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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

blogging takes all day, blogging takes no time at all

I've posted a few times before about turning processes into content but wanted to try to pull it all together in a new way - combining it with the presentations I give that talk about unsustainable models of audience engagement and participation -  in advance of the keynote presentation I'm giving at (G)local 2.0 in Skopje on Thursday morning.

"How long does all that blogging take you?"

It's a question I'm frequently asked but still find difficult to respond to because it's equally true that I spend my entire work day, and none of my work day, blogging. That's because I have integrated social media tools and techniques into my job in a way that makes it possible for me to turn the process I undertake into content.

Over the years, news and media organisations have come up with several models for encouraging audience participation and submission of content. The build it and they will come model involves the creation of online discussion spaces where audience members can participate in discussions, occasionally meaningful, with others. The send it to us model is used to gather what the media industry calls user-generated content, or UGC, usually in the form of photographs and eyewitness accounts of breaking news stories or comments about a programme, story or article.

Both of these approaches are resource intensive and carry very real technical, editorial and legal risks. These approaches also don't scale well - as usage, and user numbers, increase, so does the amount of resource required. Ironically, the amount of "noise" also seems to increase so greater participation can actually lessen the editorial link, and thus value, between participation and the programme, article or other content.

But there is another reason why these approaches don't scale well - because most media organisations still think of websites as something additional to their other content channels, as if they have a programme with a website hanging off it. Last year, Kate Adie, one of the BBC's more widely recognised news correspondents, illustrated this point well when she told the European Broadcasting Union's Michael Mullane,

"You are blogging to a peer group - that's all right - I can understand there is a demand for that. But journalists shouldn't have any time to blog - there are too many stories waiting to be told!”

It's obvious that Adie, and I'm sure many others at the BBC and other companies primarily in the business of journalism or broadcasting, wouldn't see creating content for the website as something that's part of their role. The website is something different. Something tacked onto the back of their programme or other content.

We've all heard or seen it before - "That's all from us here in the studio but if you want further information, or would like to comment, visit our website at w - w - w ..."

This all changes when the website, and indeed social media, is part of the production process from the start. Effort put into engaging with the audience becomes part of the programme. It becomes not an additional burden upon the shoulders of already overworked production staff, but an essential part of the programme making process. In this way, blogging and social media takes all day and yet takes no time away from programme making at all. As I said in a recent post,

"Social media isn't something you add to a website, it's something you do. When I look back over the social media projects I've been involved in over the years, it's obvious that the key variable upon which success, or failure, is dependent is to what extent to which social media has actually been integrated into the overall editorial proposition."

In addition to the online community and send it to us models above, many media companies - indeed, organisations and businesses engaged in just about any kind of business - are increasingly using existing third party social networking and content sharing services to engage with audiences (or consumers). There are two ways to do this - as something additional which, in time, will become burdensome for staff whose time could probably be better spent elsewhere, or through the integration of social media into the production process, generating (and widely distributing) content along the way.

Using social media as part of the production process makes it more authentic, honest and ultimately successful. It's also sustainable - even if journalists and production staff spend all their time doing it, it's equally true that it takes no time at all.

bbc london puts audience video questions to mayoral candidates

In the run-up to the London Mayoral Election, BBC London has been giving Londoners the opportunity to submit their questions, via youtube video, to each of the main candidates. A selection of questions are then put to the candidates and aired on BBC London's evening news opts at 6pm and 10pm.

It's a nice idea for getting people engaged with politics but I couldn't help but notice that the trailer (below) has had over 68,000 views on youtube whilst the video responses of the three main candidates have had just 16,000 views combined. That said, the television audience for all the clips will have been hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of viewers.

breaking news social media search tool for journalists

Today I've been working on a tool - I've dubbed it UGC Finder - for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites.

I'm rapidly developing a serious case of Yahoo Pipes addiction but with good reason - if you've got a good idea it's remarkably easy to knock together an almost working demonstration, which is what I've been trying to do today.

Historically, when a news story broke, journalists either went to the scene themselves or phoned one of their contacts who could go out to confirm the story and gather interviews, photos and other content.

