cybersoc.com

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.

the end of search? ask a friend...

This morning I spent an hour and a half showing a group of journalists at the BBC World Service how I use RSS, social networking services, social bookmarking, my blog and other tools. As I did, it dawned upon me that I don't use google anymore.

I'm no huge fan of Google. I think they own far too many pieces of what many users consider to be essential parts of the internet - search, gmail, blogger, feedburner, adsense and more. And because most of us use these tools, often every day, Google knows a heck of a lot about us. But this isn't a post about hating Google or, for that matter, any other search provider.

Social media has not only made me less dependent upon web search tools, it has set me free from them. I quite honestly can't remember the last time I searched for something online yet I use the internet every day all day, from the time I set foot out of my house and use my mobile to get online whilst on my commute to work, whilst at work, then on my way home and often late into the evening. Instead of searching, I now ask my contacts on twitter or facebook and, if time isn't of the essence, I might also check del.icio.us. The same is true with browsing. I don't mindlessly wander the internet looking for stuff anymore, I let my contacts, followers and friends online suggest content. And, just occasionally, my usage of a social networking site will lead to them showing me an advertisement that is actually well enough targeted that I click, although this is rare.

Is this the end of search? I seriously doubt it. But it's a big change in the way I use the internet and I'm sure it's not just me who doesn't bother with - doesn't need - to visit a web search page anymore.

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

some useful twitter apps for journalists

Here's a couple of twitter applications which could be useful for those working in journalism or broadcasting:

PollDaddy makes it easy to create and run multiple choice polls on twitter. To use it you simply author a question, set up the answers you want to make available and enter your twitter username and password. Here's my first experiment...

GroupTweet makes it possible to set up groups, allowing members to send a single direct (private message) to reach everyone following the group. This could be useful for production teams, or those working on a networked journalism project, to communicate more easily and privately using twitter.

I've also been using tweetscan to keep track of the use of various keywords (in particular @Cybersoc so I don't miss any replies and, when I'm at a conference, I integrate the conference tag into my RSS aggregation) and twitterlocal which I've been testing on my blog about life in St. Albans.

[PollDaddy link, like quite a lot of the good things I come across these days, thanks to Paul Bradshaw who has a rather good blog about Online Journalism.]

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....

is auto-feeding links to twitter spammy?

Cross-posting is useful where it genuinely adds value but sometimes it's just plain spammy. That, at least, is the conclusion I've drawn on the use of automated cross-posting to and from blogs and social networking services.

For the past month or so I've been automatically posting links to twitter every time I update my blog. I've found it really useful as a way to drive traffic and have been getting at least a dozen, sometimes many more, click throughs from twitter to my blog each day.

Last week I realised, as I was switching back and forth between twitter and facebook on my mobile, that I kept reading the same updates from the same people but on different services. And that most of those updates weren't updates at all, but automated links coming from twitterfeed or other automated services that link shovel to and from blogs and social networking services. The more I thought about it, the more I started to feel that this - and I'm guilty of it too - is a bit spammy. So I asked:

A dozen of my twitter followers have responded thus far with one third of those (4) saying that, yes, it's link spam. The other 2/3 (8) each gave a more qualified response but all generally agreed that, where the link it to a genuine post (as opposed to, for example, a links post from del.icio.us) AND where the tweet provides some context, such links CAN be a useful way of finding content.

I think the key here is user expectations. People who chose to follow me don't expect a tweet every time I sneeze and it's not fair to shovel links their way using automated cross-posting. However, there may very well be people who do want an update every time I update my blog(s) and, for them, I'm going to set up a separate public feed.

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.

explanatory video about twitter - commoncraft does it again

Lee and Sachi at CommonCraft have probably, through their wonderfully simple video explantations, introduced more people to Social Bookmarking and RSS than anyone.

Now they've done their magic with Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows users to "share short, bite-sized updates" with friends via mobile phone, the web, instant messenger and many widgets and a growing number of third party tools.

When you're done watching, find me on twitter then head straight back to CommonCraft for their videos on Social Bookmarking and RSS. Essential for anyone who finds themselves trying to explain tools that can be extremely useful but which are, unfortunately, widely dismissed or misunderstood. Great stuff!

translate your twitter feed for a global conversation

Yesterday I returned from the DNA2008 conference in Brussels with my facebook and twitter bulging with new friends and contacts. The problem is, I suddenly found my friend feeds full of updates in Flemish, Dutch, French and other languages I can't read.

Not only did this mean there were people in my friend streams saying stuff that I wanted to understand but couldn't, it also rapidly began to diminish the usefulness of having those streams because of all the updates I couldn't comprehend were effectively noise. Not anymore.

I've created a Twitter Tweet Translation Tool using Yahoo Pipes. It works by pulling in the feed of people I follow on twitter, runs it through the "loop" function where I've added language translation modules. I've repeated this about ten times, each time converting a different language to english, and then I've brought the results through some union boxes, essentially junctions that can accept up to five feeds in and output as a single feed. That single feed is then run through a filter that lets only the unique tweets through, meaning there are no duplicate tweets but I can see both the original non-English tweet and it's translation.

I've tested my pipe with Italian (good), Spanish (usable) and Portuguese (not so great) thus far. In the screenshot above, you can see a tweet from ConversationAge in Italian:

"Giornata lunga oggi. Sto aiutando un collega con un esperimento. Cosa sto dicendo in Italiano?"

The translation, after the tweet went through my Yahoo Pipe, came out as:

"Long day today. I am helping a colleague with a experiment. What I am saying in Italian?"

Steve Bridger helped out by saying, in Spanish:

"Just to say hello and I hope that you can read this. Good Luck!"

Which came out, quite understandable, as:

"Single to say holá and I hope that you can read this. Luck!"

Portuguese translation within the Pipe, unfortunately, proved far less satisfactory and really wouldn't enable someone to follow a translated conversation.

I'm not the first person to use Yahoo Pipes to translate RSS feeds which is basically all I've done here. But I do think that this particular application could be quite useful for helping people stay in touch with friends who speak (and tweet!) a major language other than English. It could also be useful for programmes like World Have Your Say, a global radio discussion programme on the BBC World Service.

If you'd like to translate your twitter friend feed into English (or to and from one of around a dozen supported languages) you can copy my Twitter Feed Translation Pipe and customise it by making a copy and simply changing the url in each of the fetch feed modules. If you want to change the languages supported, just use the drop down menus on the translation modules to do that.

For some people it would also make sense to create a pipe that translates from the language you tweet in to the languages used by most of your friends and to then hook that pipe up to one of the various Twitter feed services - giving you language translation on the fly.

I have found that on some occasions the translations don't appear to have worked. This can be resolved by going to the edit pipe view and clicking on language module for the tweet that you want translated.

When creating this Pipe, I found the following video quite useful:

 

press complaints commission to investigate media scraping of social media content

In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Chris Vallance, Tim Toulmin, the Director of the Press Complaints Commission, revealed that the PCC is embarking on a major consultative investigation of how news and media organisations are reusing content found online, primarily from social networks such as Facebook and Bebo. Vallance writes on the iPM Blog:

"In the interview Toulmin indicates the matter is one of degree: journalists do have a rights to use publicly accessible content and the public have responsibilities when they post it, but there is value in establishing boundaries which can guide the press in the ethical use of this content..."

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