati. What I find most interesting about Dragan's research is that although some Balkan blogs are getting large numbers of visitors, they aren't getting very many inbound links - so even the top blogs would rank way behind cybersoc.com.

Paul Bradshaw, who contributed to (g)local 2.0 yesterday via Seesmic, has been doing his own research on the leading UK Journo Blogs. Cybersoc appears in the top five on each of the different rankings he's Paul's looked at - technorati, page rank, alexa, google results and "blog authority", a combination of Alexa and PageRank.

Varagic ends his presentation by saying that metrics related to number of links aren't so relevant, but their combination can give us some answers. The lack of standardised measurement techniques is a problem but by combining the use of different buzz tracking tools and techniques, you can start to understand where particular blogs sit amongst their peers. He says that the key to becoming more visible online is "to know who influence the influencers" to become more visible.

Stats p0rn is useful if PR or Search Engine Optomisation are you're business - as they are for Varagic - and it's kind of fun for us Journo Bloggers to see how we're doing within our peer group, but I'm still quite skeptical of validity or usefulness of this type of information for most bloggers. Personally, I'd prefer to have a small number of highly engaged regular readers who take what they see here and do things with it than thousands of visitors and thousands of random links.

[You can track blog posts, flickr uploads and tweets from (g)local 2.0 using this buzz tracking pipe. ]

glocal 2.0 - skopje, macedonia

  glocal 2.0 - Skopje, Macedonia 
  Originally uploaded by robinhamman

I'm done giving my keynote at (g)local 2.0 in Skopje, Macedonia. I'll upload my notes later but you can find my slides on flickr already. Paul Bradshaw also contributed to the early morning session via seesmic video from the UK - check it out, he makes some good points about creating a distributed web presence by turning processes into content.

Niels Hendriks from Limburg University is giving a presentation about HasseltLokaal, a local citizen journalism project in Linburg, a small city in a largely agricultural area of Belgium. Concentra, the newspaper partner for the project, has always had a focus on region communities - in 1955, Frans Theelen said it should not be a newspaper title, but a programe for the people of the province - eg. community journalism.

The project gets 2200 visits a day, have 30 voluneers and 30 organisations who publish around 7 pieces of content per day. Their policy has been to publish everything, afterall it's tagline was "news for, by and about the people". For contributors it usually starts slowly, publishing text or photos about an event they'd seen. They held workshops to try to help people create more creative content.

One of the problems they had was with contributors wanting contributor cards but then, when given them, abusing those cards by, for example, having a meal then showing the card for a free dessert prior to writing their review.

The project was initiated by the Research and Development department - the IT people at the newspaper group. The journalists didn't respond well, with some feeling their professional status was being threatened,  and the project's leaders couldn't find a viable business model. Moderation was costly, funding ran out. Experiments with advertising to keep the project going put them in conflict with the marketing department. BUT, the project did help increase the paper's willingness to accept articles and photos from readers. So some conclusions:

* each individual needs some identification with the brand ( "let them be proud" )
* find correct balance between empowering and empowering citizen journalists
* not every individual has enough self confidence to contribute
* find room for experimentation within traditional media organisations

I've created an aggregation to help track the conference backchannel.

The source is here (and you can subscribe via RSS). If you're not used to pipes, make sure you click on the list tab to see all the content it pulls up - http://pipes.yahoo.com/cybersoc/glocal20

forget trying to be a one-stop-shop, be the hub of the network

I'm often astonished to come across - still - the occasional journalist or editor who thinks that linking out from a news story or other page to third party content is counterproductive because, in their minds, it simply sends traffic away.

I suppose, on the face of things, that makes sense but there is value, in fact there is enormous value, in making the link and anyone who denies this need only look at the commercial success of Google for evidence that sending users away, quickly and directly, to what they want does make business sense. Google does this through an automated process. Content producers, including news and media websites, can do it better because they can apply editorial skills to the process.

No website can provide everything it's users are likely to want but, increasingly, niche sites are popping up that cater to very specific interests, or focus upon narrow topics at a level of detail that most traditional media and news organisations can't do. Audiences who come to your site looking for this content need to find it or they'll go somewhere else the next time their looking for it. This is where editorialised links come in. Don't just let your audiences slip away, provide the link that gets them - quickly - to the most relevant content and they'll remember your site as being the best route to that content.