In recent years, the "citizen journalist" model has developed, with journalists and news organisations pro-actively asking their audience to submit their accounts, photos and videos from the scene. The proliferation of cameraphones has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of such content submitted by eyewitnesses, often flooding news organisations with vast quantities of mostly unusuable quotes and photographs.

One way of dealing with this is to return to the old method of going out, finding and speaking with eyewitnesses in the places where they participate online. Or, as Jeff Jarvis brilliantly put it, to keep our antennae up wherever conversations are taking place:

"And so the key skills in a newsroom will not be to get reporters to the scene — that will come later, after the news happens — but to have antennae up to listen and find news reports as they happen, as people link to what’s happening. You can’t possibly have enough reporters, editors, producers to do that on your own. You need to have lots of friends who’ll alert you: When I put up a link here to something I find compelling — or even embed and broadcast it here, live — will I also alert CNN? I don’t know. Would you? Do you have such a friendly relationship with CNN? Maybe that will happen but that, too, is insufficient. So you need to use every tool that’s available — the Technorati of the live video web — to see what’s happening in the world."

Today I've been working on a tool - I've dubbed it UGC Finder - for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites.

I've set up keyword searches for:

• Explosion
• Evacuation
• Bomb

On the following services:

• Tweetscan (search of public tweets on twitter)
• Flickr (photosharing)
• Youtube (video)
• Technorati (blog search)
• Icerocket  (blog search)

I've truncated the content from each of these, and applied several filters, in an attempt to  find a good balance between usefulness and being drowned out by irrelevant results. I’ve set it up so that, where possible, I’ve filtered out non-unique results.

We had the chance to test UGC Finder this afternoon when there was an explosion at a pub in Leeds. It did, as I'd expected, find some reaction on twitter and livejournal but updating with new posts was a little bit on the slow side. But as an easy to use tool for journalists who might not know much about using the internet beyond sending an email and searching on google, it does seem like I've come up with something useful.

One shortcoming I realised when building the tool is that adding more search terms would be arduous but necessary if I ever wanted to be able to track breaking news not involving an explosion, evacuation or bomb.

With a bit of help from Chris and Ryan, I've been trying to come up with a way of taking the BBC News Breaking News RSS feed and extracting key words from that, then plugging those keywords into the tool so as to have new search terms created, on the fly, by our coverage of breaking stories.

I've managed to achieve this with a second pipe which:

• takes the BBC News RSS feed
• extracts keywords from the titles of articles
• uses those keywords in a flickr search
• output is images from flickr tagged with keywords from breaking news stories

What I'd really like to do is figure out a way of combining these so that the BBC News RSS is used to create keywords which are then plugged into the content searches I created for the first pipe above. This would create a tool which would be fairly automated and easy for any journalist to use. On top of this there could be a search box, like the one Martin Belam has used for Chipwrapper (which lets you keyword search ALL UK based news feeds), so that users could configure their own searches as well. 

You could also add location into the mix by, for example, combining the above with a geo-annotated news feed , TwitterLocal and the geofeed rss functionality of flickr.

I've just about hit the ceiling of my Yahoo Pipe making capabilities so here's the idea, and above are some links to my demonstrators - now it's over to you to make something really cool out of it. Drop me a line when you do.

paxman and "pathetic pleas" for your home movies

The BBC's Jeremy Paxman doesn't think very highly of his Editor, Peter Barron's, attempts to gather content from Newsnight's audience:

"... it's all available again on the website along with our editor's pathetic pleas for you to send some of your old bits of home movies and the like so that we can become the BBC's version of Animals Do the Funniest Things. Goodnight."

conference and events i'll be speaking at

I'm going to be speaking at quite a few conferences and events over the next few months. Do drop me a note if you're speaking at or planning to attend one of these:

• 17 April - BBC World Service, Spanish Section (BBC staff only)
• 08-10 May - Keynote at (G)Local 2.0, New York University of Skopje, Macedonia
• 12 May - Meeting with Paul Bradshaw's students at Birmingham City University (UK)
• 22-23 May - Conference twitterer (seriously) at the European Broacasting Union's RN08: The Future of Radio Journalism in the Digital Age, Paris
• 29-30 May - Presentation at Embracing New Media in Your PR and Corporate Communications Strategy, Amsterdam
• 04 June - Presentation at Social Media Influence (formerly Blogging4Business), London
• 12-16 September - Organising and Moderating a Panel on Social Media for International Broadcasting Conference (IBC), Amsterdam

turning participation in online debate into content and navigation

As part of the BBC's White Season, a week of programmes on BBC2 as well as other BBC TV and Radio outlets, BBC News online hosted an online discussion asking if "white working class people [are] ignored in Britain?"

