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social media training course

One of the best things about my job is that I have various opportunities to inform and enthuse people about the benefits of using social media tools and services to support their existing processes. In order for social media to be genuinely useful, it has to become part of a person or organisation's everyday practice. If it's not, then it just becomes an additional burden - something extra they have to do rather than something that helps them to achieve their goals personal or professional objectives.

Readers who follow my twitter feed or dopplr updates will know that I've recently been traveling around the country a lot. Most of this has been to provide the 10 finalists of NESTA's Big Green Challenge with social media training to help them use photo-sharing, video-sharing, mobile phones, social networking and blogging to inform a wider audience about their work, reach out to new supporters and likeminded groups, and to better organise their own efforts. It's been great fun - I've met some wonderful people along the way, learned about some wonderful projects, and seen parts of the country I'd never otherwise have the opportunity to see. Here's a map showing where I've been or will be going over the remaining few weeks of the training:

View Larger Map

I've also been authoring blog posts - a sort of beginners guide to using social media - on the Big Green Challenge Blog. Here's an index to the posts I've published thus far:

1. Introduction: social media and the whole web as your canvas
2. Reaching new audiences with photo-sharing
3. Sharing your videos online
4. Getting started making google maps
5. Taking the internet everywhere
6. Live and direct with your mobile

There are at least two more posts to come - blogging, which should appear next week, and finding and keeping track of content, which will cover social bookmarking, RSS and searching for blogs.

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

bbc sport olympics map mashes up twitter, blog posts, coverage

When the English county of Berkshire was hit by flooding last year, Ollie Williams, then at BBC Berkshire, put together a map that mashed up BBC coverage, the location of emergency relief centres, flickr photos and youtube videos.

Now Ollie's moved to BBC Sport where's he's built a map for the Beijing Olympics that mashes up results, blog posts and geo-coded twitter tweets.

It's quite a nice implementation although, it could be improved with the addition of photos and video, both of which could be easily created and uploaded on the same 3G or wifi enabled mobile as the tweets are coming from. That said, this is a really good starting point for using maps as a way of navigating BBC content - something you're bound to see more of in the future.

Speaking of, James Thornett, another former BBC colleague, has a new(ish) blog called Straight to the Point which is all about mapping, location based services and the like. Well worth a look.

privacy alert: google steet view cars in london

Following a meeting at the Cabinet Office earlier today, a colleague and I spotted the Google Street View car filming in Whitehall.

Google Street View is an extension of the functionality of google maps that lets users see the view they'd get if they were actually walking down a street. Spotting sunbathers, crimes in progress and other goings on within Street View has become a bit of a cult activity.

In the UK there's been a bit of a backlash against Google Street View but, just yesterday, it was given the go-ahead by the Information Commissioner, who had been reviewing the service in light of UK privacy laws and a complaint from Privacy International.

In the US, court papers have been released which, critics say, demonstrate "Google's hypocrisy" after the company claimed that "complete privacy doesn't exist" - quite the opposite to it's normal statements that Google "takes privacy very seriously".

As for the guy in the Google Street View car, I reckon he's been photographed before - he didn't seem to take any notice at all of me standing there snapping away.

using mobile location data to provide local wikipedia entries

Yahoo's Fire Eagle, launched in beta a few weeks ago at SXSW, can accept, store and share location data with a growing number of applications including zonetag, dopplr, movabletype and twitter.

I haven't had much time to play around with it and, as one of my twitter friends put it, had failed to have a "wow moment" with fire eagle until a few minutes ago when I came across wikinear which could prove pretty useful, particularly at times when I unexpectedly find myself with a few free minutes or hours to do some sightseeing when someplace unfamiliar.

Wikinear, as I understand it, picks up (after I've authorised it to do so) my location data from fire  eagle. It then pulls in the entries for the five wikipedia entries closest to that location. The pages are optimised for viewing on a mobile phone screen.

In the screenshot below, you can see my location at the Broadcast Centre, BBC White City Media Village in London, along with five wikipedia entries, all for places that are, or previously existed, within a few hundred feet of that location:

the best mobile phone for blogging, documenting, reporting?

After three or four months deliberating over which new mobile phone upgrade to, a process that's caused me to realise that there is no single solution that does everything I require, I've finally managed to get a new phone.

