cybersoc.com

broadcast live video online using your mobile phone

Earlier this week I installed an application that turns my mobile phone into a highly portable, live broadcasting device. There are plenty of video sharing services that can accept uploads via mobile phone including youtube, blip.tv, kyte.tv and others. But qik, the service I'm currently alpha testing, does something very different - it allows you stream video live from a 3G phone to the web.

The potential for this is incredible. From now on, every journalist will have the ability to get usable video content on air almost instantly using nothing but a mobile phone that fits easily in their pocket. Activists will be able to stream live from protests. Concert goers can share their front row seats with friends at home.  Privacy concerns aside,  the ability to stream live video from a cameraphone, and for that video to be instantly available around the world via the internet, really is awesome.

Here's what the service looks like online:

And a short video I made showing how the mobile application looks on a Nokia N95 handset:

Click To Play

techpresident: tracking the us presidential candidates use of social media

At last October's Networked Journalism Summit, organised by Jeff Jarvis, I had the pleasure of meeting Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum which is described on their website as a "hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens."

PDF is the organisation behind TechPresident. When I met Micah, he seemed almost surprised when I told him I'm a huge fan. Which I am. I think it's one of the most interesting projects to emerge in the last year.

For the uninitiated, TechPresident tracks the American Presidential candidate's use of technology - in particular blogging, youtube, and social networking - in their campaigns.

There's stats porn aplenty, for example the graph at left which plots the number of facebook friends each candidate has and shows whether that number has risen or fallen in the past week. You'll also find aggregations of candidate blogs.

But what I enjoy most are the original posts by Micah and his team that provide insight into the clever ways some of the candidates are really trying to leverage the capabilities of social media in their campaigns. For example, yesterday's post by Michael Whitney points out a facebook widget developed by the Barack Obama campaign to help users find out which of their friends might be eligible to vote in the important Iowa primaries (today) so that they might remind their friends (and influence) their vote:

With the US Presidential Primaries taking place over the next two months, and the actual election following in the autumn, TechPresident is likely to get a lot more notice in 2008 and I can't wait to see how the site continues to develop.

social impact of the web @ the rsa

I'm one of the half dozen BBC people attending The Social Impact of the Web event today at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) in London.

The central theme is:

"With e-democracy and new forms of on-line consultation and community mobilisation still to become a reality, how can new internet technologies empower us to interact with each other in novel ways?"

The first panel to get a crack at answering this question includes Georgina Henry, Editor, Comment is Free & Editor, The Guardian; Andrew Chadwick from Royal Holloway, University of London; and Tom Steinberg, Founder and Director, mySociety and other projects.

Audio and video streams of the event are available here.

---
Andrew Chadwick

Three things we should celebrate about web 2.0:

Citizen Journalism - 250,000 public comments posted on the Guardian in a month alone (and, quoting Stephen Coleman, the BBC gets over 1 million messages a month)

Little Brother - Discusses Conneticutt Bob... a blogger who followed a candidate around and blogged every moment... "we should really like it" that people can turn the public gaze upon politics and politicians

Low threshold, co-present, co-production online: wikipedia model (with editors and structure), digg (simple vote) and other forms of collective action such as last.fm

Three things we shouldn't celebrate about web 2.0:

The production/consumption divide: Pew study said only 8% were deep users of social media (median age 28), only 7% were connectors. 26% were "indifferent" and/or "disconnected" - and the median age was 64. The vast majority is not producing and the older are more likely to be excluded.

The shift to video: Back in the old days, we spoke about how text only communication broke down barriers (eg. text frees you to be who you are, not who you look like). Is worried that the sound bite politics of today will be put on youtube and will limit deep political discourse.

Social network narcissism: one of the interesting things that people do on bebo, facebook, myspace, etc they are arranged around the idea of socialability. Yet most of the interaction is individualistic. They tell people about themselves on "absolutely bizarre minimalist" sites like twitter - "the greatest manifestation of social network narcissism if I've ever seen one"

---

Georgina Henry:

"If you take a broad view of politics -I like to think of it as what people want to debate, rather than what you want people to debate..."

"My feeling of the web is don't expect too much of it... if you don't expect too much, you won't be disappointed with what it gives you, and then it becomes facinating..."

"I've learned more in a year working on comment is free about the audience than I did in 18 years working on the print side..."

"access to it [writing for comment is free] is an important part of it"

"Whilst I've got quite a dim view of some of the stuff that's posted on the site... [some of it is good]"

"even if you are a journalist who specialising in something for quite some time, there are times when people come along and tell us something we didn't know, which is quite humbling...it throws [named columnists] into this big forum with thousands of other people... the feedback has been quite rewarding for journalists, but quite challenging too..."