The first 4183 of the resulting 7000+ comments were then run through a visualiser that makes it possible to see clusters of comments based on emotions shown, intensity of emotion, intesity of feeling, region of participant, and level of agreement. The interface allows users to then filter those results or drill down into them to the level of individual comments:

It's a nice example of how data generated by online behaviour centred on news or current affairs discussion can itself become compelling content. The pattern grouping also make for useful navigation elements. Max Gadney provides more information about the project on the BBC Internet Editors Blog....

bbc manchester blog: end of the project is a great starting point

[note: I cross-posted the following on the BBC Manchester Blog a few minutes ago...]

The BBC Manchester Blog will be closing on Sunday. When Richard Fair and I launched it in August 2006 we had high expectations, not just of the blog itself, but of how the blog would help us to trial a new model of how the BBC and other broadcasters could engage with what the industry calls "user generated content". Our first post explained:

"For years, the BBC has been looking at ways to engage more directly with it's audiences. We've promoted email addresses on air and asked for photo submissions, we've stuck comment forms on the bottom of articles, we've spend countless hours building message boards and community platforms, our staff have reviewed and approved millions upon millions of messages - and what have we learned? That all this is expensive business.

In the past, whenever the BBC has sought to do something with user generated content we've built new platforms, taken on the role of managing all the content that floods in, asserted some rights over that content (although not ownership in the vast majority of cases) and, some would argue, exposed the BBC to legal and moral risks. Furthermore, doing things in the old way had a bit of a sting in the tail - if a service really took off, and sometimes they did, the BBC would actually face increased costs because our services often don't scale well.

This project is an experiment in doing things a bit differently. Rather than building platforms, we want to help people create their own stuff on existing third party (non-BBC) platforms. Instead of contributors sending us content members of staff here at the BBC sifting through that content in a bid to find the good bits, we're simply going to ask contributors to tell us where they're publishing their content online and we'll keep an eye on it. The BBC won't claim any rights over the content and won't own anything..."

Our new way of doing things raised quite a few eyebrows with some, at least initially, skeptical of our motives, and others excited by our attempt to try something a bit different.

As part of the project we ran a blogging workshop and organised some informal blogger meet-ups. And then you invited us to yours. We read your blogs and invited some of you to read your posts on the radio. We quoted from and linked to your posts and many of you linked back. Basically, we did what bloggers do through their blogs and comments and links - we had a conversation.

We have yet to write the final review of the project, in part because our time to work with the model came to an end a long time ago but the blog has carried on under a different guise. That said, below we've provided a brief summary of some of the key things we've learned from the project:

• Being part of the community by participating as equals, as opposed to participating as a broadcasting organisation keen for new content but not interested in the community, brings with it many editorial and personal rewards.
• Even if you use time saving tools such as RSS, social bookmarking and technorati, sifting through content and write posts that quote from and link to the best bits.
• People don't necessarily blog or post content about the topics, stories and events that media organisations might hope they would - and, in our experience anyway, rarely post about news and current affairs.
• As a stand-alone proposition, the amount of staff time and effort spent was high in comparison to the quantity of content generated and size of audience served. But, when we were able to use the contacts and content we found through the blog on-air that equation immediately changed. That is, in resource terms, the blog was costly as just a blog but much more efficient as a driver of radio content.
• The best way to get noticed online is links and the best way to get links is to give good links yourself. That is, you have to play by the established rules of engagement and, online, that means linking prolifically.

