Can anyone spot why this review of an app on facebook:
Best flickr app on facebook that I could find - Zuport is flakey, the official one is even flakier. One thing I’d change: the info box is a good idea, but instead of listing all the groups you’re a member of, allow me to choose which ones and/or just show the ones for which I’m an admin or moderator.
Should result in this message:
Warning: This message contains blocked content
Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.
…with no indication of what I need to change for facebook to allow me to submit it!
After a lot of trial and error, I figured out which bit was causing offence - scroll down to see what it was….
Continued…
Posted in Digital Culture.
Tagged with facebook, filter, flickr, trial and error, usability.
Seeing as the media (especially the news media) doesn’t really do what I’d like it to do yet, I’ve been thinking about what kind of media world we’re going to inhabit once the next round of this revolution is over.
Here’s what I think is going to happen…
1. All Media companies will be online media companies.
As the Internet becomes the de-facto medium of delivery, old distinctions between organisations in different media will evaporate. I’m not saying that Channel 4 will no longer do broadcast television, or even that The New York Times will no longer do paper newspapers, but that online there will be little to differentiate them; they will all be competing for ‘audience’ (however that’s defined), and they will be trying similar things to attract and engage people.
2. If the action is happening online, people will go where the action is.
The key dynamic in online media is debate, often played out in public fora, comment streams etc, and a good debate can be news itself, especially ones that arise spontaneously and involve actors who are close to the argument. Status and microblogging services can get the word out that something important is going on somewhere quickly enough for the debate often to still be in progress when people arrive. Furthermore these events can happen pretty much anywhere, can coalesce around anything that expresses an opinion - not at a site designated for the purpose. Of course media companies try to create and host such events and many of them will undoubtedly be huge successes, but I suspect that people will go where the action is if they can.
3. If the action is happening offline, people will go where the best view of the online reflection is.
Every major offline event creates online media that reflect it from many angles - some of that media of course created by media companies and some by all sorts of other entities down to the level of the individual. People will tend to go wherever they get the best view of what’s going on (or what’s just happened). That may be an automated aggregation site like addictomatic or popurls or ensembli, etc. or it will be a curated aggregation either provided by a media company or by individuals - but traditional media companies may well be loathe to include media produced by their competitors in their aggregation - it will be the sites with the best curation, best usability, quickest updates, smarted contextualising and widest inclusion that will likely win the eyeballs. And the ones with the largest market presence of course - I wonder who will win the war for ubiquity…?
4. This will happen at micro as well as at macro level.
This kind of behaviour and service opportunity is not limited to major events - hyperlocal aggregators (with hyperlocal advertising models) will also play a big role, especially if the prime local aggregator can be identified quickly during a major event and included in a curated view.
5. Media companies large and small should concentrate on providing the best view.
Curation should be like the AWACS of the media war, providing overview, context and commentary without the inefficiencies of needing to fill dead airtime and blank column inches. It should be able to act when there is something to act on, move quickly to keep up with unfolding events, fill in context when new information is sparse and provide a ’state of play’ during events that last a significant amount of time. Media companies might even learn something from project management about how to keep people informed of what’s been going on…
6. The news doesn’t need to be delivered in parcels.
We don’t need a daily paper, or a half-hour news bulletin - we just need continual information, organised, contextualised and versioned with decent release notes and a measure of significance, so we can see what’s happened recently.
7. The ultimately best view is usually only to be found a while after the event.
Online news should be designed with history in mind - what happens once the event is over? What retrospective view of the events does the coverage provide? What relevance might it have if a similar events happens some time in the future? What if the story isn’t told yet and there are more chapters left to unfold much later than the original events; especially true of crime events and court cases. I think it would be extremely useful it be able to relive all or part of an event (or the aggregated online reflection of an event at least) in real time so you can see what was known and when as the drama unfolded (the replay feature in Google Wave comes to mind). And how should the final record be laid out? How rich can it be? How informative? How educational? How useful?
And people say the news industry is in dire straights - when there’s so much to be done!!
Posted in Digital Culture.
Tagged with aggregators, media, media companies, news, newspapers, social media.
So Don Tapscott says:
If markets are the best mechanism for determining how goods and resources are allocated, why isn’t everybody an independent contractor at every step along the way in production? The answer is collaboration costs. Because the web drops collaboration costs, consumers can now produce.
…and I think he’s quite right. And not only can consumers now produce, but large organisations can now begin to disaggregate, indeed must disaggregate in order to realise the efficiencies that derive from it (this is frightening them quite considerably).
