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slides of jyri engestrom's presentation @ nmkforum

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

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

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

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

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

nmkforum2007: video of jyri engestrom from jaiku

See http://www.jaiku.com

nmkforum2007: plenty of people blogging it

There are plenty of other people live blogging today's NMK Forum so I'm going to hold back a bit for a while.

Graham had a greasy breakfast on his way here.

Jemima Kiss on Organ Grinder: "New Media Knowledge always puts on a good show, so I have great expectations of today's forum on social media. First off, NMK wins big points for its twist on the LSO venue: we're all sat at round tables with a programme guide that resembles the order of service at a family wedding. Maybe we'll even get some Dad dancing later if we're lucky."

Shiny Media's Tech Digest is constantly updating. Sadly, I've quickly spotted a few mistakes there too, like this misquote of the Guardian's Kevin Anderson, who actually reckons Jemima (above) is the type of journalist-blogger that news and media organisations should be getting to blog for them: "1109 - Someone in the audience from the Guardian claims that we need to stop focussing on making big names blog, such as Jemima Kiss, at the Guardian, and that instead we should choose bloggers more carefully - choose journalists that actually suit the work, and want to engage with the readers. Media needs to get over it's obsession with getting their big star attractions online, and keep them where they're best."

Kevin's also here. He's a lot more enthusiastic than I am about Mahalo's crowd powered search.

Jem Stone, who was on the first panel of the day, has posted his notes as has Nico McDonald.

I think I'll do some video later...

nmkforum2007: journalism & "user generated content"

Although packed to the rafters with good participants (too many of them?), the Media, Publishing and Advertising Panel was somewhat directionless for the first twenty minutes or so. Then they started talking about journalism - below are some rough notes:

Tom Bureau, C-Net: "When you are in a special interest environment.. the question has to be, who knows more about the subject, our journalists [who are experts who study and write about this all the time] or a cross section of the audience... of the hundreds of thousands of users, there will be 7 or 15 who [know more than we do]... obviously they might not have the presenatation skills to tell a story that the journalists do...jounalists need to understand [how to find and use this stuff]"

Ashley Norris, Shiny Media: "There are an awful lots of journalists out there who despise new media... some of the social media stuff that is bolted on, especially on the newspaper sites, are just asking them for user generated comments or whatever... they don't link out... even the BBC Blogs don't link out much to the British Blogosphere, which is thriving... the journalists need showing how to do it."

Jem Stone, BBC: "It's not because the bloggers don't respect [the fact that there is good content on blogs]... they just don't know where to find it."

Nico Macdonald, Spy: Nico wants to see high level discussion and debate in context with current affairs and news content...

Someone on the floor: If we want to increase the level of trust people have in journalists and journalism, shouldn't we just hire better people? Aren't we placing too much emphasis on "getting our audiences to do our work for us for free..."

Jem Stone, BBC: "It certainly isn't cheap..."

Tom Bureau, C-Net: "We don't believe this is a replacement or substitute for fantastic journalism, but we realise in specific areas, there are individuals with knowledge they want to share and that enriches and enlivens [our content]..."

Kevin Anderson, Guardian (from the floor): Not all bloggers are journalists, not all journalists are bloggers... "I would much rather have a journalist who wants to interact with people than to get the biggest names to do it... we need to focus on people who have the interaction skills to deal with the public."

[Other people probably blogged more about this panel - feel free to drop your URL into a comment here.]

nmkforum2007: human powered search?

Jason Calacanis, the first speaker at the NMK Forum 2007, kicks off his presentation by asking "What can you do if you disagree with the place your website appears in the google or other search results?" Well, nothing. And that, Calacanis thinks, is what started the whole Search Engine Optomisation industry that basically exists to game google's algorythms. In fact, Calacanis says, the lack of any arbitration in search results is leading to the declining relevance of search results - just as spam has ruined email and splogs are ruining technorati.

Kevin Anderson writes, over on Strange Attractor:

"At the NMK Forum in London, Jason Calacanis has just announced Mahalo Greenhouse, part of the recently launched Mahalo human-assisted search directory. The Greenhouse will allow the public to add search results and, if accepted by the site’s guides, get paid for them...Jason’s thinking is that Reuters, AP and DowJones employ hundreds of people to write editorial content, why not employ 100 people to curate search."

Anyone who feels agrieved by their placement (or absence) in Mahalo's results can discuss that placement on Mahalo's forum and Maholo is inviting users to help populate the index of sites, paying them for those efforts. Great, but other than those two details, it seems to me that Mahalo's model was pretty much lifted from Yahoo, circa 1995: users submit sites to a group of editors who decide whether or not to include the site in the index.

Not so revolutionary then. But having humans involved in the process of determining what does and doesn't go into the index seems a reasonable way of keeping spam from ruining the results. If, that is, we can - as Euan Semple pointed out in his question at the end of Calacanis' presentation - trust the "under employed editors in Santa Monica" and their judgements.

nmkforum2007: live blogging kit

This is a glimpse of the contents of my hard shelled rucksack that I've justed finished packing in preparation for a day of live blogging at the NMK Forum on Wednesday.

Contents include (from top left): Vario 2 Windows Mobile from T-Mobile, Nokia N70, USB Nokia Charger, MacBook projector dongle, BBC business cards in aluminium case from Muji, Mac Book Pro, spare Mac Book Pro battery, Mac Mag Safe Charger, iPod cable, 60GB Video iPod, Sennheiser in ear headphone buds, micro-memo digital recorder for iPod, ElectroVoice "The Hammer" microphone, camera case, Canon digital Ixus camera, extra CF card for camera, camera lead. I hope I'm not forgetting anything...

(Photo idea stolen from Graham)

nmkforum2007: wed 13 june, london

Next Wednesday I'll be at the NMK Forum in London. The schedule includes quite a few panels debates and presentations that I'm looking forward to. In particular, Dan Gillmor is giving a keynote titled “Citizen Journalism and the future” and the panel "Media, Publishing and Advertising: Old Guard, New Tricks" which happens to include quite a few people I know. I'm also interested in what Jyri Engeström, Jaiku.com will have to say about mobile social media.

In the interest of some coordinated tagging of content from the forum, might I suggest we all tag our posts, flickr photos, videos or whatever else we create and share with the tag "nmkforum2007"? That will make it much easier to have a backchannel conversation during and after the forum itself.

Here are some quick links to the tag nmkforum2007:

flickr (photos)
Technorati (blog buzz)
del.icio.us (bookmarks)
Google Blog Search
IceRocket (blog search/buzz)

NMK Forum Blog