Many of the ideas, tools and techniques we used as part of the BBC Manchester Blog have since been embraced by other BBC Blogs, websites and programmes. Indeed, word about the model we created for the BBC Manchester Blog has traveled far and wide, sometimes taking us with it, influencing a number of interesting projects elsewhere.

As for Richard and myself - well, we'll probably keep on blogging and, with any luck, will keep in touch with some of the great people we've met through the BBC Manchester Blog.

We'd like to thank all of you who took notice of or participated in the BBC Manchester Blog. You'll find links to some great Manchester blogs in our sidebar.

Finally, we'd like to say a special thanks to our good friend Kate Feld who, for a few months at the beginning of the project, became the BBC's first ever local on-air blog reviewer. If you want to delve beneath the surface of Manchester Kate's blog, Manchizzle, is at the very epicenter of the local blogging community.

Best wishes - and happy blogging.

Robin Hamman and Richard Fair

reaching distributed audiences requires a distributed web strategy

The other day I met with some work colleagues to discuss their proposal for a new blog related to a weekly regional television programme. When the hour was over they left not with a well formed blog proposal but with a handful of vague ideas about how they might get production staff and journalists working on the programme to actually start using some social media tools, in particular del.icio.us, as part of their process.

The idea is simple: think closely about how you can use third party tools, content sharing services and social networks to create content out of existing processes.

So, for example, a journalist researching a story online is likely to want to bookmark anything they might want to revisit later. Using del.icio.us instead of saving these bookmarks locally in a browser or text file means those bookmarks are (or can later be) shared with others, thus creating content out of the research process with little, if any, additional effort.

Another strikingly simple, yet powerful, example of this model is to, instead of uploading an image, audio or video file to your own web server, upload it and tag it on the appropriate sharing site such as flickr or youtube. Then link back to your own website where the file can be embedded (or cross-posted). This way you reach out to new audiences on other services.

A post today by Paul Bradshaw drew my attention to how one of his journalism students, Charlotte Dunckley, is already using exactly this sort of distributed web strategy. According to Bradshaw, Dunkley looked at the online usage patterns of her target audience of 15 to 30 year old in Birmingham and her findings show that having a web presence, and getting noticed online, requires having content, and participating, in the places where your audience is. Not necessarily in creating a place for that audience to come. Dunkley writes (as quoted by Bradshaw):

“Evidently my target age group lean heavily towards using websites with some kind of social networking element. Another common trend were blogs (yay) - Trash Menagerie, Perez Hilton and Fluokids, to name but a few.

“So - getting exposure via a good web presence, in Birmingham, to our target age group, is perfectly achievable without a website.

“We have the top three most visited websites for our target audience covered - Myspace, Facebook and E-bay… a Flickr account has been set up and is awaiting content - I’m thinking well tagged page layouts, our original photography (where the photographer lets us use them) and images from our events and associated events. Similarly there will be no problem uploading event content from Youtube. We could even look into recording snippets of face to face interviews in future too. "

Bradshaw explains exactly why such an approach makes sense:

"Charlotte had been worried about her technical limitations and the lack of a website. Instead, she quickly realised that this wasn’t important - it wasn’t about building a big solid brick house, but about taking a bunch of caravans on tour, to where her audience lived online."

Bradshaw goes on to ask:

"I notice that students’ first instinct when set a task is to… set up a Facebook group. To connect with people they don’t know. Now how many journalists have the same instinct?"

As little as twelve months ago I would have said that only a very small number of my BBC colleagues had considered a distributed web strategy or participated, with a BBC hat on, in a social networking site, online community or content sharing website. Today? I probably get asked once a day how programmes and programme makers can set up shop off bbc.co.uk. For many it's not yet instinctive but the tide of awareness is certainly turning...

 

rory cellan-jones (bbc) interviews jim buckmaster (craigslist)

Click to Play

A few days ago, Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's Technology Correspondent, asked on his blog:

"What would happen if everyone, anywhere, could have their own live television station from a mobile phone?"

I guess the answer is, things like this.

Earlier today I bumped into Rory over at BBC Television Centre where he was hosting a lunchtime discussion with Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist. Following the talk, Rory used a Nokia N95 to record an interview with Buckmaster and I streamed it live using Qik.