"... newspaper sales are going down... the discussion is online and you've got to be there... I think it is a very skewed audience... you need broadband, which isn't universal... tends to be much more male... skewed by people who are often posted in the day, doing the sort of jobs where you can sit at your computer and do this... I never see it as this is life, I see it as this is a slice of life, which doesn't mean you shouldn't engage with it..."

"people who are close to politics [and are asked to blog] can find it a difficult space... you can recieve this barrage of hostility... that has been very difficult for people... it's skewed by anonymous screen names... but it does reflect a bit of the times I think, and you can't blame the internet wholly for that... it's also reflected in the letters for the editor which you don't see because they are edited out... the difference with blogs is that it's there for everyone to see..."

"If you look at political activity in Britain at the moment... people finding it a lot easier are people in opposition... partially because there is cynicism aimed at authority..."

"I don't think its a substitute for all the other forms of political debates, but it's going to absorb more and more of people's time so you've just got to get in there and shape it."

---

Tom Steinberg

The people who make mysociety happen are the coders and people in the background.

A friend sent him an email a few days ago saying he wanted to post on Comment is Free but was worried about doing so. Eventually he did it... Tom says: "There are no winners on comment is free, only losers"

Bloggers and News Media are "accelerators": "for people like me, political junkies, this is just brilliant... it used to be like a drip feed, not it's like a drip feed filled with whisky..."

"News is getting much cheaper...."

"Politicians have known that if they made a mistake [people would find out about it a few hours later]... now they know people will find out about it a lot sooner..."

studies don't seem to show that the internet is bringing new people to politics

"tool-smiths" - people who build tools that make it possible for people to find out who their local politicians are and how to contact them - a Netherlands based voting recommendation service had nearly 5 million users, in a country with about 3 times that in population (a massive percentage)... it's a tool, not a piece of journalism. Or moveon in America that helped mobilise masses of people.... largely driven by web 1.0 email.

the things that the toolsmiths create challenge the way we do things... and because more people will be looking at these tools when they make their voting decisions... theyworkforyou will make it clear not what politicians say, but what they actually vote for, which will - hopefully - represent a challenge to soundbite politics

it is the tools that are transformational

"we built, as a independent contractor, the Number 10 petition site... 25,000 people a day are coming... what I'd like to do is be able to point people to a debate about what happens next... petitions, a very low form of political engagement, can help get people more engaged..."

I've just noticed that Sandy Walkington, a Lib Dem councillor from St. Albans where I live, is sitting in the row in front of me. He runs a few web based campaigns, including one called Hands off Herts which raises awareness of development issues in the county of Hertfordshire.

The second session is on Web 2.0 and Social Innovation

Bronwyn Kunhardt

Quoting Heidegger: "The social character of man is determined by his use of technology"

10 years ago technology was objective, now technology is subjective... "social software"

government, corporations and parents all have problems with Web 2.0 because they tend to think in authoritarian ways

Edelman has released a study showing that bloggers are very connected to their local communities. And there is a study of 14,000 in Australia saying the same thing. We need to pull all this stuff about online social networks doing good into one place...(thus her new venture "social media consensus")

MT Rainey

In 1995 Rainey addressed a News International conference and told them that:

People won't seek out brands and organisations that they have never heard of or that their friends don't use.

There will always be the need for a shared media experience because that has value

Now, she says, the great things about the web - web 2.0 - are that:

ability to share and exchange information with each others
strong viral effect basically mimics the mass media affect... and is arguably more valuable because it's more personal.

breakdown of user/consumer boundaries... information trails... "is turning consumers back into people"... "we express and display nearly all our choices now, and we are people first..."

broadband... price of participation is very low. "Your facebook page can look the same as coke's facebook page"

[Robin Note: Ok, enough. I didn't realise that users of social media were meant to be in competition with coca cola's efforts to market beverages to us via facebook profiles.]

...pitch for some project...web 2.0... "wisdomocracy"... "if google's model is do no evil, our's is no wisdom wasted" ... etc etc... "relieve the health burden and GP visits"... etc etc

Nico Macdonald

"Contrary to the widely held view, technologies in general, and the Web in particular, do not transform society. Society transforms society, and it develops, consciously or unconsciously, tools such as the Web to effect changes, which themselves may be conscious or unconscious. The Web was not developed to transform democracy. It was developed to share scientific research. While many earlier proponents of networked hypertext systems may have had more high-flown hopes for such tools, Tim Berners-Lee had quite pragmatic objectives."