This morning I came across a post by Rich Gordon on the Readership Institute blog at Northwestern University. He argues very much the same:

"My colleague Limor Peer suggests newspapers should work harder at making their Web sites into destinations. But newspapers have been trying to build Web destinations for more than a decade now, with little real success. Maybe it's not a matter of poor execution -- maybe it's the strategy that's wrong.

I'm going to suggest a different approach: Instead of trying to build the best destination, build the best network.

The kind of network I'm referring to is a web of interconnections -- links between content and between people. In essence, I'm arguing that on the Web, news organizations -- perhaps, all media -- should focus on building themselves "into the clickstream." The goal: make your Web site a network hub that connects content and conversations."

Gordon  provides a bullet point list of ways for websites to become "Mavens and Connectors". His list includes:

• link out -- alot
• link, especially, to blogs
• link in -- to related content of your own
• open up the archives
• use web technologies intelligently
• cultivate conversations about your content
• distribute your content widely
• partner with portals
• build your own social networks
• encourage use of ranking/rating sites
• build shortcuts across the web

The original post provides far more detail on each of these points and is well worth a read.

conference announcements: manchester, skopje & nimes

Three potentially interesting conferences coming up in the first half of next year, with paper submissions in Dec 07 / Jan 08. I'm likely to be speaking at the event in Skopje.

Futuresonic 2008: The Social - Online, Mobile and Unplugged Social Networking (Part of the Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas)
1-4 May 2008 (Submissions by 18 Dec 2007 - please verify via website)
Manchester, UK
http://www.futuresonic.com/

(G)local 2.0 - Blogging: Evolution Treated as Revolution
May 8-10, 2008 (Abstracts by 23 Dec 2007 - please verify via website)
New York University Skopje
Skopje, Republic of Macedonia
http://glocalconference.wordpress.com/

CATaC08: ICTs Bridging Cultures? Theories, Obstacles, Best Practices (6th International Conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication)
24-27 June 2008 (Submissions by 14 Jan 2008 - please verify via website)
Universite de Nîmes, France
http://www.catacconference.org

journalism, social media and blogging: presentation at cardiff university

  kitbag for Cardiff trip 
  Originally uploaded by robinhamman

If you're close to Cardiff University on Wednesday you might be able to catch me giving a presentation at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (Bute Building) from 1-2pm.

I'm also conducting a blogging workshop from 2.30-4pm.

It's open to journalism students, faculty and good blaggers who can get past the door (not that I would recommend such things).

My dopplr contacts knew about this a few weeks ago - apologies if you would have liked to have come but didn't hear about it until it was too late.

video from netj forum: jay rosen assignment zero

In March 2007, Jay Rosen helped launch Assignment Zero, a networked journalism experiment that got a bit of help from Wired.com. He posted his review of that project last night on his blog PressThink and has just walked the audience here at the Networked Journalism Forum through his seven main points of learning from the experiment:

howard rheingold & mark earl @ nesta

I'm at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) office in London where Howard Rheingold (who I've known online for many years and have had the pleasure of meeting, and interviewing, on a number of occasions) has just taken the stage to give a presentation about "mass collaboration".

Howard, who has authored a number of influential books about human uses of technology including Virtual Community and Smart Mobs, is currently a visiting professor at a number of universities (non-residential fellow at USC's Annenberg Center for Communication; visiting professor at DeMontfort University (Leicester, UK) and Lecturer at Stanford University) sees a new pattern emerging - one where, instead of competition, in many areas of life people and groups are starting to work in collaborative ways.

Howard said this observation came to him as he was writing Smart Mobs and he's continued thinking about it ever since, collecting instances of it through the Smart Mobs group blog.

"Science, for thousands of years, had dependended on independent geniuses to come along... they can report and publish and others can build on it... I think you can make the case that the first virtual community came from this spread (of Protestant printed works)..."

"Capitalism as we know it came from... the diffusion of inexpensive pamphlets... the idea of limited liability... stock corporations.... these were all ways that people, literate people, could do transactions with each other. They'd not had the instruments to do this before..."