We will, I reckon, see this applied across pretty much all sectors and industries over the next 5 years or so (see the excellent documentary Us Now for a taste of what this means). But I want to have it applied to the news business right now. I don’t want to go somewhere in particular for my news, I want to cherry pick individual journalists whom I trust, and listen to just what they have to say. And not just press journalists, but bloggers and pundits and comics and commentators alike.
However, in order to do that I have to know who those people are. Also, in order not to become isolated in a tiny backwater of self-reinforcing opinion, I need to know what their political outlook is (self-declared, auto-interpreted *and* community assessed) and see some contradictory opinions both by writer and per article. And I need to find out if there are other writers I might be interested in based on the preferences I’ve expressed, and what other people think of them, and what they’ve done in the past, what awards they’ve won, what publications they’ve been published in, what ‘kind’ of writer they are… I’m sure you get what I’m driving at 
I need a recommendation engine for all those soon-to-be-freelance journalists that I a) genuinely want to read, b) absolutely do not mind tracking back from a summary feed to provide a page hit to, and c) am quite likely to drop the occasional micropayment to in support.
Posted in Digital Culture.
Tagged with discovery, Don Tapscott, journalism, journalists, media, newpapers, press, publishing, recommendation engine, recommendations, Us Now.
Over the last ten years, I have spent countless hours ripping CDs to mp3 files and tagging them up. As well as transferring from CD, I have bought digital music files, I subscribe to Napster and I have a Last.fm account as well as one for Deezer. Each of these services is available to me, along with my raw mp3s, via a Sonos music system, and each provides me with a library of some kind which is supposed to allow me easy access to the music I like.
But it doesn’t. It’s properly broken.
Let’s start with the raw mp3 files. Organising these should be like organising a physical record collection. It should be visual - I should have an interface that allows me to rummage around, quickly identifying the records by their covers. It should distinguish between important albums and lesser singles, EPs, bootlegs etc. It should be rich so I can access lots of other information associated with the object, not just metadata. And it must be personal - I must be able to filter and arrange the way I want to and not just in boring lists of meta information.
And then the other services. None of them know anything about my digital music collection (with the possible exception of Last.fm, but indiscriminately scrobbling music played by all members of the household is pretty useless anyway). None of them know anything about each other. None of them work like a record collection. For example, when I add Air’s Moon Safari album to my library in Napster it creates 3 new artist entries because the artist metadata on their version of the album includes some extra vocalist names! I have some albums which, as each track features a different vocalist, creates a new artist for each track! Why on earth would I want to arrange my record collection in this way? Of course this is useful for searching, should I ever need to find that track that had Francoise Hardy on it, but this now affects the *standard view* of my record collection - the view by artist.
I don’t use iTunes (because given the amount of struggle I’ve had with quicktime over the years I don’t trust Apple anywhere near files I hold dear), so it is possible that iTunes provides an experience closer to what I want than I’m used to. I don’t know. It’s also possible that I’m a too much of a digital immigrant to realise that organising a record collection is a pointless exercise from a time when the volume of files was within the realm of that imaginable by the human brain. It’s possible.
However, I’m pretty sure I have more photos than I have music files. And I’ve organised and tweaked and distributed all of those by hand using Picasa and Lightroom. Is it really going to take Google to come along *again* and do the job properly before anyone else does?!
Posted in Digital Culture.
Tagged with albums, Apple, Deezer, Google, iTunes, Last.fm, Lightroom, metadata, mp3, music, Napster, Picasa, Sonos.
Summary of a talk by Ian Ayres at the London School of Economics on the 13th September 2007 on the subject of his book “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart”.
Ian Ayres is an economist and lawyer, and is the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School, and a professor at Yale’s School of Management. He has a personal website here: http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayers
In 50 words or less:
Ayres firstly introduces us to two main methods of mathematical analysis: regression and random testing. He then proceeds by way of examples to show how these methods, applied with sufficient size, speed and scale, are more effective than human experts at making predictions, and the consequent implications.
If you enjoy the annotated video of this talk, please leave me a comment or raise a question - I love thinking about and discussing this stuff!
Continued…
Posted in Digital Culture, Innovation.
Tagged with algorithms, analysis, Axiom, commitment bonds, Corillion, direct instruction, economics, eHarmony, Epagogix, Farecast, Harrah's Casinos, Ian Ayres, Joann Fabrics, mathematics, Monster.com, Pandora, Polar Rose, prediction, Progressa, random testing, recommendations, regression, regression analysis, Visa.