Read his presentation in full (yay!!!) on his blog...

(battery dead... sorry!)

french "anti citizen journalism" law & the case for union recognition for bloggers

The French Constitutional Council has, according to the IDG News Service, "approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday."

Pascal Cohet, spokesperson for the French Civil Liberties group Odebi which has been gathering reports about the law from around the world, points out that under the law, George Holliday, who recorded LA Police beating Rodney King, could have been sentenced to up to 5 years in prison and fined €75,000 (USD $98,537).

The law was proposed by Minister of the Interior and Presidential Candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and was, according to the IDG report, intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses, including "happy slapping". Campaigners, however, worry that the law was intentionally written in such a way that allows broad interpretation that effectively outlaws the efforts of citizen journalists to photograph and film violent acts, including police brutality.

The French Government has also reportedly proposed "a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists' organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories."

Nicolas Sarkozy, regular readers of this blog will recall, is the right wing French politician who caused quite a stir by turning up to address Le Web 3 after being invited by Loic Le Meur, one of France's most widely read bloggers who has endorsed Sarkozy's candidacy. Le Meur, a serial entrepreneur, supports Sarkozy in part because he feels that Sarkozy is the candidate most likely to help bring new opportunities to the French software and technology industries by supporting start-ups and venture capital investment in them. Sarkozy has, in the past, also been supportive of journalism.

It's quite difficult to understand why Sarkozy would propose a law that seems to go against both the internet publishing/tech community he's been courting as well as journalists.

Citizen journalists and bloggers can't, of course, ignore the existence of libel law, contempt and other restraints that are placed upon what they can and can't publish online. Indeed, The Press Gazette reported last December that violation of such laws (as well as repression) on the internet accounted for "one in three jailed journalists". It's important that bloggers understand both their rights and their legal responsibilities and there are a growing number of resources, including this one from NewAssignment.net, offering explanations of these.

The good news is that in some places, for example California, courts are beginning to recognise that bloggers and citizen journalists should have the same legal protection as journalists. The bad news is that, in most jurisdictions, such recognition is probably still a long way away.

Existing organisations created by and for bloggers, such as the Media Bloggers Association, tend to be more about cross-promotion and don't get the same respect or recognition from governments that more mainstream journalism bodies receive.

The way forward, if bloggers and citizen journalists want to work together to ensure their recognition and rights, is to begin speaking with existing journalism industry trade bodies and unions, for example the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the UK or the Online News Association internationally. Seeing that more and more bloggers are doing journalism, and more and more journalists are becoming bloggers, they may very well be willing to take bloggers on as fully fledged, card carrying members and/or to set up branches specifically for bloggers.

Once onboard with the trade unions, bloggers could join professional journalists, free speech and civil rights campaigners, mainstream media organisations and other interested parties to form a united front in fight against laws like this one in France and elsewhere.

[Update: BBC News Online is now reporting on the proposed French law]

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the openness of blogging & 3 new blog friends

Thursday 9:21 am 3/1/07
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

I spent most of yesterday at a "social media consensus" workshop at the British Library. The group included people working with social media from a range of organisations including Microsoft, Channel 4, Save the Children, Bebo, and the Association for Progressive Communications.

The purpose of the day was to try to develop some sort of tool to measure the social impact of social media but we spent most of the day getting to know each other. Part of that process involved spending 20 minutes getting to know the person next to you which, in my case, was a serial entrepreneur named Oli Barrett. He recently started his blog, Daily Networker, to write about the interesting people he meets. I get the idea that he's one of those people who mixes business networking and his social life so much that the two are almost inseparable which, for someone like him, is probably the best way to reach some sort of work/life balance: just combine it all into one.

One of the things that Oli has recently been involved with is a project, Make Your Mark with a Tenner, where they gave a group of teenagers a tenner for a month to see what they turn it into. It's an idea that landed Oli a seat next to David Cameron the train from Manchester last week, an encounter he shares on his blog.

Facilitating the workshop was Pim Techamuanvivit whose food blog, Chez Pim (what else?!) has a technorati ranking in the 2000's and gets tens of thousands of visits per day. Being honest, I didn't realise that food blogs can actually have an audience of that enormity. I do, however, enjoy the occasional food blog, usually Graham Holliday's NoodlePie which I read in part because I know him and can almost hear him talking as I read his posts.