Rheingold then introduces three mythic narratives - the social dilemmas:

• The Prisoner's Dilemma
• The Tragedy of the Commons
• Public Goods

Tragedy of the commons: every shepherd is going to graze as many sheep as he can and without some strong external authority, humans are doomed to deplete and despoil resources... Ostrom looked at this and found that, although true in many instances, there are incidents of sharing and collectivity. Ostrom identified a number of common aspects to successful arrangments of collectivity including clearly defined boundaries, monitoring, dispute mechanisms, etc.

There are, of course, lots of examples of people doing things collaboratively - Seti@Home, Wikipedia, even Amazon Associates and Google Adsense.

What do technologies that help people work together collaboratively have in common? According to Rheingold, they're all:

• Easy to use
• Enable connections
• Open
• Group forming
• Self-instructing
• Leverage self-interest

You can see a map of these technologies, the ideas behind them, and how they might be useful for collaboration at cooperationcommons.com as well as on flickr.

Next up is Mark Earls, a former ad man, and author of Herd. He talks about Ubuntu, an African idea about "working together". The fundamental strategy of primates was, according to Earls, being part of the group. Robin Dunbar research, the "Super Social Ape" (see R Dunbar: Grooming, Gossip and the birth of Language), where he found that the size of the neo-cortex of different apes and primates corresponded with the size of group they successfully lived in.

I had a look at Earl's blog and found this nice quote:

Just a word from someone much wiser than me, Gandhi, the founder of Modern India.

"Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being."

In his talk, Earls makes a passionate argument as humans as a social creature - the ultimate social creature - and says our success is dependent upon this. What are the cornerstones of our existence as social creatures?

• Copying: We start at birth and keep using copying as a strategy, every day of our lives. Fashion is an example of this. Earls says Amazon has 16 "social features" on every item in their catalogue that help people to copy other's behaviour and drives sales.
• Belonging: Being with other people (eg. relationships) is what life is all about. People want to be a part of something and Earls says this is what drove the outpouring of shock following the death of Diana; it's also what makes people join singing in a football stadium.
• We love doing things together: "If you want to get people to do things, you need to facilitate it." Earl's example is Nike's Run London.

The really exciting truth about who we are is that we are, according to Earls, social creatures rather than individuals... and embracing this model is a lot more fun.

Nico has been sitting next to me, banging away on his Treo, so I reckon he'll have more soon...

bbc+universities launch 8 studies on user generated content & audiences

As blogged earlier today by the Guardian's Jemima Kiss, the BBC has teamed up with research teams from a number of UK universities to launch eight studies looking at user generated content, audiences, and social learning through virtual worlds:

"The BBC has announced a major academic research scheme that will inform its future media and technology strategy, partnering with the Arts and Humanities Research Council on eight projects exploring user content, immersive worlds and digital storytelling.

The Knowledge Exchange Project is jointly funded by the BBC's Future Media & Technology department and the AHRC, providing £500,000 for the projects that will enable researchers to collaborate with BBC staff.

Eight proposals were chosen earlier this year and begin in the next few months. All of those focus in some way on viewer and listener engagement, and the development and impact of digital services."

I'm pleased to announce that £90k (USD $180k) of that funding will be going to a partnership between my department and the University of Cardiff to investigate the BBC's calls to action for audience contributed stories, comments, photographs and video - the stuff formerly known as user generated content.

We had our first face to face planning meeting in Cardiff two weeks ago and, in a move we hope will bring new voices into the discussions we have as research is underway, intend to blog the project from start to finish. Link coming soon...

slides of jyri engestrom's presentation @ nmkforum

Jyri Engestrom's thoughtful presentation at the NMK Forum in London two days ago was, for me at least, the most insightful presentation of the day.

Luckily, I'd recently heard Lee Bryant mention Jyri and, as Lee usually gives a good turn himself, figured that Engestrom's presentation was worth swivelling my mac around and switching on the isight camera. I'm glad I did.

Now several people have drawn my attention to Jyri's slides which he has made available on slideshare:

I was so impressed with Jyri's presentation that I can't help but try his service, Jaiku, that appears to have bits and pieces of the functionality found in plazes, dopplr and twitter. Expect one of my usual reviews of Jaiku once I've had the chance to bed in a bit with it.

