cybersoc.com

eurovision contest predictor based on search data

Last year, I ended up watching the Eurovision Song Contest because I wanted to take part in the conversations my friends were having about it on Twitter. In the resultant blog post, I looked forward to this year:

"Broadcasters and content providers should take note. What I participated in last night would be almost totally invisible to most viewers. Most people don't know how to find and track conversations on twitter, other social networking services or blogs. But being part of an audience community is a powerful experience for participants and a valuable brand building tool for broadcasters and other content producers.

We need to make it as easy as possible for ordinary users to find and participate in conversations around our content. The way to do that isn't to duplicate the tools and services that are already out there, but to create interfaces, windows, that let people see and join into the conversation. Underlying that interface there might be all sorts of complex tools - hashtags, tweetscan, summize and twitterlocal are all useful - but in pulling them all together in a meaningful way, much of the complexity and need for prior knowledge is removed. Achieve that and next year's Europarty is going to be unforgettable."

Well, it's time for Eurovision again, but I've yet to see any good mash-ups or aggregations of conversations people are having around the contest or coverage of it but I have found an interesting piece of data mining by google, who has created a predictor gadget that looks at searches, filters in various ways for better accuracy, then ranks the contestants:

You might also want to follow tweets mentioning eurovision. Let me know if you find that mashup or aggregation I as hoping for.

revealed: groundbreaking study of user generated content use at the bbc

In July 2007, as I announced here, the BBC/AHRC partnership selected eight projects to go forward. I was, along with Liz Howell and Robin Morley, the primary BBC sponsor for the largest of those projects, the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of User-Generated Content and it's Impact upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and the BBC. The study was awarded £90,000, a clear demonstration of the importance of this piece of research both to the BBC and to the academic community.

The study was completed last summer but, until now, I've been unable to blog about it. Don't read between the lines - the report wasn't buried, I simply didn't feel that I had the necessary permission to blog about it but that all changed yesterday when the BBC and AHRC, who co-funded the research, held an event open to invited members of the public, including myself.

Claire Wardle from the Department of Journalism at Cardiff University, who completed the ground-breaking research along with colleague Andy Williams, revealed in this first presentation of the findings, the following.

The project was truly groundbreaking in that researchers had unparalleled access to BBC journalists, editors and audiences - allowing for:

• 10 weeks of ethnographic shadowing in BBC newsrooms
• interviews with 115 journalists
• interviews with 12 senior managers
• content analysis of a range of radio and television broadcasts as well as online content
• a MORI poll representative of the British public at large
• an online survey
• 12 focus groups

The access we were able to provide the researchers with was exceptional - no previous researcher or research group had been given such an opportunity, at least not in so far as any of us was ever aware. The main findings of the research were that:

• There are 5 main types of "UGC" and they fulfill 6 different roles within the BBC
• Journalists and audiences display markedly different attitudes towards the five types
• Technology is changing the volume, ease and speed of gathering news material and sources, but traditional journalism practices still important
• "UGC" at the local level is particularly interesting
• Overall there is support from the audience for the ways in which the BBC has been using "UGC"
• Specific calls to action are most useful for news gathering and when eliciting high-quality relevant comment
• only a small, select group of people submit "UGC"
• UGC should never be treated as representative
• significant barriers to participation: digital divide, social economic background, lack of impetus, and - most interesting for me - negative perceptions held by general audience of contributors
• contributors want a real world impact for the contributions - eg. "If it was going to be read by Gordon Brown, then of course I'd submit it..."

The study also identified a typology of audience material:

• audience content
• audience comments
• collaborative content
• networked journalism
• non-news content ("photos of snowmen")

The majority of respondents to the MORI poll commissioned had favourable views of user generated content and thought it played a positive roll in reporting yet few have actually contributed.

One of the questions was whether people would take a photo if they saw a fire break out - just 14% said they would, and just 6% of those said they'd send it to a news organisation. Great differences were seen across classes - 16% of higher management would take a photo, with all saying they'd submit it to a news organisation, but in other groups (middle-management to manual laborers) only between 4 - 5% would take a photo.

