Author Archive

Excellent analysis of what went wrong with the Your Freedom site, focusing on its comments and community policy (or lack thereof).

Any communications medium of any value can suffer from the annoyance of spam, not just email. If you value your reputation, don’t consider spamming in any form.

Seth Godin explains why spam is unacceptable – and unproductive.

… the future of marketing is based on permission. It’s based on sending messages to people who want to get them, who choose to get them, who would miss you if you didn’t send them. It’s not easy and it’s not cheap to earn permission, but so what? This is my attention, not yours, and if you want to use it for a while, please earn the privilege.

You could be forgiven for thinking all online discourse is nothing but flaming, trolling and abuse.

The truth? It is possible to have healthy, rational and polite discussion online. It just needs some very careful planning.

This very insightful post by Chris Applegate takes the example of the BBC Have Your Say forums and offers some observations of where they go wrong.

In an age where every company is a media company, this will go far beyond news organisations like the BBC.

Read the whole of Applegate’s post if you’re interested in how and how not to create spaces where people converse about your company and your projects.

Here’s a blog post with some useful tips about tweaking your text and pages in order to be found by people searching on Google.

Try running this very specific Google search – “Manhood” by Mels van Driel review – and you will not find the L.A. Times among the results – at least not within first three pages that humans would care to flip through. How come might you ask? Well the answer is simple – there is nothing whatsoever that tells Google that this post is a book review about this particular book…
from ReadWriteWeb

Substitute book reviews with whatever you’re discussing on your own site or blog. Popular tech blog ReadWriteWeb should know. Their search engine optimisation proved to be so good recently that searchers mistook an article about Facebook for Facebook itself.

And here’s another post of tips, from the blog of Google’s Matt Cutts…

Don’t just use technical terms–think about real-world terms and slang that users will type. For example, if you’re talking about a “usb drive,” some people might call it a flash drive or a thumb drive. Bear in mind the terms that people will type and think about synonyms that can fit naturally into your content. Don’t stuff an article with keywords or make it awkward, but if you can incorporate different ways of talking about a subject in a natural way, that can help users.
from Matt Cutts’ blog

We’ve been working with National Theatre Wales and people who belong to their community – including office staff, production staff, cast, venues and “people formerly known as audience”.

Last year we built the community side of NTW’s website on Ning, with graphic design by the folks at Elfen. (Hoffi made the front page and listings pages.)

It’s worth noting that members of the community have the clear choice of making their posts public (open to be read by anyone who is looking) and many are doing so. The community is open to anybody on the web who wants to sign up.

But obviously with the web as it is, people are publishing their own stuff about National Theatre Wales and its productions around the web – not just on NTW’s community. We want to encourage this, it’s part of what NTW wants to achieve.

In fact, with NTW we have purposefully assigned a short tag to each production for use around the web – of the form ntw01 for production one, ntw02 for production two and so on. People are starting to use these tags already, in order to make their thoughts and posts more findable.

We also want to help the community to be aware of this other interesting stuff – videos, Twitter posts, blog posts, photos, audio – where relevant. “Online conversation” is a metaphor that has become popular on the web – and it does have some explanatory power. We want to give that conversation the best chance of being seen by groups of people who might be interested, so they can take part if they wish – wherever they choose to post their responses.

Here’s Tom’s post on the NTW site about the production tags and how posts, photos, videos and so on are collected on the NTW group for each production (and also a Netvibes page):

http://community.nationaltheatrewales.org/profiles/blogs/talking-about-national-theatre

Take a look at the group for ntw01, A Good Night Out In The Valleys for an example of live search results from around the web. If you’re wondering how the live searches work on the groups, we made them with Yahoo Pipes. There is a chance of a few false positives turning up, as with any web search. But on the whole we like the way they’ve turned out.

We’ve included the services which seem to be the popular ones for discussing theatre. In theory more publishing services, e.g. Audioboo, could be added to the results if those services start to become popular.

So there you go, one small part of NTW’s online strategy which we’ve been working on.

We don’t normally cover the minutiae of tech industry developments on this Native blog (plenty of blogs are dedicated to that if you want it). But this post about developments in mobile is well worth understanding.
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/the-one-thing-that-google-nexus-one-has-over-the-iphone/

As a user you do not have the freedom to choose the carrier with the iPhone. Nor can you buy an unlocked version. Apple dictates what carrier you are to use. As a developer you cannot get your iPhone app in the store, unless Apple approves it. You are at their mercy. And while this might improve quality it also provides a ground for corruption or power misuse.

Google on the other hand has taken an entire different approach. Instead of focusing on controlling the entire experience, it places the user in the center and lets him decide what to do. It has created Android OS which is now distributed across many different devices. It has an app store that everyone has access to. It encourages free distribution and development of their software. And now it has delivered the Nexus One, a phone that isn’t tied to a mobile carrier, and (disregarding some technical barriers) can be used with any carrier. They even have set up a web store where you can buy the phone without a carrier, or add a carrier plan to it. Who would have thought this to be possible 3 years ago? Who could actually break the monopoly the carriers had on handset distribution? We have to thank Google for that although Apple clearly paved the path for this disruption.