(By the way, I've added the tag "academic studies" to this post because Jyri's social science background ensures that there is plenty of theory to grasp hold of in the presentation. I can't believe he started with an apology for that!)

debate on virginia tech coverage

I'm at a debate organised by the BBC College of Journalism to discuss how the Virginia Tech shootings were covered by mainstream media, particularly in America. The email about the event says the following will be covered:

The Cho Seung-hui video - was NBC right to broadcast it
and how the American public has reacted to the channel since.

Using footage filmed by students as the shootings took place.

controversy caused by journalists, using online diaries and blogs, to
contact friends and relatives of those caught up in the shootings. Can the internet ever be considered private?

We kick off with a presentation by Professor Joe Foote, the head of Journalism and Communication University of Oklahoma, who discusses how the Virginia Tech shootings were covered by mainstream media, particularly in America.

He says that, whenever an incident like this occurs, the institution where it happens - in this instance Virginia Tech - often finds itself in a state of crisis without sufficient plans to deal with it. When the first shooting happened, the small security service found themselves over stretched. When the massacre began a few hours later, they were simply overwhelmed. And it wasn't just the security, it was also the administration of the university who suddenly found themselves within the media gaze.

It isn't just security and the administration that is under pressure at these moments - mainstream media is too. Joe Foote says:

"A very small minority of people contribute to journalism, but everyone is a critic. And they are going to look at everything you do from the first hour - why didn't you [do this or do that]... and they aren't just critics in their own right, they are sharing their criticism internationally and that's one of the biggest changes in Journalism in years... now news organisations need [to understand how they will deal with this scrutiny before it happens..." [brackets indicate paraphrased passages]

Foote then talks about an incident at the university where he teaches involving the apparent suicide of a student. The news media reported on what the University and FBI told them, that it was a suicide, but blogs were reporting that the student was trying to blow up a football stadium holding 90,000 people and couldn't. The blogs also reported that the student had recently converted to Islam and had a one way ticket to Libya. For days the mainstream media reports continued to say it was a suicide, but all over the world people knew what the blogs were saying - everyone seemed to know "the truth" from the blogs.

So what do you do, as a journalist under attack because people think you are hiding the facts? The credibility of mainstream media is under attack... "everyone in the room knew what was happening, but not a single journalist would say it"

"What," Foote asks, "would you do?"

In this instance, a journalist broke ranks and told the story. "Of course, it was long after it became a news story, that it got sorted out... the bottom line is that the majority of the news organisations were there, getting beat up...[but, it turns out] the blogs were all wrong. All wrong." The ticket wasn't his and there was no evidence he'd tried to get into the stadium.

"That's the kind of thing that could happen to you... I think there is going to be enormous pressure from outside sources... that these rumours have truths... that the audience will have already pieced things together and think they know the story before you (mainstream media)..."

Foote's point? That mainstream media organisations need to know how they are going to deal with this enormous pressure to tell the story that the bloggers and others "already know" instead of doing our due diligence on the story and ensuring that we report just the facts.

David Hayward, of the BBC College of Journalism, asks Foote his views on NBC's decision to show the Cho Seung-hui video and points out that most of the journalists and editors he's spoken to would have shown it, but audience members wouldn't have. Foote responds that, had NBC not shown it, the conspiracy theorists would have seized strongly upon that - which is a compelling reason to show it. The problem, Foote says, wasn't so much the decision to show the video, but the way it was shown over and over. (And later he pointed out the way the video was advertised and the tragedy was labelled "bloodbath at Blacksburg", etc etc)

[I'll update with more if more relevant discussion takes place]

Sometime later...

Someone asks about "digital doorstepping": Foote responds saying that, when he was a journalist thirty years ago, when something happened they'd get the phone book out and ring the person up for comment. "I don't see anything different about a journalist going to a face book page and taking something from there because it's been deliberately published and shared..."

Foote also thinks that there are new specialisations appearing within journalism:

"There are new careers in journalism developing... who don't seek out new original information, but try to take secondary sources and try to validate it... There was [in the past] the assumption that you had a reporter [who did it all]... now you have people whose full time job might be to verify the credibility of content..."

Foote makes his final point: "I'm surprised that news consumers aren't able to discern a quality news product... [he gives example of consumers understanding the value of a shoe before buying it]... but in the US, you've got the same news anchors at the front, but behind them you've got something of neglible value... [and no one is complaining about the lowering of quality]"