There's lots of other interesting findings in the full-version of the study which, so far as I'm aware, hasn't yet been published publicly although it's my hope that it will be made available soon.

my mobile journalism presentation

Slideshare doesn't seem to like the Below you'll find the presentation on mobile journalism I'll be delivering to students on the MA Magazine and Newspaper Journalism course at City University, London on Thursday. The presentation looks at:

    •    service providers - why do companies offer services which enable mobile content uploading and social networking?
    •    citizen journalism - what motivates people to "report" what they witness; what sort of content do they create and share?
    •    journalism - how are professional journalists and new organisations using mobiles?
    •    tools - what tools are available for documenting and sharing content online?

And at some point during the lecture I'm hoping to involve some professional mobile journalists - by mobile, of course....

mobile + journalism: get your mojo

View more presentations from Robin Hamman.

Download Zipped Presentation - Keynote

conferences this week: dna2009 and social media influence

It appears that conference season has begun.

On Tuesday I moderated a panel about using social media to have "difficult conversations at Social Media Influence in London with panelists Headshift's Lee Bryant (my boss), Andy Hobsbawm from Agency.com and Paolo Valdemarin of Evector.

[Photo by Kris Hoet]

Today, I'm on two panels during the final afternoon of DNA2009 in Brussels. I'll be joining Laura Oliver (journalism.co.uk), Darren Waters (BBC), Katharina Borchert (WAZ) and Bart Brouwers (Spits) for a panel about twitter, moderated by Ben Hammersley and possibly being joined remotely by Jeff Jarvis.

Later I'm on an experts panel responding to questions about social media.

Follow it all on twitter...

update...15.17:

John Thompson, publisher of the excellent Journalism.co.uk, streamed the panel live. Here's the first of his four clips:

Watch live video from johncthompson's channel on Justin.tv

massive increase in twitter use good for news websites

UK internet measurement agency Hitwise recently announced that Twitter's traffic has increased a staggering 1000% over the past year and now exceeds that to Digg.

The Hitwise report reveals something far more interesting, in my mind at least - the way that twitter is driving traffic to other sites, in particularly those of mainstream media. From the PC Advisor article about the report:

"Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the past 12 months.

Almost 10 percent of Twitter's downstream traffic goes to News and Media websites, and BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com. A further 17.6 percent of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6 percent goes to social networks, 6.6 percent to blogs and 4.5 percent to online retailers.

"As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," commented Goad.

"A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain's most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.

Yeh, you read that right - 10% of twitter's downstream traffic, that is the site that people go to after visiting twitter, is to BBC News. The article, unfortunately, is not clear whether this is a global or UK specific statistic but either way it's interesting because it demonstrates that, far from just chit-chatting the day away, people are discussing news and current affairs on twitter as well.

on today and world update this morning

I spent most of the morning on BBC radio. It all started yesterday, when I saw a tweet by Rory Cellan-Jones, alerting me to a blog post he was writing in response to a Wired article proclaiming blogging is dead. I wrote a post about the cuffufle in a tea cup myself over on the Headshift blog before seeing Rory's follow-up tweets, asking if anyone had a view which I did. Next thing I knew, I was being asked to go on Radio 4's Today programme with Rory and technology journalist Kate Bevan.

We were interviewed by John Humphries who famously refuses to use the computer in the studio at Television Centre... here's the clip (or Download today_20081023-1023a.mp3 ) It also made the BBC homepage.

But that was only the start. Whilst waiting to go on Today, I got a call from the BBC World Service, who also wanted to do an interview about the death of blogging so, as soon as I was done on Today, I headed over to Bush House to be interviewed by Dan Damon on World Update. Apparently it's broadcast on over 200 FM stations across the USA, as well as key audiences in East Africa and the Middle East - which is a shame because my performance was, at least in my own mind, negatively impacted upon by tiredness, having consumed too much caffeine and a little bit of boredom. The interview ended up being interviewed across three slots in the programme so I'm afraid you'll have to listen to the financial reports and other bits if you want to listen to it all. I've *acquired* two of those bits [Download Robin1.mp3 / Download Robin2.mp3 ].

bbc blog costs £17 billion...

bbc blog costs £17 billion...
Originally uploaded by robinhamman

Last year, Iain Dale brought us the news that government blogs were costing tax payers many thousands of pounds a month to run. David Milliband's blog, for example, apparently costs over £40,000 a year and the Welfare Reform and Child Poverty blog was revealed, in response to a parliamentary question, to cost nearly £1500 per month to run - equivalent to around £2 per visitor.