Panel discussion on the subject of Innovation technology conducted at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in February 2007.
The speakers were:
- Richard Lambert (Director General, CBI)
- Professor Mark Dodgson (Technology and Innovation Management Centre, University of Queensland)
- Professor David Gann (Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London)
- Peter Bressington (Director, Ove Arup and Partners Ltd.)
- Alan Schafer PhD (Vice President Technology Development, GSK)
- R Lemuel Lasher (Vice President and Managing Director, Computer Sciences Corporation)
If you enjoy the annotated audio of this lecture, please leave me a comment or raise a question - I love thinking about and discussing this stuff!
Continued…
Posted in Innovation.
Tagged with Alan Schafer, creativity, David Gann, eScience, innocentive, Innovate UK, Innovation, innovation technology, Joseph Schumpeter, lecture, Lemuel Lasher, Mark Dodgson, metrics, modelling, Peter Bressington, Richard Lambert, simulation, visualisation.
Summary of a talk by Clay Shirky at the RSA on the 18th March 2008 on the subject of his book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations”.
Clay Shirky is a writer, teacher and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet Technologies. He is adjunct professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and has a website at www.shirky.com
In 50 words or less:
Social networking is now technologically boring enough to have become socially interesting. The ability to engage in effective group action using the Internet is increasingly within the grasp of wider sections of society. The unfolding result of this is a sweeping re-adjustment of societal and organisational power relations.
If you enjoy the annotated video of this talk, please leave me a comment or raise a question - I love thinking about and discussing this stuff!
Continued…
Posted in Digital Culture.
Tagged with Belarus, Clay Shirky, Digital Culture, Here Comes Everybody, HSBC, Mafia, Minsk, Nico McDonald, online activism, online social tools, Palermo, political activism, RSA, social collaboration, social media, social tools, William James.
Talk given by Professor Dan Ariely at the London School of Economics on his research in the field of behavioural economics and his new book “Predictably Irrational”. The talk was given on the 18th March 2008.
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University. He also holds an appointment at the MIT Media Lab where he is the head of the eRationality research group. He has a website here.
In 50 words or less:
We are not entirely rational, but are subject to ‘decision illusions’ just as we are to optical illusions. There are several kinds of decision illusion. Cognitive products, such as insurance policies, do not consider this when they are designed. Knowing about them empowers us to address this problem.
If you enjoy the annotated audio of this talk, please leave me a comment or raise a question - I love thinking about and discussing this stuff!
Continued…
Posted in Human Behaviour.
Tagged with behaviour, behavioural economics, Dan Ariely, Duke, Enron, MIT, Predictably Irrational, pricing, questionnaire, The Economist.
Summary of a talk by Charles Leadbeater at the RSA on the 23rd April 2008 on the subject of his book “We Think - the power of mass creativity”.
Charles Leadbeater is an author and journalist, he has a website here.
In 50 words or less:
Is the Internet a really big deal for mankind? And if so is that a good or a bad thing? Charles Leadbeater believes the answers are yes and generally good, because new forms of collaboration allow us to imagine new ways to reconcile age-old conflicts such as “autonomy vs. authority”.
If you enjoy the annotated audio of this talk, please leave me a comment or raise a question - I love thinking about and discussing this stuff!
Continued…
Posted in Digital Culture.
Tagged with Andrew Keen, Berkman Centre, Charles Leadbeater, Chris Anderson, collaboration, cult of the amateur, digital natives, Don Tapscott, future of the internet, Jonathan Zittrain, Matthew Taylor, participation, recognition, Robert Putnam, sharing, summary, We Think, Yochai Benkler.
This is a summary of a talk given by Kevin Kelly at the TED conference in December 2007.
(Kevin Kelly is the founding editor of Wired magazine, and has written extensively on digital culture. Here is his blog).
In 50 words or less:
The Internet has turned out to be more amazing than anyone imagined 5000 days ago, and in 5000 days’ time it will be similarly more amazing than we can imagine now - perhaps a single machine linking most things and people in a giant semantic, open, transparent, organism-like system.
If you enjoy the annotated video of this talk, please leave me a comment or raise a question - I love thinking about and discussing this stuff!
Continued…
Posted in Digital Culture.
Tagged with conference, futurism, Kevin Kelly, lecture, Marshall McLuhan, Peter Norvig, Stuart Russell, summary, talk, ted, the one, the web, web technology, Wired.