The final contenders were: Apple iPhone, T-Mobile Vario III (a rebranded HTC YyTN II), Nokia N95

Apple's iPhone looked like an obvious choice for me. An Apple user since around 1984 and and now on my third iPod, I instinctively understand how to use the iPhone. I love the way it feels in the hand, although the onscreen keyboard is a bit small for my fingers, and just love the sexy, cut-down version of the mac interface. I would have bought one if the iPhone didn't have two serious shortfalls - the lack of a better than average camera, no GPS (replaced with maps?!) and no 3g internet. The latter of these was the real show stopper. I simply cannot work on the train, something I spend at least an hour a day doing, without fast mobile internet. I'd also find the lack of video camera disappointing but this wasn't really a consideration.

The T-Mobile Vario III (HTC TyTN II) seemed the least obvious possibility but, in the end, nearly became my choice. Up until yesterday, my kit bag contained both a Nokia N70 (mostly for using zonetag) and a T-Mobile Vario II that was given to me by a PR Agency. As it's based on the Windows Mobile platform, I have no idea how to use the vast majority of the features in the Vario II. In fact, I hate everything about it except for the keyboard which is fantastic, probably industry leading. The Vario III has a screen that can be angled to make viewing more comfortable and has 3.5g internet, a touch faster than the Vario II. Would I rather have a Vario III than an iPhone? Hell no, but I would be forced to choose a Vario III over the iPhone because of the 3g and keyboard. Would I have chosen the Vario III over the N95 IF the Vario had the same camera? I'm afraid that would have tipped things this way. Indeed, if the Vario could run zonetag and had a camera slightly worse than the Nokia I probably still would have had to go with the Vario. But that's not the way things went in the end...

The Nokia N95 isn't particularly sexy, unlike the iPhone, and lacks a keyboard, but it's easy to overlook these shortcomings due as everything else is present and correct: HSDPA (3.5g) mobile internet, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens that can be used for stills and video, wifi connectivity, GPS mapping, and the ability to subscribe to podscasts and vodcasts. There's also a particular piece of software, zonetag, that really shines on the N95 because it takes full advantage of the excellent camera and the built in GPS. I bet the N95 will also be the cameraphone of choice for Qik users too.

The audio-visual abilities of this phone make it easy to understand why Reuter's has based it's Mobile Journalist Kit around the Nokia. Unfortunately, unless someone at Reuters or Nokia can help me out (?!?) I'll still have to carry my ipod and micromemo for high quality audio.

I chose the Nokia's high speed internet (essential) and a good camera (damn near essential) over the svelte looks and an intuitive interface of the iPhone and the practicality of the Windows based, keyboard wielding HTC on the other.

The N95 isn't, however, my dream phone. What I really want is an iPhone with 3G and a better camera, or a Nokia or Sony that looks and feels gorgeous, has a usable keyboard and can connect up with my mac. Until then, I'll be carrying a phone and lugging a laptop wherever I go...

google local news and local blog search

David Brain writes,

"in this years’ Edelman Trust Barometer we asked opinion leaders in 18 countries about the news sources they rely on most for information on companies. Not surprisingly, local sources dominated, but three global brands appeared regularly among the local names. Most of us could probably have guessed the BBC and CNN would be mentioned, but the number of respondents ticking the box marked Google confirms that the concept of ‘search engine’ and ‘news source’ are becoming less distinct. Last I looked, Google did not employ a single reporter."

[The graph on the original post proves interesting and is certainly worth a look.]

Google, Brain points out, has recently launched a local news service. The post announcing the new service explains how Google does it:

"We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located."

A look at the Google News Local page for St. Albans, a small City in the county of Hertfordshire, England, pulls up some relevant content but is also quite noisy, with the algorithm also pulling in headlines from West Virginia and Vermont USA and Australia. Useful then, I suppose, if you happen to be searching for news on a location with a unique place name but otherwise not so great.

There's also, hiding over on the left side of the page, a new location specific blog search. The top results for St. Albans were spot on but further down there's the same problem - the algorythm seems unable to distinguish between multiple cities named St. Albans and, worse, picks up lots of classified advertisements, newspaper articles and other non-blog content.

