Technology

Recently I’ve noticed how organisations who are starting to use social media are radically underestimating the time investment that such work requires… and often adding this work onto the job description of people who are already pretty busy. This is a bit of a mistake – it’s important to work out exactly what is involved in generating and getting content out successfully into the web community and to your followers.

Talking recently to a photographer, I was struck by how he described his clients’ lack of understanding about what it took to properly publish his work online so that people saw it. Usually basing their own assumptions on their (limited) use of Facebook to share photos, they see it as an easy thing, which doesn’t require much time of special knowledge.

For a modern photographer, taking the photo is just the start of things… then comes processing of RAW files, then into Photoshop for some finishing touches to the post production process. Then resizing the image files and getting the colours right for print or web, depending on their use.

Over to Flickr, there’s uploading and creating (good) titles, descriptions, tags, geo-tags and other meta-data. Then there’s the option of doing a bit of research on Flickr to find appropriate groups to put the photos on. Then beyond Flickr, there are the other online places you might want to embed or publicise the content. Facebook, Twitter, client’s websites, niche networks etc.

Only then can he really consider his job ‘done’… and it takes at least as long as he used to spend in the dark room in the old days of film, when clients could appreciate that it took a good deal of time, art and experience to create a photographic object.

The same is true of text content (edits, re-edits, checking sources, writing for web and search, adding metadata, double checking, publishing,  pushing the content out to other networks etc). And the same with video – shooting, editing, captioning, converting into the right format, uploading (sometimes to multiple sites), embedding, publicising on other networks etc…

Often, a brand is also running a presence on Facebook – which needs its own attention, then there’s responding to incoming communications, monitoring online activity etc. All in all, it can be time consuming if you’re planning to attend to your online activity meaningfully.

So when we’re talking to companies who are looking at working seriously in the real time web environment, we’re pretty eager to hear how they plan to provide enough people time to resource it. Who will be doing the actual work, and how will it fit into their job? I do hear too many saying that they’ll just ‘add it onto’ someone’s existing role – and it’s a bit of a red flag.

The cost of online technology has come crashing down in recent years – but the requirement to provide some real human time paying attention to online activity has increased. Rather than just see this as an opportunity to save money from the technology budget, companies should be re-investing those savings in human time to pay for all the work that is actually involved in running a successful online presence.

It’s great the brands are now able to run their own online media presence, but it takes time and human effort – and that is what generates the value – people. So if your thinking of investing in this space, think in terms of time, rather than money.

Opposition leader David Cameron appeared on radio this morning and took a cheap shot at Twitter, saying “the trouble with Twitter, the instantness (sic) of it – too many twits might make a twat.”.

We only get the glib soundbite from Cameron – crude language and all – and it adds nothing to the topic of discussion. So ironically, Cameron is guilty of being as trivial, whether by accident or by planning, as the Twitter users he presumes to criticise!

But there is a grain of truth in the point he was apparently trying to make. Yes, anyone using a communication medium – especially one so relatively new – should be aware of its limitations and be careful to avoid being misunderstood. But that’s self-evident isn’t it? That goes for blogs, television, the press, Facebook, YouTube and any of the other media “outlets” you might speak through. Radio too.

With Twitter and other social media platforms, politicians and the public sector can communicate directly with people, without the filtering or editing that takes place in traditional mainstream media. His language is unfortunate and misses the point. But I guess it’s good to hear Cameron speaking with passion and an authentic human voice. He could have posted it on Twitter.

Meanwhile Simon Dickson has some insights into Whitehall and a recent Twitter strategy document for civil servants:

Yes, Neil’s document is lengthy; and he admitted from the off that it would seem ‘a bit over the top’. But if exciting new tools like Twitter are to make it through the middle-management swamp of the Civil Service, they need to be wrapped in boring documentation like this. Whether or not it ever gets read, mandarins need to feel that your Twitter proposal has received the same proper consideration as the other (weightier?) items on their to-do list. ‘Dude! This is so cooool! We should so be doing this!’ will not get you very far.

This is a 20-minute video from a BBC event with an insightful speech from creator of the web Tim Berners-Lee plus a question and answer session.

Here’s the background to BBC’s Digital Revolution project around the 20th anniversary of the web.

Good conversation starter about Facebook’s long term business plans written by Robert Scoble, in case you missed it.

The year 1500 witnessed an information revolution, when Caxton’s printing press really started to impact society in ways that were difficult to predict. Clay Shirky likens that era to now in his latest article Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, which is well worth your time.