Sitting next to Pim at lunch, we got talking about one of the more peculiar aspects of the British - the ability to secretly harbour one's displeasure with a particular dish whilst, at the same time, smiling and telling the waitress that it's "lovely" when prompted. The typical displeased British diner then proceeds to punish the restaurant by not leaving a tip, snarling as soon as they are clear of the doorway, and to spend the next six months telling anyone they know about their horrible dining experience. The major fault in this, of course, is that the very people who can remedy the situation are no given a chance to do so. Pim doesn't let people get away with this in the comments on her blog because she realises how big an effect a negative review can have upon a restaurant's business.

Having recently posted a glowing review of a Michelin starred Parisian restaurant, where she had found both the food and service impeccible, Pim was surprised to find a comment from someone who claimed that the service was so rude that she would never return. Pim challenged the commenter, asking not only for more details of the commenter's bad experience, but asking what, if anything, the commenter had done to allow the staff to resolve the issue. It turns out that, having paid the bill, the commenter had started to slide her chair back, at which point the attentive French waiter immediately arrived to help her get up. The customer felt they were rudely being hurried from the restaurant but, as Pim pointed out in her reply, the waiter was simply following the usual protocol and had she simply said she wasn't ready to go, he probably would have apologised and moved back into the shadows to more perfectly anticipate her next requirement.

Towards the end of the day, I also met Adam Gee who is a New Media Commissioner at Channel 4 and who writes a blog called SimplePleasures. Actually, it's 4 different blogs with the same name - you'll find an explanation here. I get the feeling that, more than anything else, his blogs help him organise and make sense of his life whilst at the same time sharing it with others.

Why is it that everytime I go to these things, it's the bloggers I most enjoy meeting rather than the others? I think it's exactly for the reasons above - they tend to be open, conversational, sharing people. Which is exactly why, with years of experience in the online community management industry, I'm now much more likely to engage with and be personally interested in blogs instead of message boards and chat rooms.

Community is a funny word. It's full of warm-fuzzy wholesome goodness yet, when you really think about it, communities have barriers to entry. "Community" can, and often is, synonymous with "clique" - as much exclusive as they are inclusive. Blogs, on the other hand, are out there and anyone with something to say can comment, quote, take away, link to, etc is so much more open and accessible.

My advice to the non-bloggers who were at the workshop yesterday? If you work in a creative industry you've got to blog, otherwise you aren't part of the conversation.

using the data protection act to reclaim charges (2)

On the 5th I posted about my quest to use the data protection act, and some knowledge gleened from the internet, to claw back some of the bank charges I've paid over the years. I wrote "Data Subject Access Request" letters to my bank and two credit card companies, asking them to provide me with details of all penalty charges I've paid out over the last six years (the limit on claiming).

Two points to my bank who wrote back to me by the end of the week to confirm that they would supply the requested information without charge, returning my cheque for £10, the maximum amount they can charge for processing requests under the Data Protection Act. And on Friday I received three large envelopes from my bank with details of every transaction - approximately 200 pages worth - I'd made using my account with them. The charges total £680 and many of them were of the triple whammy variety where you go over your overdraft and then get charged £25 for each of the next three transactions for a total of £75 - often incurred in a matter of hours.

This evening I will be writing back to my bank detailing these charges and explaining that I don't feel the penalties were valid, using my own spruced up version of the template letter found here.

I'm still waiting to hear from the other two banks / credit card providers. I'll continue to update the process of claiming these unfair bank charges back here, so do bookmark this page if you're interested in following my progress.

Using the Data Protection Act

Most journalists have heard about the Freedom of Information Act, a useful tool in gaining access to information held by government agencies. The Press Gazettes FOI campaign and the BBC's Open Secrets Blog are as good places as any to start learning about how journalists and media organisations are using this tool.

But many journalists don't realise that they have another powerful tool at their disposal - the Data Protection Act 1998.

I first discovered the usefulness of the Data Protection Act a few years ago when I used it to claim back thousands of pounds from an academic institution that, whilst very good at chasing me for tuition fees, hadn't provided the amount or level of tution I would have hoped to have received.

I argued the case that I'd been mistreated (well, more like not treated at all!) to no avail so I decided to use the UK's Data Protection Act to force the institution to reveal what, if any, records they held on me. The records revealed a catologue of issues and helped me make a much stronger, and ultimately successful, case for a full refund of tuition fees paid.