For a second or two, when I read the headline "BBC Blog That Cost our Banks £17 Billion" in Metro last week, I thought a journalist had got the wrong end of the stick - afterall, I used to run the BBC's blogs and they didn't cost anything like £17 billion...

Thankfully, that's not what the article was getting at. Instead, it was blaming BBC Journalist Robert Peston, who blogged about the near collapse of a major British bank and a government brokered merger in the hours before the markets opened, leading - some say - to even greater losses in the financial markets.

The Independent recently wrote:

"In recent weeks, as capitalism itself has seemed in peril,, the BBC business editor has hardly been off duty, whether reporting for Radio 4's Today programme, for rolling news and the bulletins, or posting on Peston's Picks, his influential blog.

On 17 September, at exactly 9am, a new entry on that blog opened with the simple but remarkable sentence: "Lloyds is in advanced merger talks with HBOS to create a giant UK super retail bank, I have learned."

Within seconds of posting the story from the PC in his office at home in Muswell Hill, north London, Peston, 48, had walked to the spare room and, via a specially-installed ISDN line, was broadcasting his scoop live on the BBC News channel. In the words of this newspaper, Peston's influence meant that he was "one of the few men with the power to dam the floodwaters heading HBOS's way". This was the same reporter who had already won the Royal Television Society's "Scoop of the Year" award for his coverage of the collapse of the Northern Rock building society.

Peston is perhaps the first senior journalist to publish a major, breaking story on their blog as the first available outlet. My guess is we're going to see a lot more unmediated, unedited journalism like this in the future although there are, it should be said, major risks involved. It's not just Andrew Gilligan who can make a mistake.

international broacasting conference (ibc2008)

The panel on Social Media and Broadcasting that I helped organise for the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) in Amsterdam takes place from 11.30 - 13:00 on Friday in Room L.

Joining me on the panel will be BBC Radio 4's Chris Vallance (iPM)  and Yahoo Europe's VP of Search & Social Media, Jeff Revoy. The panel will be moderated by Andy Davy, Controller of Portfolio Management, FM&T at the BBC.

We're going to be dipping in and out of a Yahoo Pipe I created to track feedback to the session, live. The pipe looks at twitter, flickr, technorati, google blog search and other sources for links to the session profile page on the IBC site, tags such as IBC and IBC2008, the names of people on the panel, etc. Have a look:

live blogging a motorbike journey from england to russia

My friend and former work colleague, Matthew Cashmore, who is soon to leave BBC Backstage for his dream job at Lonely Planet in Melbourne, has teamed up with a couple of his mates on a Journey to Russia to raise funds for charity.

They're documenting their journey with blog posts, maps mashups, a live daily video stream and podcasts. Here's what it's all about:

"Journey To Russia is explained simply; 3 Blokes, 3 Bikes, 3 Weeks. The journey starts in September 2008, when Matt, Stace and Patrick leave London for the far flung cities of St Petersburg and Moscow.

The journey will cover several thousand miles in a very short period, crossing the familiar western Europe and venturing into eastern Europe before entering the former USSR. The chaps will visit:

Holland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Luxembourg, and France...

Motivation - Matt, Stace and Patrick wanted to do something to raise the profile of a charity very close to their hearts, Everyman. Everyman is dedicated to funding research to cross out prostate and testicular cancer."

manchester blog awards 2008

The Manchester Blog Awards return for the third year running thanks to the efforts of Manchizzle and others.

They don't have a category for blogs that closed earlier this year but, if they did, I reckon we'd be in for a nomination or two for the now defunct BBC Manchester Blog. Best of luck to all those who are, or wish to be, nominated for an award!