It’s a great conversation starter, especially if you’re in the news business or indeed any form of “content” business.

After reading such an insightful person put the following, your response could be one of fear or excitement. It may depend on what business you’re in.

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

If you have a spare weekend you could also:

- Watch a Shirky speech on video

- Plough through some analysis on pages that link to the Shirky piece

- Peek into Shirky’s research process via his Delicious bookmarks

Have fun. You never know, you might find a radical new model for a news service.

In the past few months, if you’ve seen a mysterious looking van gliding past your home, this could be the explanation.

The intriguing Google Street View has launched in 25 cities today, including Cardiff where I live and work.

I’d be interested to hear if you find anything noteworthy – just go to Google Maps and drag the yellow man on to the spot you want to view. It takes postcode, street names and location names.

It’s a funny aspect of people that they’re able to look anywhere – but usually people go straight to their own house and locality.

Here’s Juno Lounge (where we hold monthly Trydan cafe meet-ups to discuss the social web).

I was trying to date the pictures by looking for cues from Cardiff’s cultural scene. Gwdihw cafe bar appeared in this bit of Cardiff in late 2008 and Cafe Bar Europa took on new ownership and name in summer 2008. But I’m pretty sure the Visitor Centre vanished from Cardiff Bay a long time ago. Finally I happened on this poster site on Womanby Street, where most of the posters refer to events in June 2008.

Telegraph have an intro and photo gallery of big (mostly English) landmarks.

Roger Browning at The Guardian was captured on camera striding into his London home. Here’s a Times piece about the privacy issues from 2007, when the service launched in the USA.

Google’s press department have also slung out a brief list of ideas for uses of Street View for business. As with anything, it’s worth having a good play before even considering business applications. Besides, the big winner will be Google itself, with whole new data sets to draw eyeballs and clicks to their ads.

Today’s exciting story at the crossroads of media and technology is the Guardian’s new API.

If you’re new to the idea of an API, or “application programming interface”, read The Guardian’s own intro to the concept of APIs from 2007. Here’s today’s announcement.

OK, why is this exciting?

Every newspaper is a massive storehouse of potentially interesting data. You can access that data by getting a paper copy and reading it. Or you can access it by visiting their website.

There aren’t many other ways of sifting through the stories, features, facts and statistics held by the newspaper. You are somewhat limited by the design and the methods the Guardian have deemed useful for presenting that data.

But now, The Guardian have opened up access to their content. The same copyright applies, they’ve just allowed you to query it in a multitude of ways. Now, you can write software (or hire someone to write software) which presents it in new forms, giving new insights. The “interface” part of API is not a graphical interface but a set of requests you can send which result in answers and other data coming back.

The API idea is familiar to software developers. Usually it wouldn’t be a surprise for an online service to launch an API – examples abound: Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Google Maps, Twitter, Yahoo, Flickr and YouTube are just some of the services that offer their own APIs. If you visit one and scroll to the very bottom of their homepage, usually that’s where you’ll see a little API link which takes you to the documentation for developers.

If you take the perspective of a service owner, the set of data you are sitting on is suddenly more useful because of the versatility of access you have allowed. The world at large knows more than you about what it wants from your data – and can do more. When that data is combined with data from other APIs, in the form of a “mash-up”, that’s when the real fun begins.

The practice of newspapers offering APIs is relatively recent. The other big one already available is that of the New York Times. Here’s a real example I picked arbitrarily, Reading Radar. This developer has taken the bestselling books chart from the New York Times and is linking directly to the Amazon listing for each book. Incidentally, he probably makes a modest amount of money via Amazon Associates, an affiliate scheme to drive sales. He credits the New York times prominently as the source of the data, so they get the kudos and the brand recognition. Here’s some technical info on how he achieved it.

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research has a list of suggestions for developers who are keen to flex their coding skills and tap into this rich resource. You can guarantee that most or all of these will appear in the coming weeks.

If you’re not a developer, you can still make use of the new services that spring up – Reading Radar and the like. That’s the point! If you’re on Facebook and have ever used applications like Scrabulous (as was), Super Wall or the hundreds of others then you’ll know this – and sometimes with annoyance in that case. But people come back to Facebook because the usefulness and fun factor outweighs the clutter.

But if you’re a content owner then you should be thinking about how this could impact on the future of your business. Jeff Jarvis argues today that APIs are the new distribution, citing BBC and National Public Radio as further examples of media owners who’ve experimented with offering APIs.

News Corporation, Trinity Mirror and other media owners should be eyeing this Guardian announcement with interest.