Towards the end of last year, I tried to use the Data Protection Act again, this time to get some records from Google after I was kicked out of their AdSense programme without explanation. Two letters later and I've still not heard back from them although some readers of this blog who have taken the same steps as I did had almost immediate results. Eventually get around to chasing that up again but, as no money is at stake, it's kind of fallen on the backburner for now.

This weekend, I decided to take a few minutes to go on another Data Protection Act adventure, this time in an attempt to reclaim bank and credit card charges. Anyone who has ever accidently gone over their overdraft limit, forgot to post a cheque to a credit card company in time, or had a cheque returned uncashed will know that banks charge as much as £75 each time this happens. Now I usually try to be good about keeping payments and such up to date but, over the past years, am sure I've paid a few hundred pounds in such fees.

So, inspired by letters in the pages of the Guardian's excellent Saturday Money supplement and the website of "Money Saving Expert" Martin Lewis, this weekend I sent Data Protection Subject Access requests to my bank and two credit card providers. I've asked for a full list of charges made against me, instead of statements per se (which aren't covered by the DPA), and enclosed a £10 cheque with each to cover the statutory maximum that the bank can charge to supply the information requested.

Once I get the information I've requested, I'll then write to each of the banks, explaining that the charges were disproprotionate to the cost actually incurred in sending them and, as such, they are penalty fees that would not hold up under UK contract law.

I'll let you know how I get on...

new tactic for striking journos: start blogging

If a dispute between The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia and the publishers of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News isn't settled by midnight tonight, the union has announced that instead of simply manning picket lines, members will immediately start publishing their own news website - placing them in immediate and direct competition with the newspapers.

Tom Ferrick, Jr, one of those who intends to join the union action should current lastminute negotiations fail, told AP that in competing with Philly.com, the union's PhilaPapers.com would sell ads and function like an online news site, covering major stories as well as the strike itself. About 200 people are expected to staff the site, which is to include news, politics, business, sports and entertainment sections.

It's an interesting development in the tactics used by union activists...

election day legal guide for US bloggers

The American mid-term elections are today (Tuesday 07 Nov) and lots of bloggers - and I'm not just talking about the BBC, Daily Kos and Instapundit - are likely to be providing coverage of the elections, last minute campaigning and polling.

The BBC 5Live's Pods and Blogs, which put out a call for help from citizen journalists - a calll that was answered after people like Craigslist's Craig Newmark got involved - will be live blogging the election. You'll find some of the stuff they've already done here.

If you're planning on blogging the election yourself, you'll probably want to make sure that you do so within the boundaries of the law in the state you're in. The Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School (disclosure: I am currently a non-residential fellow at Stanford Cyberlaw) has put together a state by state guide to photographing and/or recording from the polling station.

Originally, Lauren Gelman and the students at Stanford Cyberlaw had set out to answer more general questions about election day law but found that around 80% of the questions were actually about photography.

Do have a look if you want to know the answers to questions like:

Can you be in the voting area except to vote? (Not in Delaware)

Can you ask people how they voted? (Not within 50 ft of polling place in Rhode Island).

Can you take photos? (In CA it is illegal to photograph, videotape or otherwise record a voter entering or leaving a polling place).

[UPDATE: I just came across this as well - "9 Ways Citizen Journalists Can Cover the Elections"]

(photo by me - Nov. '94)

google fails (so far) to comply to my data subject access request

Regular readers of cybersoc.com will recall that back in August I got kicked out of Google Adsense.

I appealed to Google, asking for them to spefically disclose what, if any, evidence they had that I had broken their terms and conditions or had engaged in "click fraud". The email response I received following my appeal appeared to be automatically generated which got me thinking, perhaps the whole process of being banned had been an automated process based upon some data they'd gathered about me or my audience.

"Hey, that's kinda scary" I thought, "what data does google collect each time I search, each time I visit a page displaying a google ad, each time someone visits my pages displaying google ads? How are they using this data??".

By this stage in my thought process, having proof that I'd been unfairly kicked out of adsense actually became secondary - I really just wanted to know what information Google had about me and why...

So I sent Google's UK office a Subject Access Request which, under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998, a UK law that requires anyone gathering or storing data to disclose what information they hold and how that information is, has been, or will be used. Google can, if they wish, charge me a nominal fee (£10 I think is the upper limit) for photocopying, printing and posting of the data to me - and they have 40 days to reply.

It's now been 37 working days, 54 days in total, since I wrote to Google. I am now drafting them a letter explaining that, by not complying with my previous request, they may be in breach of the provisions of the Data Protection Act. My letter will give them a strict deadline of ten days for a response and, should they not respond, I will complain to the Information Commissioner.

More when there's more...