It's a good idea but, for me at least, not good enough to be very useful for locality specific searches - and serves as a reminder that fancy algorithms can't yet match human editorial judgement.

bbc global correspondents google maps mashup

Stuart Pinfold, who works in the audio traffic department at the BBC (recording despatches as they come in and routing them to the appropriate broadcast outlet), has put together a google map that shows the locations of the BBC's global correspondents, stringers and bureau:

Stuart told Ariel, the BBC's inhouse newspaper, that "information about correspondents is still being added as my colleaguse and I think of people not on the list..." because there isn't enough location data contained in the RSS feeds to make it fully automated.

prompting participation - a missing social software feature

I'm a long term, and fairly heavy, user of the photo-sharing site flickr although, over time, my usage of the site has changed from being a place where I primarily shared my best and most interesting photos to one where I mostly upload photos directly from my cameraphone.

I primarily use zonetag, developed by Yahoo Research Labs, as my uploader because it has some functionality not currently offered by other similar services including Shozu. Once it's running on your phone, zonetag pops up every time you take a photo and asks if you'd like to save it to flickr. It then asks if you'd like the include the cell location data, which links up with flickr's new(ish) maps functionality and plots your photo on a map, and what level of privacy you'd like. It does other cool things too, like allows you to delete all the local copies of photos that you've uploaded, making that particularly tedious task far easier, and it can connect to the RSS feed of your choice for tag suggestions.

We've enlisted the help of several local weather watchers - members of the public who are interested in documenting and explaining the weather to others - for an experiment at BBC Leicester. We've set up a flickr account for each of them to upload their photos to. Once added to the invitation only group pool set up by BBC Leicester, the photos are automatically pulled into a BBC weather page. Each day, staff at BBC Leicester use their flickr account to favourite one of the photos and that appears, in the same page and again automatically, in the same page.

We've also set-up several of the participants in the project with zonetag accounts to get photos from their cameraphones, stamped with their location data, uploaded to flickr. We also pointed zonetag at BBC Leicester's RSS weather feed to provide tag suggestions so that if, for example, snow fall that's been predicted occurs and a weather watch takes a photo of it on their phone, the tag "snow" will automatically be suggested.

The weather watchers participate in their own time and retain ownership of their own photos. The BBC simply embeds those photos using the flickr api, just as a blogger or user of a social networking service would do. The real benefit to this approach is that there is no need for the BBC to build an uploader or to own, manage, resize or in anyway store the content AND the participants are able to do what they set out to do regardless of whether the BBC applies any editorial process to the photos, namely that they can share their photographs of the weather with a potentially wider audience.

It's easy for the participants to take part - using flickr is very straightforward - but I think it's fair to say that part of the reason this experiment has been a bit slow off the ground is that it's easy to simply forget to upload a fresh photo each day, especially if the weather is unchanged or isn't doing anything particularly interesting.

If the BBC, or zonetag, was able to add a feature that would prompt users to take a photo based on time or location, details the application uses from the phone anyway, I think we'd see much greater participation in projects like this. Users could then set their zonetag settings to prompt them to take and upload a photo either at set times of day, set intervals, or when they are at a specific location.

There are lots of ways that people could use this, either for the expression of personal creativity or as part of a research or media led project.

For instance, a photoblogger doing a taking a photo of the weather outside their window each morning might find it useful to be prompted to do so, as would a commuter who blogs about their journeys to and from work or the mother doing a photo essay where she captures a photo of each day in the year of her child. Location, too, could be used to prompt a photo with similar applications.

Actually, prompting participation like this, far from being annoying, would be a useful way to drive usage of microblogging services such as twitter ("your last update was n minutes ago, update now..."), plazes ("you're in a new place, want to tag it?") and Jaiku. The prompting would, of course, have to be user configurable so as no to become intrusive but I see no other reason why a feature couldn't or shouldn't be incorporated like this.

Do you work for yahoo, plazes, jaiku, twitter or another service that could incorporate a feature like this? If so, I'd love to hear your thoughts...

simplicity and openness reduces the participation burden

One of the responses I often get from people who don't really get the whole social media thing is that it takes a lot of time. They've got a point - I do a lot of things online, using a lot of different services, but it actually takes me less time to do more, and to generate more content, today than it did a year ago. There are two reasons for this: simplicity and openness.