Alexander Vanelsas nails the key difference between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s new Nexus One phone. It’s not about the pros and cons of the specific features of the device, but the entire philosophy which Google have embraced.

Unlike Apple’s closed iPhone system and app store, Google’s own ecosystem is open. Its mobile operating system, Android, is free software.

Any company or individual is free to download the software, adapt it, improve it and also to develop applications which run on it – and is free to distribute them. Whether they then charge for the software is up to them and their business model.

This is not only a sound philosophy, but a killer business strategy for Google.

In other words, Google has unleashed a wave of innovation here and through Android, already opened the way for “clone” mobile devices to flourish. It is certain to boost the widespread adoption of cheap smartphones with web access.

If you’re in the planning stages of a social media project, then don’t ignore the imminent growth of mobile web access.

A good (and funny) guide for terminology fascists, but also people who just want to be clear and correct:

http://meish.org/2008/12/09/lets-go-over-this-again-shall-we/

Here’s a chart of the male-female ratio on different social network services – including Facebook, Twitter, Ning and so on.

(I don’t know how reliable the figures are.)

O’Reilly are more than just a book publisher and events organiser. For one, they’re among our main influences.

They’ve opted to release their new book The Art of Community, by Jono Bacon, in paper-based version, electronic book reader versions and a free PDF of the whole thing.

In the words of the author it’s intended to be a “solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities”, which is right up our street of course.

The contents are released under a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike in this case). It’ll be interesting to see how people adapt it and how that boosts attention for O’Reilly and the author.

(Thanks to @zambonini for the tip.)

I met a representative of an arts organisation this week. She mentioned one of their key aims is to help artists and other people they deal with to share knowledge. So they are organising an event, a get-together, to allow people who wouldn’t normally meet to do so.

The event itself sounded like a good move. It also made me think of the possible benefits of recording the event and uploading it online.

The recording might be a video, on a service such as YouTube or Vimeo. Or it might be just the audio, on a service such as Soundcloud. Attendees and other people can then embed a player on their blogs and websites, if you allow this (and usually there’s no reason not to allow embedding). Ideally you could embed it on your organisation or company website – but you don’t even need to do that to get started, at least for now.

The equipment for just documenting something is so ridiculously cheap now. We’re not talking about high production values or live streaming, just documenting the thing.

(There plenty of other ways to document an event using social media but today I’ll focus on getting the whole event as audio or video.)

Most attendees can be fine with audio or video if you tell them beforehand. Let them know about good opportunities to introduce themselves and plug their own work – at the start of each person’s first comment for example.

For video we use the Flip cam at Native, which is just a suggestion but it is cheap and an additional bonus is its size. It’s portable and so small that even the less confident people can happily ignore it and get on with sharing their thoughts.

So here are some possible benefits.

Extending the reach
There will probably be people who want to attend your event but can’t, because of time and geography. Recording it allows them to catch up afterwards.

Reminders
For people who do attend your event it serves as a reminder of what was discussed. It might even help them to concentrate and fully participate in the meeting rather than struggle to take notes of everything.

Awareness of your organisation
Publishing a recording helps wider awareness of your organisation, its aims, its projects and so on. Relevant recordings lead to inbound links and boost to your online reputation.

Openness
One feature of the web, thought by many to be the beauty of the web, is that your recording is potentially accessible to anyone. What about exclusivity? Some audio and video services do allow you to control access to recordings. But in most situations you can just make it open. Why place limits on who can get this information? It might seem paradoxical, but some of the most competitive people and companies are the ones sharing the most useful recordings. Most things aren’t sensitive. They may as well be open.

Promotion of the event itself
This follows from the previous point. There are lots of reasons to attend your event. Some of these reasons are: meeting other attendees face-to-face, asking questions, having more influence, helping oneself to a drink or buffet. None of these are replaced by a recording. Often the recording can promote the event. (For instance, look at how the prestigious TED talks have taken off since they started sharing video. The attendance fee has increased too.)

Persistence
Having a recording of key points may allow you to avoid having to repeat yourself. You can keep the recording online for weeks, months, even years afterwards. All of the good audio and video services will give your recording a permalink. This will not change and can thus be emailed to your community and shared between them and other people. Your recording will also be found by people searching for keywords contained in its title or list of tags.

Unknown reasons
I kick myself to think of the useful events I’ve attended – or even organised – and not had recorded. That’s because you don’t always know how useful the recording will be until afterwards. Or maybe sometime later. Those meetings just vanished into thin air. I’ll get by, but it would have taken hardly any effort to record them – so why not? (I’ve also been to some boring and irrelevant meetings in my time, but that’s subjective. Even those might have been of use to someone out there. You never know.)

These benefits can apply to anything good you choose to put online, not just audio and video. You could substitute the word “recording” above with “blog post”. You might already have guessed that for me, typing out this blog post ticks off some of the benefits described above.