Simplicity and automation: Many of the services I use are so simple to use - indeed, some are entirely automated - that doing so takes me no more time than not using them.

When I take a photo using my cameraphone, instead of simply asking me if I'd like to save the photo, a piece of software called zonetag asks me if I'd like to save the photo to flickr. If I agree, it then offers me the chance to tag the photo. Agreeing to upload the photo to flickr takes no additional time over that required to save the photo on my handset only.

Last.fm, which is a social network based around music and the sharing of musical preferences, is even easier to use. After signing up, I simply install a small piece of software - friendly spyware - that keeps a log of what tracks I listen to on my itunes and/or ipod. It then updates my profile accordingly and suggests other tracks I might be interested in as well as giving me the opportunity to meet others with similar musical preferences. I don't have to do anything to participate although to get the most from the service I would need to be more proactive than I currently am.

I have long been a fan of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service I use, that does something similar for bookmarks. Instead of saving a url to my favourites, I save it to del.icio.us. This has the benefit of being available to me regardless of what computer I'm using as well as enabling the sharing of links with others, the formation of networks around links and tags we might have in common, and more. Saving a bookmark to del.icio.us is little, if any, more time or labour intensive than adding a page to my browser's favourites yet, when I do get the time to make use of them, the extended features enhance the utility of the service greatly.

I've also been experimenting with Plazes and, more recently, Jaiku (dopplr is another emerging service in this area). These services let users set their physical location and, in the case of Plazes and Jaiku, can actually track my location using my mobile phone or internet connection point, plotting me on a map for other users to see. This is useful because it can make it easier for users to meet up with other people they know who use the service, strengthening existing social networks. And even if users aren't meeting up, they're kept aware - with little, if any deliberate attempts to make contact directly - of their friend's whereabouts and what they're up to.

Twitter is a bit more labour intensive than the above, but not necessarily. Many people send text messages to individual friends to keep in touch. Twitter allows you to send that same message, via mobile or the twitter web interface, to all your friends and for them to do the same. The social utility here is that you keep many people updated as to the question "what are you doing now?" without the necessity of sending out multiple messages to multiple friends. Viewed that way, twitter can actually be time saving rather than time consuming. [more on twitter @ mediashift]

Open: Many of these services (and this is an inherent feature of "web 2.0" applications) have begun talk to each other, sharing bits and pieces of my content, contacts and conversations between themselves in ways that add value and efficiency for me.

In fact, all of the services listed above generate RSS feeds which can then be pulled in by other services, such as my blog (hosted by typepad) or my facebook profile, and re-displayed to a different audience.

The result? Friends, colleagues and others who want to  keep up with what I'm doing can easily do so, but with very little effort required on either their part or mine. I certainly feel closer and more involved in the lives of my friends who use one or several of these services for exactly this reason - it's easy to keep abreast of what they are up to, the things that are happening in their lives. It also means that, when I can mroe easily see when I need to go out of my way to make contact, whether it's a simple facebook poke, a kind comment, an email, or a phone call.

Outputting RSS feeds is the key to most of this openness and sharing although there are some services, such as google maps or flickr, that make their API's available to developers with the results being the many thousands of google maps mashups or services such as moo.com which sits on top of flickr.

Of course, some services still don't talk to each other as easily or integrate as well as I'd like. For example, I think zonetag + flickr (see above) should talk to my calendar on upcoming (or, these days, facebook) so that when I attend an event my photos are automatically tagged appropriately [updated - looks like they may have something like this that I wasn't aware of when writing]. And Last.fm doesn't, as far as I'm aware, have the ability to alert me to concerts that my facebook friends might be attending, or to point me towards flickr photos or myspace pages of bands I'm interested in. All this could happen and, indeed, may soon happen with more and more services like facebook opening up to third party applications.

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I like the way things are headed, with more and more simple, some would say "passive", ways to generate content and participate in social networking sites and with more and more of those services beginning to talk to each other in ways that enhance the overall functionality.

So does blogging and social networking take time? Of course it does, but the beauty of a many emergent social media services is that their simplicity and openness means that myself and other users can engage with them as much, or as little, as we want yet we're still able to keep at least one foot in the conversation. Even true believers need not make a weekly pilgrimage.